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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

#421

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

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,…

You could have done this with Google search or Wikipedia or reading through books though

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

#422

Post by app134 »

tim-projects wrote: post #403
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find this interesting as someone who does primarily devops, my satisfaction has increased with ai. Since for me the code isn't the puzzle but an annoying inconvenience in the way of completing the entire system. For me QA is a big part of solving the puzzle.

DevOps is a huge part of my job as a systems engineer and I too have found increased satisfaction with AI.

I think the reason (for me, at least) is that my markers of success were always perched precariously atop a mountain of systems that I had varying levels of understanding of anyway. Seeing a pipeline "doing the thing" is satisfying regardless of how I sorted it out.

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

#423

Post by flybrand »

numpad0 wrote: post #367
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time

This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.

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

#424

Post by ccortes »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #317
esseph wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could simply become a better writer without not writing anything by just observing. To become a better X to must do more of X. There are few shortcuts worthwhile.

I would disagree. If you only do X, in fact I think you will miss a lot of things that could make you better. You can become better writer by reading other great writings, if you only write yourself, you will not have the full big picture on what is possible. Then you can become better by thinking a lot, imagining a lot, etc... Same with most fields I would argue. Although we were discussing about the decay of skill…

There’s a huge difference between “doing more of X” and “doing only X”

For someone arguing that “coding is conveying logic” seems like you need a refresher on propositional logic

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

#425

Post by 01100011 »

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…

Who is the 'we' here? When did I become ok with LLMs writing code end to end or against LLMs being used to assist writers? I wasn't aware I held either of these positions.

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

#426

Post by dzonga »

adrian_b wrote: post #153
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for sla…

Yes, many Americans and other Westerners believe that the so-called "socialist" economies, like those of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe were non-capitalist. This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are. In reality, the "socialist" economies were more ca…

wow!! straight to the dome.

thought about this too - but not as expressively as you put it.

e.g in China - for early stage ventures - there's cut throat competition - then as Thiel would put it with heavy competition profits trend towards 0 - by then the tech is perfected or close to perfect - then the state uses its funds to back a monopoly. that's how you get a BYD.

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

#427

Post by _heimdall »

anonymars wrote: post #379
_heimdall wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

And I didn't understand why anyone thought the warning was wrong. Who sends their navy around Europe, collects 100k troops on the border, and ships blood reserves to the front for a training exercise?

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

#428

Post by FrustratedMonky »

"A METR randomized controlled trial found that experienced developers using AI coding tools actually took 19% longer on real-world open source tasks. Before starting, they predicted AI would make them 24% faster. The gap between prediction and reality was 43 percentage points."

This is weird, but does seem a common result.

-> AI generates a ton of code fast, but then the human takes a long time to review. Every time the prompt changes. The AI takes a few minutes to generate code that the human will take hour to review.

The reviewing is taking longer than if human just did the code. So why is it so difficult to go back to coding instead of prompting.?

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

#429

Post by _heimdall »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #348
_heimdall wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure that plays a role for sure, though I don't think anyone in 2014 was predicting a broader invasion 8 years later.

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

#430

Post by great_psy »

Meirambek_VIDI wrote: post #69
great_psy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article is making the point that it is a cultural problem about cost cutting and short term thinking.

Yeah, agreed - short-term incentives seem to drive a lot of this. Do you think tools can help, or is it mostly cultural?

Give me a python script that takes a string representing the output of a sha256 algorithm and a plain string and compares if the sha256 of plain strig matches the sha256 provided.
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