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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

#371

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312
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 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…

I am not sure those are mutually exclusive. We all know if situations where a person knows of tiny and typically undocumented system quirks. We even have a corporate name for it: institutional knowledge. The issue is that executives think it can ALL somehow be done, when even cursory real life project lift will quickly teach one how insane average gap between documented and undocumented tends to be. Add to that near constant changes to API, versions, systems, people and I can't help but wonder at executives, who really do think this way.

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

#372

Post by rglover »

brabel wrote: post #164
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human…

I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects.

Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot.

Not one drop of this would have been possible had I taken the traditional corporate track.

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

#373

Post by jakub_g »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #343
paganel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tend to document some tricky non-obvious pieces of knowledge directly above the relevant code. "We have to do X below instead of obvious-first-idea-Y because Z".

Any time a refactoring comes up which moves code around, AI (or my coworkers) remove those comments without thinking twice, and I need to tell them "hey this is still valid".

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

#374

Post by raddan »

xienze wrote: post #179
swiftcoder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years. A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there. First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff. Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The I…

I also worked (briefly, as an intern) at IBM and IBM’s management also sometimes undermined the R&D that happened at the company.

I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.

This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.

I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.

If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.

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

#375

Post by dmix »

Madmallard wrote: post #197
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.

America could just reduce their cost of living, optimize their healthcare, make domestic business more attractive etc instead of trying to ban everything to duct tape over deeper problems

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

#376

Post by dominotw »

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 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.ti cannot.

my promotion packet at work always included how great of a document-er i am

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

#377

Post by throwaway219450 »

microtonal wrote: post #165
SanjayMehta wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?

These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM).

Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. It's uncanny when you (literally) hear it.

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

#378

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months.

I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than a puzzle solver and its exhausting and even when it solves difficult problems for me the LLM slot machine is far less satisfying than if I'd figured it out myself.

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

#379

Post by anonymars »

_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.

When the US warned, days before, of the imminent invasion, the broad reaction was still one of "the boy who cried wolf"
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