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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

#481

Post by reaperducer »

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…

Modern managers: You have to be in the office for synergy and the serendipitous exchanges with coworkers that lead to innovation.

Also modern managers: You were in the bathroom for six minutes. I'm docking your pay.

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

#482

Post by booleandilemma »

I'm not forgetting how to code. They're not gonna get me.

Did I forget everyone's phone numbers when cell phones came out? Yes.

But this is different. Coding is my passion. I was doing it before I got paid to do it and I'll be doing it after they no longer pay people to do it anymore.

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

#483

Post by luckylion »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #432
gyomu wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a…

>It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Only if you're constrained by the same short-term thinking as US businesses. The way to do that is more of an apprenticeship model when someone observes/works closely with someone from the first group over years. Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? They want people to ch…

My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand.

Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked closely with them to try and reform them. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, but it has never succeeded.

With the ones from the first group it can work that way: you can show them how you approach problems and they will ask questions and pick up patterns and you'll see them improve.

> Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free?

Businesses would need a high likelihood that they can reap the rewards of upskilling employees. Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit? At the same time, I'll happily pay three times as much for a truly skilled senior developer. I think the employee's incentives are much more aligned: it will increase their market value, it's an investment into their wealth, not the business'.

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

#484

Post by Forgeties79 »

WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #470
Forgeties79 wrote: post #454

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. 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 wo…

> What does "fair" have to do with anything?

Not wasting other people’s time when they expect your work to at least pass a cursory check. It’s selfish and disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. I don’t know about all that other stuff you wrote but it’s not really what I’m talking about so I’ll clarify.

I don’t know what your high school/college was like, but we used to trade papers for editing. It was universally considered bad practice to send rough/first drafts. It’s disrespectful and wastes the time of people who are being generous with it for you. You’re offloading your work in a selfish way.

Simply put: If I want an LLM’s raw results, I’ll prompt it myself. Why are you involved if I don’t want your work? Your expertise? Want to use an LLM then go for it but don’t just wipe its muddy boots on my work. At least look at the results.

Unfortunately, this is becoming even more common with LLM’s. I have no problem confronting people about it because 100% of the time they don’t want it done to them. It’s not even an argument, it’s catching them being selfish and they know it.

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

#485

Post by avereveard »

Why do millions need to code? When we industrialized million lost the knowledge to sewn a garment. Why a few specialized worker producing self building solution is that bad?

I mean beyond the obvious hacker news bias.

If you like it nobody will remove it to you as a hobby. But the artisanal aspect of coding as a production mechansim is dying, and it was about time.

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

#486

Post by thegrim33 »

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 way the system is supposed to work is that companies that make bad decisions fail, and provide room for companies that do not make bad decisions to appear or grow bigger. Which works as long as you have an environment with fair competition where people are free to start and grow companies without running into entrenched interests or undue hardship.

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

#487

Post by com »

SoftTalker wrote: post #475
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit fo…

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student. Products like jet engines, though, ar…

Not quite; for wide-bodies at least RR pips GE for fuel-efficiency, but there’s not much in it for the latest generation of power plants.

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

#488

Post by irishcoffee »

wreath wrote: post #437
sahilagarwal wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally don't have as much time (or patience / fucks) anymore in my day. So, I use AI 3 days a week. On the other two days, I don't use assistants to code, just ask them to review my work after its done. Helps me keep sane tbh. And keeps the edge sharp.

At work we are literally forced to use AI and it’s part of our performance review. Even though I really like coding by hand, I have to now use AI so I can keep my job. I will try this out though, 2 days per week using AI and the rest handcoding, enough to stave off the inevitable lay off perhaps.

Surely it can’t be hard to token max at work the same fucking way people have games Jira metrics for years and years.

If I’m ever in that position (everything I work on it air-gapped, it’ll never happen) I would make it a priority to figure out how to game that bullshit metric so I could get on with solving actual problems.

I imagine a lot of people do this. Metric becomes a target, etc.

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

#489

Post by dieortin »

kristofferR wrote: post #440
owebmaster wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What service got better and/or cheaper?

Most software, other than Windows and macOS, seems to have gotten better more quickly lately. Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.

Could you give some examples?

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

#490

Post by afarah1 »

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've had the "problem" of forgetting syntax before any AI, with IDE autocomplete. It was only ever a problem when switching jobs and being expected to write syntactically correct code on platforms without syntax checks or autocomplete. So I did some exercises on such platforms in preparation for interviews.

In the real world, reliance on syntax autocomplete and checks was never an issue. The important thing has always been understanding the core concepts of the language and the runtime, e.g. how the event loop works with Node.js and how to write asynchronous and event driven programs.

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