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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

#141

Post by rglullis »

efitz wrote: post #38

I disagree with the premise - interesting but I interpret the same fact pattern differently. The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones. Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant. Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for th…

The point you seem to be missing is that focusing only on optimization makes us all fragile to system shocks.

> Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.

Until a crisis hits. Covid and supply chain failures. Iran war and straight of Hormuz. Prolonged War in Europe with no production pipeline available. Banks collapsing after unsustainable overleveraging in supposedly "safe" mortgages.

For every optimization and cost-saving measure that is deployed, there should be a backup plan in place. MBA types and "technologists" keep missing this. What is the backup plan for the case where most of the economy activity is built on software produced by business who overleveraged on LLM for code generation?

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

#142

Post by adrian_b »

ted_dunning wrote: post #70
stingraycharles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “ol…

That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong. There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.

Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient.

This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.

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

#143

Post by roenxi »

collinfunk wrote: post #117
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…

> There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. His rationale for invading Ukraine was to "demilitarise and denazify" it. The NATO point seems largely be invented by people who dislike NATO in the west. > They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacabl…

There's an english transcript [0] of his speech from when they went in up on the Kremin website. He opened with something like

> I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.

They're claiming the NATO thing is relevant. Opening paragraph justification.

[0] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843

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

#144

Post by latexr »

trick-or-treat wrote: post #111
latexr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming Anecdotally, what I’m seeing right now is the opposite. People who don’t care about programming are joining, while those who do care are getting tired of the bullshit and leaving. The good programmers are the ones leaving, the hacks are extremely happy to use LLMs. When shit hits the fan, there won’t be many people left to clean it.

So you see people who don't care about programming, joining and getting comfortable with vscode and claude code and devops? Because it seems to me like there's a lot of coding-adjacent things they still need to be able to do even if they never look at a line of code.

Those examples are nonsensical. None of those are necessary to get working code. The VSCode example is particularly baffling. Firstly, I’m sure you understand there are other editors people use for code; secondly, I know even people who don’t code who have picked up VSCode for text editing and are fine with it.

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

#145

Post by cbg0 »

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.

It should have the same flow as reviewing PRs from humans.

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

#146

Post by baq »

samiv wrote: post #109
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…

Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Sheesh..worst case scenario is that the work done now will benefit someone else when they've already left. Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing i…

> Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter?

Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements

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

#147

Post by bit1993 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #128
bit1993 wrote: post #48

Yes. Just like globalization created companies like TSMC, AI will do the same. Software engineers who don't rely on LLM code generators will have a moat because they can do it cheaply and sustainably. Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, don't expect new programming languages or frameworks this means that the software engineering skills that exist today will be relevant for a long t…

I am not so much convinced by your last point, that point of new languages and frameworks. I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models. I think engineering skills will still remain relevant due to tast…

> I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models

But they will still rely on assembly, C, Rust, Linux, HTML, TCP/IP... Doesn't matter how up to date they are, they rely on existing code they have been trained on, they can't just create new languages without the training data.

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

#148

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well.

Quite paradoxical: when its a person's native language we can spot it a mile away but there's no shortage of engineers who claim how good the code output is.

Whatever the reason for the default tone of AI in English, it's still there when generating code. It makes me think that the senior engineers who claim that it produces awesome output just don't understand the specific programming language as a someone who thinks in it almost natively.

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

#149

Post by AnthonyMouse »

NordStreamYacht wrote: post #130
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for sla…

> megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. You just described Lucent.

That's the end stage. The bigger problem is the companies rotting from the inside even though they're still alive, because they use their resources to suppress your alternatives to them while they're slowly dying on top of you.

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

#150

Post by Terr_ »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #34

"the west" ? You mean the world? Deepseek was being glazed here, Im sure chinese programmers use it like CC

To be charitable to TFA, there are a dearth of accurate and well-understood labels for the kind of X versus Y they want to make between national economies.

Even "First/Third world" has been fraying at the edges for decades since it was originally about political alignment.

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