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

techtrenches.dev

41–50 of 896 posts

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

#41
Speak for yourself. I now dare to code much harder problems and learning is bliss. No more having to sit down to dig needle-in-haystack through horrible documentation or random Stack Overflow posts.

LLMs are a magnificent tool if you use them correctly. They enable deep work like nothing before.

The problem is the education system focused on passivity (obeyance), memorization, and standardized testing. And worst of all, aiming for the lowest common denominator. So most people are mentally lazy and go for the easy win, almost cheating. You get school and interview cheating and vivecoders.

But it's not the only way to use LLMs.

Similarly, in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.

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

#43
This is some convoluted BS built on the premise that wars need to make sense, economically or otherwise. No, wars do not need to make sense. If a person, a dictator or a president, unilaterally starts a war that forfeits the lives of both the dictator's (possibly fabricated) enemies and its own people, that person is knowingly committing murder. Logically, such a person should be handled with at least as much prejudice as a lone wolf that opens fire on a crowd. So we need to fix our legal systems to be better at preventing wars, not our economic systems to be better at fighting them.

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

#46
While the Fogbank story is a funny anecdote, I don't see it as a fitting example for atrophied skills. It's like writing a clean implementation of some software and it just doesn't match the legacy version until you realize that the legacy version had an unnoticed bug that made it behave the way it does.

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

#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 time.

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

#49
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? We are benefactors of the Ukrainians' bravery and sacrifices. How much money could we have not spent if Hitler had been stopped in Czechoslovakia?

> Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? Yes. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...

You are completely ignoring the argument of your parent comment. They are saying that money is being spent to the benefit and best interest of the spenders, that it’s not a handout.

You are, of course, free to disagree and make your point, but ignoring the argument does not advance the discussion.

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

#50
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…

[flagged]

You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.
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