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

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

#191

Post by muragekibicho »

eolgun wrote: post #183

The Fogbank example is the most chilling part. It's not just that they lost the people — they lost the ability to know what they didn't know. Nobody could even write down what was missing because the knowledge was never formalized in the first place. The junior hiring collapse compounds this. Senior engineers develop judgment partly by watching juniors make mistakes and correcting them. Remove that loop and you don't…

The junior hiring collapse is all so bizarre. I graduated recently and my career prospects are jarringly limited.

I thought I'd go back for a Masters/PhD but then Trump mercurially defunded lots of STEM grad programs. Ngl, I found myself stuck. Zero job openings, zero PhD program openings. It's all so frustrating.

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

#192

Post by sahilagarwal »

liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

I generally don't have as much time (or patience / fucks) anymore in my day. So, I use AI 3 days a week. On the other two days, I don't use assistants to code, just ask them to review my work after its done.

Helps me keep sane tbh. And keeps the edge sharp.

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

#193

Post by IronyMan100 »

skybrian wrote: post #22

There was a time when companies had terrible development practices and could forget how to build, test, and deploy software, but is anyone seeing that now? We have much better development practices nowadays. It doesn’t seem much like defense industry problems.

IMHO, it's a people Thing. People developed better practices, talked about IT in conferences, maybe left the company. AS a result the knowlegde spread. On the other Hand, If the places where a skilled individual can work and honey their skills, the knowlegde become scarce, the knowlegde cannot spread anymore and it will vanish. If you only program with AI and 5 people do the Work of 100, then you end Up in such a scenario.

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

#194

Post by clutter55561 »

The same “forgetting pattern” can be said of assembly, hardware, combustion cars, radio, heck, even making fire.

There will always be specialists who can really debug stuff. Mechanics, etc. Time moves on, and we need to move with it.

I’m amazed at this “end-of-world” crap. People use AI to write this shit, to make it even crazier.

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

#195

Post by simonask »

heinternets wrote: post #28

When you've run out of ideas just portray "the west" as some monolithic portrait in some decline-porn fan fiction as clickbait.

I'm so tired of this, it's such a lazy take. "The West" is a giant, incongruous collection of wildly disparate nations and cultures with wildly different circumstances, policies, histories, and cultures.

It feels a lot like someone has a cursory understanding of American politics, and thinks the US is somehow representative. It's not, it is an outlier by every statistical measure. If you want to understand the world, you need to start by forgetting everything you know about the US.

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

#196

Post by mschuster91 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #68

I saw academic rigor fall of a cliff in exchange for 'better job alignment' between end 80s when I had my first class after finishing highschool called 'Formal verification in software' on to beginning of the 2000s when I left giving the first class to new students 'Programming in Java'. All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.

> All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.

Yeah. Companies didn't want to train new employees any more as that costs money (both for paying the trainees and the teachers) so they shifted to requiring academic degrees. That in turn shifted the cost to students (via student loans) and governments.

People call it a red flag for scams if you are supposed to pay your employer for training or whatever as a condition of getting employed... but the degree mill system is conveniently ignored.

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

#197

Post by Madmallard »

whycombinetor wrote: post #8

>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. >In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI. Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev t…

Pretty sure cheap foreign labor is more prevalent now than ever at every major tech company.

They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance.

It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.

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

#198

Post by lkm0 »

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.

The blog post reads nothing like Hemingway. Here's a classic example: https://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Hemingway/hemingway-...

Hemingway writes simple sentences with a kind of detachment to make the emotional flow of his stories as transparent as possible.

LLM slop reads more like slide bullet points extrapolated to prose-length text

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

#199

Post by MattJ100 »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186
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…

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…

We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions.

Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and their configuration is a total mess.

Something about this feels really broken, when a channel full of domain experts are willing to lend a hand (within reason) for free. But instead, people increasingly turn to the machines which are well-known to hallucinate. They just don't think it will hallucinate for them.

In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they should be even more careful.

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

#200

Post by t43562 »

cbg0 wrote: post #187
t43562 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore? I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.

> Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore? This is a whole different discussion, but I just see it as part of the job that I'm getting paid for, I don't need to enjoy it to do it. Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not ev…

> Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.

Well, there you go. Letting AI write the tests is a mistake IMO. When I'm working with other people I write tests too and when I see their tests I know what they're missing out because I know the system and the existing tests. Sometimes I see the problem in their tests when I'm working on some of my own. If you absent yourself from that process then ....

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