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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

#51

Post by roenxi »

collinfunk wrote: post #31
crotobloste wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? Factually correct. > We are benefactors of the Ukrainians' bravery and sacrifices. Who's we? > How much money could we have not spent if Hitler had been stopped in Czechoslovakia? Very different situation, in all aspects.

You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?

There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.

Hitler was more about wanting more land and resources for Germany, and he saw war as being a legitimate tool for achieving his aims that he deployed early and enthusiastically.

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

#52

Post by cladopa »

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything".

They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.

Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thinking about some of the people I spoke with being dead.

Since that I have also been in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as an entrepreneur and engineer. "What are you going to do when drones are used against your infrastructure?" If you followed the Russian war and first Iranian strike it was obvious that drones were going to be used against them. "not going to happen" again.

The have lost tens of billions for lacking proper preparation. They could have been protected spending just hundreds of millions of dollars over years.

It is about humans, not AI.

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

#53

Post by palmotea »

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 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-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned.

The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.

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

#54

Post by drawfloat »

efitz wrote: post #38

I disagree with the premise - interesting but I interpret the same fact pattern differently. The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones. Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant. Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for th…

Everyone is taught at a young age how to do basic addition and multiplication. That's all check out requires. People are not taught at a young age how Rust lifetimes work or how to write human maintainable code.

I agree, as with everything in 2026, the reality lands somewhere in the middle of the discourse online. But pretending this is in practice anything like the check out example is wrong.

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

#55

Post by RangerScience »

RossBencina wrote: post #24

Excellent post. Two stand-out points are deskilling through abolition of apprenticeship (or equivalent progression through the rank and responsibility), and loss of institutional knowledge, especially tacit knowledge stored in individual people. These are people problems more than they are technology problems. Without continuity of process and practice stuff gets lost. Sometimes change really is progress, for example…

What comes to mind is how the cure for scurvy was simply… forgotten, causing it to come back.

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

#57

Post by stingraycharles »

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…

Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated.

No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.

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

#59

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

skybrian wrote: post #22

There was a time when companies had terrible development practices and could forget how to build, test, and deploy software, but is anyone seeing that now? We have much better development practices nowadays. It doesn’t seem much like defense industry problems.

This still happens. Lots of my career has been figuring out what code is actually running in prod, and determining if it even works.

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

#60

Post by vishnugupta »

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 on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

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