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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

#341

Post by andy_ppp »

don_esteban wrote: post #337
andy_ppp wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in char…

You started well, but then the train got derailed... Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).…

If China cannot get oil from the middle east what happens to China and China-Russia relations? I didn't say there would be hostilities just Russia would become potentially the more dominant partner.

If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?

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

#342

Post by djyde »

Jtarii wrote: post #259
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding? It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget? Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim. My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the…

If your internet died you would likely be worse at programming that you were in 2020. I think is what people are getting at.

I always compare AI programming to Google. If that's the case, then without internet, without Google, without Stack Overflow, my abilities would be worse than they were in 2000.

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

#343

Post by aleph_minus_one »

paganel wrote: post #328
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work — believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. I am not so certain: For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system. The problem rather is: the volume…

It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.

> It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading

I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up.

If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem.

In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks:

- easy, regular adjustments

- deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system

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

#344

Post by bonsai_spool »

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.

What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap.

This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about offshoring that the article wants you to bring along.

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

#345

Post by doginasuit »

I write all my own code and then run it by the LLM for analysis and suggestions. I'm probably not a 10x developer, but this has 10x'd my own progress. I make fewer missteps and build a deeper understanding of the problem space. I used to brace myself for a lengthy debugging session whenever testing a new section of code and now it tends to run as expected, more often than not. It may take a few years but I expect people who are using LLMs in the backseat will pull out ahead as the leaders of the future of software.

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

#347

Post by layer8 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #174
lelanthran wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 can do that too. Most programmers can. That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it. I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexib…

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it. No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.

How is that “no” and “the other way around”? The desire to rewrite comes from the ease with which one can critique existing code for being “too hard” to understand.

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

#348

Post by lotsofpulp »

_heimdall wrote: post #322
sofixa wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. They did though. While nobody actually believed Putin would be dumb enough, the Ukrainian army was still, just in case, extremely busy on preparing defences, organising stockpiles, preparing defensive tactics.

> While nobody actually believed Putin would be dumb enough I'm not sure why you'd say nobody thought they would invade. To me it was clear in December the year before when the Russian navy began sailing the long way around Europe, getting in the way of Irish fisherman and confirmed days before the invasion when they had stockpiled medical personnel and blood on the front lines.

It was clear when they captured Crimea.

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

#349

Post by unleaded »

barankilic wrote: post #275
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #210

“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.” The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies. Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article. If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care…

I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated wor…

The purpose of writing is to get your thoughts across in words. A prompt sufficient enough to get out an article with zero chance of it adding things you don't mean has to contain as much information as the article itself would. Just write the article.

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

#350

Post by cucumber3732842 »

baq wrote: post #146
samiv wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements

In those filthy low margin industries that HN loves to regulated across the oceans out of sight out of mind capital investments have service lives measured in decades.

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