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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

#521

Post by Supermancho »

don_esteban wrote: post #337
andy_ppp wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in char…

You started well, but then the train got derailed... Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).…

> Russia has no need for Eastern Europe

They sure do like to sell to them.

> Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles

This never made much sense. Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller munitions from local seaboards (subs). This idea that NATO is somehow threatening by proximity is not credible. The answer to it would not be to rush headlong into a conflict to bring those forces to bear and bring your border to theirs anyway.

It looks more like the Ukraine conflict has been about securing resources, testing capabilities, and demographics (tied to capabilities). Russia wanted more resources to sell to partners and wanted to test the (declining) capability of it's own forces.

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

#522

Post by threepts »

techblueberry wrote: post #517
threepts wrote: post #508

"institutional knowledge that exists nowhere in the codebase. Those engineers don’t exist yet because we’re not creating them. The juniors who should be learning right now are either not being hired or developing " This article passes blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being actively hired. You do not need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something in order to be hired.

Most people don’t know shit before they get a job. All the most gifted developers I’ve hired or worked with were idiots on day one. Less dumb than than everyone else, but I don’t care how many hackathons or coding competitions or open source projects you’ve contributed to, there’s so much education dealing with real problems and real coworkers in a real work environment.

I agree, most human developers have an exponential learning curve but I also acknowledge the fact companies are mostly driven by shareholder pressure to maximize earning potential and are not to keen on funding that curve.

They just want to quick results for their 3rd quarter report and AI does that, without much investment (for now atleast).

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

#523

Post by 7402 »

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…

Is it really so obvious? It didn’t seem AI-written to me.

Every day I seem to encounter (and skip over in disgust) a dozen or so AI-generated articles at the top of web searches, but this wasn’t anything at all like those.

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

#524

Post by recursive »

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…

I've been opposed to all of it the whole time. But yes, let's stop being hypocritical.

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

#525

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

There's economic / capitalist pressure to reduce cost / increase revenue and optimize for short-term profits; that's on the corporate side, anyway.

But applying the military hardware stuff to software is IMO a bit of a leap; I get the similarities, but where demand for software hasn't slowed down at all, demand for military hardware and ammunition just wasn't there.

The alternative would have been to keep all the factories alive, maintained, staff employed (or training staff ready to onboard rapidly hired staff when capacity had to go up), supplied stockpiled (and rotated), etc. And who would be willing to pay for that?

In times of peace the voter wouldn't want the government to spend billions on the military if it wasn't necessary... except for the US which still spends billions a year on the military even in peacetime. But not on their production facilities it seems.

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

#526

Post by recursive »

avocabros wrote: post #302
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…

That's because the purpose of code is to be used, not to be read. The only purpose of the written word is to be read.

I've always tried to write code for future maintainers first. That is often me.

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

#527

Post by pilgrim0 »

0xpgm wrote: post #84
raincole wrote: post #77

First of all this is clearly AI-assist writing (being charitable here). And the premise makes no sense anyway. The only risk of forgetting how to make shells is when other countries are making shells more efficiently. Non-western countries are not going to reject AI-coding, nor are they going to make software more efficiently by hand.

Programmers in non-western countries may not be able to afford $100 per month on vibe coding. They may keep taking the longer and harder route of a mixture of AI and hand coding.

The same applies to the south. It’s shocking to read tales of people spending hundreds of dollars monthly with coding agents, that’s wholly impossible for the vast majority of devs in South America, even 20 dollars is hard to justify for most households. By economic factors alone, I bet there are a lot more people learning the hard skills in places they can’t afford to be dependent on the tools.

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

#528

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

AI isn't making us forget, and we aren't in the process of forgetting. We forgot, past tense, in 2015.

The rise of coding bootcamps destroyed the historic knowledge and expertise of professional software developers. Waves and waves of people joined the tech workforce, without taking the years of experience required to learn how programming, and professional software development, should work. The result was a lot of really bad code, and a lot of reeeeeally bad product decisions.

Since 2018 I haven't met anyone who has read an entire technical manual on a framework, library, or tool that they use every day. By 2020 I was meeting engineering managers who said they wouldn't let engineers use a technology if they couldn't find StackOverflow snippets for it. I still meet "Senior" engineers who don't understand the most basic professional methods, like how Scrum, Agile, or Kanban actually work, and why you shouldn't just make things up as you go. Hell, the entire industry developed a collective psychosis preventing them from understanding the word "DevOps", because everyone switched entirely to learning by reading false blog posts written by clueless amateurs and upvoted in an echo chamber. If you never learn properly, and repeat misconceptions, you won't do good work.

We neeed a professional software development license, the same way the Trades have licensed plumbers and electricians and framers. We need people to apprentice under a master engineer, so they are guided by people who know what to do and what not to do. And we need formal tests to ensure businesses don't hire clueless people who passed a two week course to write critical software. Of course nobody wants to do this, and that's why it's so necessary.

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

#529

Post by notnullorvoid »

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…

It didn't feel at all AI written to me. It's much better than the AI written junk that HN laps up without noticing.

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

#530

Post by aleqs »

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 think the problem is even more general than that, and has existed since before LLMs. All of the decision makers are incentivized to chase short term gains and ignore everything else. Many tech companies already had huge gaps in knowledge around their own codebases simply because such knowledge and expertise is basically treated as a liability/expense rather than an asset.

I'm actually very optimistic about LLMs/AI for basically the opposite reason tech leadership/MBAs are - I think it will allow us to overcome organizational/business/marketing ing hurdles that tech companies rely on short-sighted MBA-style 'leadership' for in the first place. And not because I believe in OpenAI and Anthropic - I think the future is self-hosted or community -hosted open models, and open collaboration among willing peers, building open software to solve real problems in honest ways, rather than hierarchical top-down corporate hellholes pumping out pre-enshitified crapware full of ads, tracking and dark patterns.

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