Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techtrenches.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 896 posts

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

#261

Post by Jtarii »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #258
vjsrinivas wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not practicing an activity consistently, you'll forget some of the finer grained aspects. When I'm coding, I subconsciously create a continuous logic map. Having someone or something just generate (and generate so quickly) destroys that and makes it easier for bugs to slip through.

I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how co…

A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.

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

#262

Post by 2ndorderthought »

yapyap wrote: post #154
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 real issue, in my view, is not AI itself in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though

Only in 2026 is AI the answer to everything and when the negative traits of our behaviour are amplified due to AI it clearly has nothing to do with AI even when the article exactly about that.

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

#263

Post by skydhash »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #222
MattJ100 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

Personally this type of behavior played a large part in why I left 2 oss communities. A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us abou…

I’m subscribed to a couple of mailing list and follow the archive of a few others. I wonder if the friction associated with the medium is why I haven’t seen those shenanigans?

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

#267

Post by 2ndorderthought »

skydhash wrote: post #263
2ndorderthought wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally this type of behavior played a large part in why I left 2 oss communities. A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us abou…

I’m subscribed to a couple of mailing list and follow the archive of a few others. I wonder if the friction associated with the medium is why I haven’t seen those shenanigans?

I should look into mailing lists. That would be a great filter for the "I need it now at any cost" interactions. Thank you for the indirect advice.

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

#268

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Jtarii wrote: post #261
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how co…

A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.

Are we talking about observational ability, creativity, accuracy of communication or grammar here?

There's many more ways to evaluate a writer skill in terms of what they are doing vs what is coding. Coding can be creative, but in most cases you are not evaluating coding as writing, unless it's possibly technical writing, which is still different compared to coding.

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

#269

Post by smallstepforman »

swiftcoder wrote: post #171
rvba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anything come out from those billions?

> Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

Every year they grant prizes. If hardly anyone is doing core R&D because of cost cutting, there is a higher chance those doing the smallest amount of R&D get the prizes.

A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.

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

#270

Post by wry_durian »

dragontamer wrote: post #211
Lio wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s even a management tutorial game which demonstrates the dangers of removing too much slack from systems. It’s called The Beer Game[1]. One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time. Short-termism is the death of companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

Wut? The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.

If "winning" the beer game means not overreacting to short-term signals, then you can view that as a form of slack. You're sometimes paying a bit extra to hold onto something that you have no immediate short-term use for.
Post reply on HN