The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by GorbachevyChase » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243

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…

They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…

I think you’re not blaming political leadership enough. NAFTA, and other programs were always going to lead to the state of affairs we have now. This was a choice. Blaming greed is like blaming gravity.

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

#462

Post by abustamam » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #60

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…

> 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…

I haven't read this book but I see it often mentionedin contexts like this. it was written in 2001 and I think its synopsis still stands.

Slack by Tom Demarco (2001)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

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

#463

Post by beng-nl » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

1287128 wrote: post #340

barankilic wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We are not okay with slop code. There was healthy and widespread dissent in 2024 and beginning of 2025. Ycombinator cracked down on the dissent first by installing another moderator and then by downranking and banning anti-AI people. What you read here are bots and those invested in AI and an occasional retired person who uses AI as a crutch.

Such unsubstantiated claims against the integrity of HN moderators should not be thrown around so casually.

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

#464

Post by arexxbifs » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

alecco wrote: post #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 a…

Perhaps the approach to, and leverage from, using AI is different for someone who's been active on HN for two decades, and junior devs who've been brought up on iPhones in the flawed school system you're describing?

As TFA says, the problem is that accumulating knowledge takes time and effort, and the AI hype and expectations on LLM-assisted coding helps with rationalizing ever more short-sighted decisions that squander or hinder that process.

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

#465

Post by torginus » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121

palmotea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

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…

I wonder if it would work if top US companies implemented a system like the NFL draft, where companies competing for top engineers out of college get to pick from the best engineers inversely proportionally based on how they did before financially.

While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.

But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.

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

#466

Post by dd8601fn » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

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 have always had a problem, worse than most I think, where if I’m away from a language for a bit I lose my ability to write it quickly and competently, real quick.

It doesn’t matter if I was quite competent in it… the mechanical bits fade fast.

Doing llm assisted work is going to be like pouring bleach on my brain. I can feel it. The more I use it the worse it will be for me.

I can still formulate what I need, and problem solve just fine, but all the nuts and bolts evaporate.

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

#467

Post by atq2119 » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

SleepyMyroslav wrote: post #247

adrian_b wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient. This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level…

I don't think compilers are a good example. The economics of software development has won a long time ago. For example in Gamedev with well known soft real-time requirements people (mostly) stopped doing that machine code dance many hardware generations ago. Like it happened with memory optimizations: people measure memory in GB now not in KB =) I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimiza…

Gamedev dev is a good example actually. True, handwritten assembly has gone out of style. But knowing how caches work, and how to lay out data to improve performance is important. And stuff like vector intrinsics also gets used.

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

#468

Post by phpnode » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #232

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 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…

I used to be an expert at php but now I haven’t written any in over a decade, I can still read it but it would take me a little while to get back to where I was (hopefully I’ll never need to), same thing could easily happen due to ai

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

#469

Post by mjevans » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #450

sph wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

I think that has something to do with the prerequisites of democracy. I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.

Democracy requires informed thoughtful voters to function.

Public education was supposed to deliver that. This is a dream that has failed in the US.

Possibly the most lacking tools are Critical Thinking (not directly taught as a subject AFAIK) and some class with a focus on how government(s) work. The latter was an elective I took in high school (not a core requirement, it should be).

At least when I was in college it helped to have critical thinking skills, but was not a basics (100 level) course. Political studies might be a different degree, but again not a core course. I find that ironic since everyone has to interact with government regulations and vote.

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

#470

Post by WhatsTheBigIdea » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #454

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'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. This feels unfair to the people dealing with your (LLM’s) code. You don’t vet it at all? Or am I reading this wrong?

What does "fair" have to do with anything? This is exactly the issue the author is writing about. Take the easy way, reap the profits, then someone suffer the obviously predictable consequences at some point in the unforeseeable future... likely not you! "Fair" is not relevant.

The original author points to the consolidation of military suppliers as a major issue, but the truth is that the economies of the western world have been massively dependent on this sort of consolidation and outsourcing for a large portion of the "growth" that they have achieved for a generation.

It would be convenient to think that the real question is "how do we climb back out of this hole?" but I feel the more pressing question is actually, "when and why will we start trying?"

The profit motive simply does not drive society in this direction.

The crises are catastrophic and perhaps even existential, but they are not profitable. You have to be a really lucky market timer to bet on crisis and win.

Avoiding crisis over the longer term is simply not investable.

"Fair" is not a relevant or useful conception in this context.