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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#131

Post by Terr_ »

simondotau wrote: post #86
Animats wrote: post #13

> They can’t tell you what the AI got wrong. AI code generators are trolls. They confidently plausible content which is partly wrong. Then humans try to find their errors. This is not fun. It has no flow.

I beg to differ, insofar as my own experience has been the exact opposite. I enjoy fixing other people's mistakes. And I especially enjoy outsmarting the LLMs. I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.

I think I might enjoy it for a little bit and then become very depressed at the idea that it will never end, a future of fixing things that should never have been broken in the first place and which won't stay fixed.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#132

Post by isodev »

neuderrek wrote: post #122

I remember same complaints about junior engineers copy pasting snippets of code from StackOverflow without understanding. And without curiosity to understand, without code review and mentorship from senior engineers they never grew to the senior level. But that is only some of them, others used StackOverflow to learn, did not use the snippets without understanding them first and properly adapting to their context, an…

I think you're missing the point. Nobody removed people thanks to their SO copy-paste skills. If anything, more folks were hired to troubleshoot and sort out any copy pasta blunders (since you actually need working software, at the end of the day).

With LLMs this is no longer true - the thing can vibe a great deal before anyone notices that they have 100.000 lines of code doing what a focused, human reviewed and tested 10.000 lines can do. And as this goes on, it becomes increasingly more difficult for anyone to actually dig into and fix things in the 100.000 without the help of LLMs (thus adding even more slop on the pile).

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#134

Post by anonzzzies »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #115
anonzzzies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.

"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :) Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exact…

These are good point and I am not overestimating; we are simply seeing the productivity boost in our company and the rise in profitability. We practice TDD, but only at integration level, so we have tests upfront for api and frontend and the AI writes until it works. SOTA models are simply good enough not to do;

function add(a,b) = c // adds two numbers

test: add(1,2)=3

to implement

function add(a,b) return 3

So when you have enough tests (and we do), it will deliver quality. Having AI write the tests is mostly useless. But me writing the code is not necessarily better and certainly not faster for most cases our clients bring us.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#135

Post by DrBazza »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.

It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI.

It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit.

This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies.

Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit.

Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#136

Post by rvba »

acomjean wrote: post #82
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

Did anything come out from those billions?

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#137

Post by SanjayMehta »

rezonant wrote: post #71
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly thi…

People have also started copying the AI tropes, especially your period/comma example.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#138

Post by Terr_ »

0xpgm wrote: post #113
TeMPOraL wrote: post #108

The article makes no sense, and stars with a very wrong perspective on things. This kind of forgetting is normal . It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost. But you can't,…

> This kind of forgetting is normal Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.

For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc.

Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of:

1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise."

2. "This is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon."

3. "This is natural and therefore cannot or should not be solved." [Naturalistic fallacy.]

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#139

Post by allending »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #116
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

Sort of a taste receptor I’m sure many have developed now.

The most obvious patterns here are: antithesis constructions, words choices and distribution, attempt at profundity in every paragraph but instead are runs of text that doing say anything, and even the perfect use of compound hyphenation. I think and can appreciate that there is definitely an attempt at personalization and guidance to make it less LLM-y and not just a default prompt, but it’s still kind of obvious. You could use a detector tool too of course.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#140

Post by fxtentacle »

palmotea wrote: post #53
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

West: We need profits and then we’ll try to build something useful.

China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.

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