21 ms·

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

• aboardRat4 5mo ago
  >Denis Stetskov ？ Putin's propagandist, or just useful idiot.
• _ngi1 5mo ago
  Do you think this is a tooling problem or more about incentives and how engineers are trained now?
  • great_psy 5mo ago
    I think the article is making the point that it is a cultural problem about cost cutting and short term thinking.
    • _ngi1 5mo ago
      Yeah, agreed - short-term incentives seem to drive a lot of this. Do you think tools can help, or is it mostly cultural?
      • great_psy 5mo ago
        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.
      • solid_fuel 5mo ago
        You can't fix a cultural problem with tooling. I don't understand why silicon valley hasn't taken this lesson to heart yet.
        • _ngi1 5mo ago
          [dead]
• tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
  You could say COBOL has had this "problem" for 40 years also. That's why we need to constantly be inventing new ways of making things. The old ways are always forgotten over time. If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.
  • LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
    The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write a lot of C you really don't need to know assembly.... until you stumble across a weird gcc bug and have no clue where to look. If you write a lot of C# you don't really need to know anything about C... until your app is unusably slow because you were fuzzy on the whole stack / heap concept. Likewise with high-level SSGs and design frameworks when you don't know HTML/CSS fundamentals. As the author says maybe AI is different. But with manufacturing we were absolutely confusing "comfortable development" with "progress." In Ukraine the bill came due, and the EU was not actually able to manufacture weapons on schedule. So people really should have read to the end of "building a C compiler with a team of Claudes": The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality. At least with Opus 4.6, a human cannot give up "the old ways" and embrace agentic development. The bill comes due. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
    • anonzzzies 5mo ago
      But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.
• bsder 5mo ago
  > Optimized for minimum cost with zero margin for surge. On paper, efficient. In practice, one bad day away from collapse. I'm going to steal that one and add it to Stross': "Efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience."
  • californical 5mo ago
    Yes that is one key that resonated with me. The author did a great job of putting these recurring concepts into their own words The other that really resonated was something that I read before along the lines of… we think that once humanity learns something, that knowledge stays and we build on it. But it’s not true, knowledge is lost all the time. We need to actively work to keep knowledge alive That’s why libraries and the internet archive are so important. Wikipedia, too
• shevy-java 5mo ago
  > I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. With all due respect, but many european taxpayers help pay for Ukraine. I am not disagreeing on the premise of the West killing itself via systematic recessions - Trump invading Iran leading to inflation as an example - so a lot of things are going on that show a ton of incompetency both in the USA and the EU, but at the same time I also get question marks in my eyes when this criticism comes from a country that receives money from others. That money could instead go to make EU countries more competitive, for instance. I am not saying this should necessarily be the case, mind you; I fully understand the nature of Putin's imperialism. But we need to really consider all factors when it comes to strategic mistakes with regards to production - and that includes taking up debts all the time. There are always a few who benefit in war, just as they benefit from subsidies from taxpayers (inside and outside as well).
  • skhr0680 5mo ago
    Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? We are benefactors of the Ukrainians' bravery and sacrifices. How much money could we have not spent if Hitler had been stopped in Czechoslovakia?
    • gib444 5mo ago
      > Ukraine is "receiving money from others"? Yes. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america/eu-assistance-ukraine-us-dollars_en https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...
      • latexr 5mo ago
        You are completely ignoring the argument of your parent comment. They are saying that money is being spent to the benefit and best interest of the spenders, that it’s not a handout. You are, of course, free to disagree and make your point, but ignoring the argument does not advance the discussion.
        • deleted 5mo ago
• whycombinetor 5mo ago
  >I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. >In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI. Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev teams in Eastern Europe, right?
  • NSUserDefaults 5mo ago
    Happy to help and eventually take over.
  • Nux 5mo ago
    India for the most part.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    • gitowiec 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • solid_fuel 5mo ago
        Take your racist attitude elsewhere or even better, keep it yourself. The comment chain was only about where IT work is being outsourced.
        • juggina 5mo ago
          [flagged]
• wg0 5mo ago
  >The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore. I see a talent pipeline collapse in next 5 years. "Software engineering is over coding is a solved problem" as being chanted by semi literate media and the AI grifter's marketing departments would further scare away the allocation of human capital to software engineering easily commanding 3x rise in salaries due to resource shortage.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    First it was “learn to code” and bazillion videos of TikTok schmucks showing off slacking at work, now everything is solved. The puzzle is complete.
• rvz 5mo ago
  This will end with the way of COBOL with a few people that still have the expert-level understanding of refactoring old code without causing outages or service disruption. We’ll see, but right now I now see developers 24/7 hooked onto their agents and in the future we will experience a de-skilling problem which clean code, best practices, security and avoiding NIH syndrome will be all flushed down the toilet.
• Animats 5mo ago
  > They can’t tell you what the AI got wrong. AI code generators are trolls. They confidently plausible content which is partly wrong. Then humans try to find their errors. This is not fun. It has no flow.
  • solumunus 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • simondotau 5mo ago
    I beg to differ, insofar as my own experience has been the exact opposite. I enjoy fixing other people's mistakes. And I especially enjoy outsmarting the LLMs. I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.
    • neonstatic 5mo ago
      Perhaps you have the psychological make up to thrive in this new environment. Glad it is working for you.
    • Terr_ 5mo ago
      I think I might enjoy it for a little bit and then become very depressed at the idea that it will never end, a future of fixing things that should never have been broken in the first place and which won't stay fixed.
      • simondotau 5mo ago
        Literally the job of a senior developer, and always has been.
    • lelanthran 5mo ago
      > I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state. I can do that too. Most programmers can. That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it. I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexible" or "this is not robust", ... etc ad nausem. That doesn't take skill at the level to actually write the software. For the market which is hoping to switch to mostly LLM coding, the prize they are eyeing is skill devaluation and not just, as many think, productivity gains. They have no reason to double output, but they'd sure love to first halve the people employed, and then halve the salaries of those people (supply/demand + a glut of programmers in the market), and then halve salaries again because almost no skill necessary...
• whatever1 5mo ago
  I don’t know, but the evidence shows that software engineering is not that deep of an art. People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
  • heisenbit 5mo ago
    Yes, businesses tend to believe that. No, every time people switch knowledge gets lost and code quality degrades. In part I blame accounting rules justifying investments is easier than maintenance.
  • wg0 5mo ago
    Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel. Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
    • whatever1 5mo ago
      Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it. In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company. In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts. In tech, consulting firms provide cheap labor.
      • wg0 5mo ago
        Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal? That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase. Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.
• jdw64 5mo ago
  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. What remains is documentation and automation. But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. AI is following the same pattern. What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. The West has seen this before, especially in the case of General Electric. GE pursued aggressive short-term financial optimization, cutting costs, focusing on quarterly results, and maximizing shareholder returns. In the process, it hollowed out its own long-term capabilities. It effectively traded its future for short-term gains. The same mindset is visible today. The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. Tacit knowledge comes from direct experience with real systems over time. If you remove the people and the learning pipeline, that knowledge does not stay in the organization. It disappears.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • brrraaah 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • stingraycharles 5mo ago
      You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.
      • brrraaah 5mo ago
• lava_pidgeon 5mo ago
  Rather bad premise in the article. 1.) Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe are very industrial regions. The author forgets defence is not only the industry. 2.) The author doesn't show any source that Chinese developers don't use AI
• locallost 5mo ago
  I can't not write the tired comment of how ridiculous it is to criticize AI and then use AI to write your article. It's tired, but so is this writing style. For the actual problem, I fear this can't be solved by warning people, the pain will need to be felt. The system we live in, basically free market capitalism, cannot do anything else except local optimization. Maybe it's for the best, I don't know. The alternative of top down planning wouldn't have this problem, but it would have other problems. I work for a mid size somewhat luxury brand, and the major goal right now is cost cutting and AI for efficiency everywhere instead of using it to create better products or better ways to reach out customers. When I think about who will buy our luxury products if all jobs were optimized out of existence, I don't have an answer, but again I think the pain will need to be felt to change course.
• ktallett 5mo ago
  We have both forgotten how to make things and also decided we can make more profit letting someone else make everything for every market. We have moved to a generation fixated on maximizing profit. However there is logic there as the cost to access the ability to make things is prohibitively expensive. As someone who makes open hardware with a nod to the environment and reusability, you can not justify or even find more locally sourced options than China. Coding is different though, coding doesn't have a cost barrier, it has a ability barrier. I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming and perhaps go back to a happy equilibrium. AI is only production ready if you have someone who understands software development. AI will improve speed to market if you have the right team, it doesn't remove the need for some to learn to code. You will of course end up with startups using exclusively AI but they will be those who end up with major security breaches or simply cannot scale as the AI goes in the wrong direction for the future. Tbh that's probably a positive as it weeds out the start ups that are focused on buzzwords for funding and not product.
  • latexr 5mo ago
    > I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming Anecdotally, what I’m seeing right now is the opposite. People who don’t care about programming are joining, while those who do care are getting tired of the bullshit and leaving. The good programmers are the ones leaving, the hacks are extremely happy to use LLMs. When shit hits the fan, there won’t be many people left to clean it.
    • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
      So you see people who don't care about programming, joining and getting comfortable with vscode and claude code and devops? Because it seems to me like there's a lot of coding-adjacent things they still need to be able to do even if they never look at a line of code.
      • latexr 5mo ago
        Those examples are nonsensical. None of those are necessary to get working code. The VSCode example is particularly baffling. Firstly, I’m sure you understand there are other editors people use for code; secondly, I know even people who don’t code who have picked up VSCode for text editing and are fine with it.
• skybrian 5mo ago
  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.
  • disgruntledphd2 5mo ago
    This still happens. Lots of my career has been figuring out what code is actually running in prod, and determining if it even works.
  • IronyMan100 5mo ago
    IMHO, it's a people Thing. People developed better practices, talked about IT in conferences, maybe left the company. AS a result the knowlegde spread. On the other Hand, If the places where a skilled individual can work and honey their skills, the knowlegde become scarce, the knowlegde cannot spread anymore and it will vanish. If you only program with AI and 5 people do the Work of 100, then you end Up in such a scenario.
• BrenBarn 5mo ago
  > After spending an additional $69 million and years of reverse engineering, they finally produced viable Fogbank. Then discovered the new batch was too pure. The original had contained an unintentional impurity that was critical to its function. Same thing that happened to the unfortunate Dr. Jekyll!
• RossBencina 5mo ago
  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 software safety and security practices have progressed over the past 50 years, but other times change is just churn, or choices driven by misaligned incentives which will bite later, as the article describes.
  • RangerScience 5mo ago
    What comes to mind is how the cure for scurvy was simply… forgotten, causing it to come back.
• brrraaah 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• heinternets 5mo ago
  When you've run out of ideas just portray "the west" as some monolithic portrait in some decline-porn fan fiction as clickbait.
  • simonask 5mo ago
    I'm so tired of this, it's such a lazy take. "The West" is a giant, incongruous collection of wildly disparate nations and cultures with wildly different circumstances, policies, histories, and cultures. It feels a lot like someone has a cursory understanding of American politics, and thinks the US is somehow representative. It's not, it is an outlier by every statistical measure. If you want to understand the world, you need to start by forgetting everything you know about the US.
• trhway 5mo ago
  Isn't that is the point of technological civilization development? People for example forgot how to weave on the handloom, or all the parts production and the maintenance for the watermills. And wooden sailships - top mastery of handling and engineering developed for millennia, gone. As it was said - the future is here, it just distributed non-uniformly, so somebody is still and will be for some time sailing, manufacturing things and writing code.
• roenxi 5mo ago
  > Leadership qualities. Our last hiring round tells you how rare that is: 2,253 candidates, 2,069 disqualified, 4 hired. A 0.18% conversion rate. It's minor but this is just wrong. If you're going to hire 4 candidates, there could be 2,253 perfectly qualified candidates even if only 0.18% get hired. The conversion rate is meaningless; it just tells us how many jobs were on offer. There is no way that the skills this fellow wanted were so rare and difficult that only 1/500 candidates could possibly handle the job. Humans even in the 1/20 mark are pretty competent if you're willing to train them and legitimate geniuses crop up at around 1/200.
  • rotis 5mo ago
    He writes 2,253 candidates and 2,069 were disqualified. 184 were qualified, so 1 in 12 was considered competent.
    • roenxi 5mo ago
      Then he quotes 0.18% to show how rare a quality is, which is a wrong interpretation of the numbers. If he'd said 8% that would be realistic.
      • dublinstats 5mo ago
        The number of actual openings is not given. Also the number who turned their offers down (and perhaps the number they disqualified due to being overqualified and too expensive). Ultimately kind of a meaningless metric.
    • justinclift 5mo ago
      With that volume of candidates, I'd be curious as to what they used for screening (AI prob?) and whether it was filtering out good candidates due to dumb filters.
• allending 5mo ago
  There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.
  • rezonant 5mo ago
    The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly this is supposed to add gravitas, but it's very often done in places where that gravitas isn't needed, and it comes off as if I'm reading the script for an action movie trailer.
    • SanjayMehta 5mo ago
      People have also started copying the AI tropes, especially your period/comma example.
      • microtonal 5mo ago
        I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?
        • throwaway219450 5mo ago
          These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM). Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. It's uncanny when you (literally) hear it.
• Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
  "the west" ? You mean the world? Deepseek was being glazed here, Im sure chinese programmers use it like CC
  • Terr_ 5mo ago
    To be charitable to TFA, there are a dearth of accurate and well-understood labels for the kind of X versus Y they want to make between national economies. Even "First/Third world" has been fraying at the edges for decades since it was originally about political alignment.
• imrozim 5mo ago
  How do you become a senior engineer if no one hires you as a junior anymore.
  • hkt 5mo ago
    Talk confidently in your interview with non-technical managers when the last senior has left and there's nobody there to check your work.
    • blitzar 5mo ago
      So the same as it is now, be a good salesperson.
• efitz 5mo ago
  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 the item. Paper still exists for jotting down your order but within seconds of leaving the table it’s transitioned to computer. This has enabled lots of desirable advances- speed, accuracy, new payment rails, and increasingly, elimination of the server in checkout- you tap a credit card on a tabletop device. Did we “forget” how to do checkout? No. We purposely changed it. But if the internet connection goes down or the backend server powering the cash register app goes down, there is an atrophied and not-regularly exercised skill set (maybe not even trained, IDK) that has to be implemented on-the-fly and it’s slow and frustrating for everyone. Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost. Military procurement of weapons systems is hardly the place to point to as a technological tradition. There are lots of cases where no one pays the money to keep a production process in place; the reasons are all related to shortsighted “cost savings” or failing to anticipate changing needs. With coding today, we are seeing the same kind of shift in priorities as my restaurant example. Having humans write code in the 2020 (pre-GPT) tradition was extremely inefficient in terms of time-from-idea-to-implementation. We’ve found a new way to do the mundane part of that task (the mechanics of translating spec to implementation). We are figuring out how to do that while preserving quality (and a lot of it is learning how to specify appropriately). Will we “forget” how to “build” code? No, but the skills to generate source code by hand will atrophy just as the skills to draw blueprints by hand atrophied with the advent of CAD. Will we find examples where someone prematurely optimized away knowledge of a skill or process, incorrectly thinking it was no longer needed? Of course. But the productivity gains we get will be so great on average that no one will go back to doing things the old way. There will be old-timers and hobbyists who will preserve some of that knowledge; for most it will just be a curiosity.
  • drawfloat 5mo ago
    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.
• alecco 5mo ago
  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 all, aiming for the lowest common denominator. So most people are mentally lazy and go for the easy win, almost cheating. You get school and interview cheating and vivecoders. But it's not the only way to use LLMs. Similarly, in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.
  • rglullis 5mo ago
    > Speak for yourself. Even if you are the absolute unicorn who gets paid to "code much harder problems" and "learning", the rest of the industry exists to deliver actual products and services. So unless you nurture some type of https://xkcd.com/208/ https://xkcd.com/208/ fantasy, this is not just about you. The industry as a whole needs to find a way to work with LLMs without automating programming away entirely, and the industry as a whole needs to find a way to ensure that newcomers are able to be productive even if code-generation tools are taken away from them.
  • eszed 5mo ago
    > in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science. I'm not saying you're personally doing anything wrong, but there's a parallel here, when smart and curious people read articles about history and literature and art and science, rather than engaging directly with the real thing. Or then the next level down, where creating amazing work in all of those domains depends on enough "slack" in the system for people to pursue deep work that will not be immediately profitable. Do you see where I'm going with that? We (and I'm very much including myself: here I am on HN, instead of reading something more substantial) skim the (Wikipedia) surface, instead of diving truly deep. AIs (right now) are the ultimate surface-skimmers, and our fascination with and growing reliance on them reflects something in our current surface-skimming cultural mindset.
• arjunthazhath 5mo ago
  Hope we dont forget humanity one day!
• dsign 5mo ago
  This is some convoluted BS built on the premise that wars need to make sense, economically or otherwise. No, wars do not need to make sense. If a person, a dictator or a president, unilaterally starts a war that forfeits the lives of both the dictator's (possibly fabricated) enemies and its own people, that person is knowingly committing murder. Logically, such a person should be handled with at least as much prejudice as a lone wolf that opens fire on a crowd. So we need to fix our legal systems to be better at preventing wars, not our economic systems to be better at fighting them.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• immanuwell 5mo ago
  when you offshore or automate away the hands-on knowledge, you don't just lose the workers, you lose the entire institutional memory, and no amount of money can buy that back overnight
• wewxjfq 5mo ago
  While the Fogbank story is a funny anecdote, I don't see it as a fitting example for atrophied skills. It's like writing a clean implementation of some software and it just doesn't match the legacy version until you realize that the legacy version had an unnoticed bug that made it behave the way it does.
• pabs3 5mo ago
  Reminds me of this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/
• bit1993 5mo ago
  Yes. Just like globalization created companies like TSMC, AI will do the same. Software engineers who don't rely on LLM code generators will have a moat because they can do it cheaply and sustainably. Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, don't expect new programming languages or frameworks this means that the software engineering skills that exist today will be relevant for a long time.
  • zelphirkalt 5mo ago
    I am not so much convinced by your last point, that point of new languages and frameworks. I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models. I think engineering skills will still remain relevant due to taste and proper judgement. A model trained on everything and the kitchen sink has probably not the fitting bias for given specific problems in my project. Accepting too much AI generated code without steering the ship will result in some drift of taste and ultimately make some mediocre project like done by people without good domain knowledge and without good taste. It might even be short term a business, but it lacks the long term excellence, that sets projects with good judgement apart from the common rabble.
    • bit1993 5mo ago
      > I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models But they will still rely on assembly, C, Rust, Linux, HTML, TCP/IP... Doesn't matter how up to date they are, they rely on existing code they have been trained on, they can't just create new languages without the training data.
      • matwood 5mo ago
        Except they already have invented new languages. https://medium.com/@trezzescience/the-ai-that-invented-its-own-language-and-why-scientists-shut-it-down-aa92c94466bc https://medium.com/@trezzescience/the-ai-that-invented-its-o...
• cladopa 5mo ago
  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.
  • teiferer 5mo ago
    In hindsight, it's easy to be smart. You picked two examples where somebody said "never gonna happen" and then it happened. How about the countless examples where somebody said the same and then the thing actually didn't happen? Take millions playing the lottery. To each of them, I can confidently say "you won't win, not gonna happen". For almost all of them I'll be right. There will be one who wins, were I was wrong, and they will say "see, told you so". That doesn't mean my prediction was wrong. It means you are having a reporting bias.
    • hnfong 5mo ago
      GP also probably had a sampling bias. The ones who were actually concerned about the impending Russian invasion presumably fled out of the country (or at least, away from the major cities to rural areas that probably see less fighting)
      • _heimdall 5mo ago
        I was in a neighboring country in Europe at the time, not Ukraine, but we didn't see any Ukrainians move into our area until a few weeks after the war started. That's not to say the country wasn't prepared though. If the GP did talk to people on the ground days before it started, saying it won't happen would match the public propaganda at the time coming out of the Ukrainian government and their allies. They knew it was coming and seemed to decide they were better to faint like the weren't ready and avoid public panic before it started.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• throw4523ds 5mo ago
  exactly, as they say everyone has to learn to code.
• AHTERIX5000 5mo ago
  Is this written by a real person though?
  • lioeters 5mo ago
    We're forgetting how to write too, apparently, and with that, forgetting how to think for ourselves.
• ekianjo 5mo ago
  > The defense industry thought peace would last forever, too. Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.
• anonzzzies 5mo ago
  I saw academic rigor fall of a cliff in exchange for 'better job alignment' between end 80s when I had my first class after finishing highschool called 'Formal verification in software' on to beginning of the 2000s when I left giving the first class to new students 'Programming in Java'. All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.
  • mschuster91 5mo ago
    > All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'. Yeah. Companies didn't want to train new employees any more as that costs money (both for paying the trainees and the teachers) so they shifted to requiring academic degrees. That in turn shifted the cost to students (via student loans) and governments. People call it a red flag for scams if you are supposed to pay your employer for training or whatever as a condition of getting employed... but the degree mill system is conveniently ignored.
    • lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      The problem was the government providing the blank check loans with no underwriting. Without that subsidy from future taxpayers, incentives would be properly aligned. No lender would have been stupid enough to give 18 to 22 year olds $200k for bullshit degrees and sports facilities. The onus would have remained on employers and government to pay for education, rather than a certification, because they would have been the ones paying.
      • 999900000999 5mo ago
        College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation. I recently spoke to a young art school grad who talked about getting on disability over a life of the corporate grind. Who am I to disagree ? The Pentagon has never passed an audit, the government coffers are effectively a slush fund for defense contractors. At this point, I think a universal basic income is the only way. Not enough jobs exist for everyone. Poverty doesn’t need to exist
• zero0529 5mo ago
  Every day Peter Naur’s paper programming as theory building gets more relevant Link: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
  • apitman 5mo ago
    This was the first article I thought of as well. Highly recommended read.
• light_hue_1 5mo ago
  > The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code Can we stop repeating this nonsense headline please? We did not stop manufacturing things. Manufacturing is a huge industry in the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St... The US manufacturing sector is the biggest it has ever been. Exports are at all time record highs. The only thing that declined about manufacturing is the jobs. We build way more than we ever did but with far fewer people. What we did do is decide that basic items aren't worth it. Our capacity is limited, our labor pool is limited, expenses are high, it doesn't make sense to make trinkets when we can make complex high precision parts and devices. But no, we did not forget how to make things. We chose to use our capacity in a smarter way.
• raincole 5mo ago
  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.
  • 0xpgm 5mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • alansaber 5mo ago
      They'll find a way. If it's not the chiptole bot, the enormous volume of low-effort AI implementations will provide a free token layer.
    • pilgrim0 5mo ago
      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.
  • lpcvoid 5mo ago
    >Non-western countries are not going to reject AI-coding If they are smart, they will. And I think they are smart.
• netfortius 5mo ago
  This is why a comprehensive computer science degree is necessary. Seeing and working only with the trees leads to destroying some forests, eventually.
• dev_l1x_be 5mo ago
  As an anecdotal evidence I code way more now with agents because i have an entity who has vast amount of knowledge about pretty much everything and I have the creativity to use that well.
  • bit1993 5mo ago
    But you already knew how to code before LLM coding agents, juniors will jump straight into using agents without learning to code by hand, hence the premise of the article.
• TeMPOraL 5mo ago
  The article makes no sense, and stars with a very wrong perspective on things. This kind of forgetting is normal. It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost. But you can't, and there's no reason to be surprised. I bet the Pentagon and the EU weren't. They didn't need those Stingers and shells for decades, didn't expect to need them soon - but they knew they could get them if they really needed them, but it's gonna be costly. I don't get why people think this is unusual or surprising, or somehow outrageous and proves something about society or "mindsets of elites" - other than positive aspects like adaptability and resilience. This is true at all scales. Your body and brain optimizes aggressively, too. An individual saying "I need to warm up" or "I need to hit the gym a few times and then I'll be able", or "yes, I can, but I haven't done it for years so I need an hour with a book/documentation..." - all that is exactly the same as EU going "yes we can make artillery shells... though we haven't in a while so we need some time and some millions of EUR to get our supply chain sorted out first".
  • 0xpgm 5mo ago
    > This kind of forgetting is normal Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.
    • Terr_ 5mo ago
      For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc. Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of: 1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise." 2. "This is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon." 3. "This is natural and therefore cannot or should not be solved." [Naturalistic fallacy.]
      • TeMPOraL 5mo ago
        In the specific case discussed in the article and comments, I'm advocating for another interpretation: 4a. "If a process is unlikely to be needed any time soon, shutting it down and then paying cold-start costs if and when it's needed again, is better than keeping it going and wasting resources better used elsewhere", and 4b. "There's an infinitely long tail of low-probability problems, and you can't possibly afford to maintain advance readiness for any of them". Also on the overall sentiment: 4c. "Paying a cold-start cost isn't a penalty or sign of bad planning. It's just a cost."
• neuderrek 5mo ago
  I remember same complaints about junior engineers copy pasting snippets of code from StackOverflow without understanding. And without curiosity to understand, without code review and mentorship from senior engineers they never grew to the senior level. But that is only some of them, others used StackOverflow to learn, did not use the snippets without understanding them first and properly adapting to their context, and they got good coaching in their teams and now have reached senior level from there. I see the same dynamic with LLMs, just more opportunities for both juniors to learn more by following up, and for seniors to to create tooling to enforce better architectur, test coverage and fault resiliency.
  • isodev 5mo ago
    I think you're missing the point. Nobody removed people thanks to their SO copy-paste skills. If anything, more folks were hired to troubleshoot and sort out any copy pasta blunders (since you actually need working software, at the end of the day). With LLMs this is no longer true - the thing can vibe a great deal before anyone notices that they have 100.000 lines of code doing what a focused, human reviewed and tested 10.000 lines can do. And as this goes on, it becomes increasingly more difficult for anyone to actually dig into and fix things in the 100.000 without the help of LLMs (thus adding even more slop on the pile).
• marsven_422 5mo ago
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• Tade0 5mo ago
  > The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore. Well then train them, instead of selecting 0.18% of applicants and calling it a day. It's not some innate, immutable property - people can be taught even in adulthood. Also it's not like they'll work for a year and switch jobs - not in the current market.
• sailpvp998 5mo ago
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• liendolucas 5mo ago
  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 trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing. Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie. Knowledge comes basically from manual trial/error almost daily. Technology being technology if anything has shown us that we can be pushed and manipulated in every single conceivable way. And in my opinion depending on AI is the ultimate way for companies to penetrate and manipulate a very delicate ability of a human being: to think and wonder about things.
  • sahilagarwal 5mo ago
    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.
    • wreath 5mo ago
      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.
      • irishcoffee 5mo ago
        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.
• mawadev 5mo ago
  I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more. Does that really make you senior or just politically versed? The pattern shows up the most whenever failing software pokes holes in perception.
  • brabel 5mo ago
    > Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. Didactic books always have exercises for this reason. You can learn facts and techniques from books, obviously. But just because you've read a book about Michelin restaurants that you can now be a Michelin Chef.
    • kaashif 5mo ago
      Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.
    • andrewstuart 5mo ago
      Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none. There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path. “Oh yeah, like who”, you say. Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.
• sieabahlpark 5mo ago
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• crabbone 5mo ago
  The West started to forget how to code a long time before AI. At first, it was the work visas to bring programmers in, then it was outsourcing. At this point, I'm not even sure if AI is doing more harm than good in this department as it might be able to bring some jobs back to the "West", if it turns out that it's cheaper than outsourcing. The outsourcing was shedding more of the trivial jobs, while trying to keep key positions at home, but increasingly, it also started to lose the key positions too. It's possible that AI can make it so that the key positions will be harder to justify to outsource... but, who knows... maybe not.
• mahrain 5mo ago
  I don't agree with "the west forgot how to make things", it moved supply chains for cheap consumer goods to asia, but in the B2B space a lot of things are manufactured in Europe: companies like Bosch, Volkswagen, ASML, Alstom and Airbus are cranking out extremely complicated machines that last many years in demanding environments. It's just a different level of value-add vs. low cost electronics (for instance).
  • joker99 5mo ago
    I remember Covid and the supply chain crisis that unfolded in Europe and the west. Most of the companies you’ve mentioned weren’t cranking out anything during that time as all of them realised that "low cost electronics" are not always readily available and that we forgot how to make them or don’t have the capacity to produce them in significant numbers anymore ourselves. A lot of basic electronic components were not available during that time and we still haven’t fully grasped the complexities of our supply chains and where they begin. I also remember, that EE for a while stopped using the term "jellybean parts". Turns out that most jellybeans are produced in Asia.
• user2722 5mo ago
  If the system treats you as a number, you should become a mercenary. I love this articles who all the coders read but none of the management. If possible, be a mercenary and put a high number on your expertise, so we can solve this management blind spot faster. If you can't, let your life/work's passion be "not starving to death", and try to change it politics-side.
• eolgun 5mo ago
  The Fogbank example is the most chilling part. It's not just that they lost the people — they lost the ability to know what they didn't know. Nobody could even write down what was missing because the knowledge was never formalized in the first place. The junior hiring collapse compounds this. Senior engineers develop judgment partly by watching juniors make mistakes and correcting them. Remove that loop and you don't just lose future seniors — you quietly degrade the current ones. The 0.18% recruiting conversion rate mentioned here tracks with what I see in compliance and security engineering too. "Can you tell when the AI is confidently wrong?" is now the most important interview question, and almost nobody can answer it well.
  • muragekibicho 5mo ago
    The junior hiring collapse is all so bizarre. I graduated recently and my career prospects are jarringly limited. I thought I'd go back for a Masters/PhD but then Trump mercurially defunded lots of STEM grad programs. Ngl, I found myself stuck. Zero job openings, zero PhD program openings. It's all so frustrating.
    • eolgun 5mo ago
      [dead]
• muragekibicho 5mo ago
  Odd anecdote. I completed high school in 2017 and my home country demanded us use mathematical tables, not calculators, to find logs and sines for our version of SAT math. I got my highest-paying numerical programming contract (in the US) just because I knew (from high school math table experience) how to use LUTs to calculate a lot of useful stuff i.e quarter squares. Modernization is great and all. However, it's disappointing to know lots of new programmers are oblivious of the fundamentals.
• clutter55561 5mo ago
  The same “forgetting pattern” can be said of assembly, hardware, combustion cars, radio, heck, even making fire. There will always be specialists who can really debug stuff. Mechanics, etc. Time moves on, and we need to move with it. I’m amazed at this “end-of-world” crap. People use AI to write this shit, to make it even crazier.
• throwaway2037 5mo ago
  Click/rage bait? The opening paragraph is ridiculous. The FIM-92 Stinger is obsolete. It was replaced by FGM-148 Javelin. DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) didn't forget how to make things. They are still world class for manufacturing. (Northern Italy is also economically part of that manufacturing mega-hub.) There are plenty of NLAWs (much cheaper than Javelin, and only slightly less capable) in EU/Nato stocks to satisfy Ukraine needs against Russian heavily armed main battle tanks. For everything else, you can use one or two suicide drones to kill anything with a motor. And now to give credit where credit is due: Looking at his (assumed) LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denjkestetskov/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/denjkestetskov/ It looks like he was educated in Ukraine, so likely a Ukrainan national. If I were a Ukrainan, then I too would be publishing rage bait like this in an attempt to pressure allies to provide more funding, weapons, and gear. As a final suggestion, the writer can visually spice up his blog post with one of my all time favourite military photos from Wiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFIM-92_Stinger_USMC.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFIM-92_Stinger_USM...
  • InkCanon 5mo ago
    The Stinger is an anti air weapon, the Javelin is an anti tank weapon.
  • sounddetective 5mo ago
    So you published this comment with an anti-Ukrainian spin, and just 2 minutes after posting, your comment is already at the top of comment rankings? I hope HN mods follow inauthentic upvote / comment behaviour on this site; this looks fishy.
    • SyneRyder 5mo ago
      New comments get posted to the top for visibility. The 2 minutes is the key point here. If the comment doesn't get enough upvotes it will sink down, like it has now about 30 minutes later.
  • numpad0 5mo ago
    Stingers use that gas cooled spinny thingy. They're not FLIR based like 9X are.
• sorenjan 5mo ago
  Frankly, I find the attitude towards AI coding here on HN to be both disappointing and a bit disgusting. Not long ago places like this where software developers gathered were full of various texts about how important it was to be able to reason about your code, how tech debt crept into your projects, and how skillful you had to be to write good software, various smart algorithmic tricks to squeeze more performance out of your hardware, etc. Now? Seems like code quality is outdated and uninteresting all of a sudden. Everything is about agentic coding, harnesses, paying hundreds of dollars to Anthropic to let their LLM do the coding for you or perhaps using a 128 GB Mac to run a local model. Do you know your code base? Doesn't matter, if there are any bugs in the future Claude will fix them! Tokenmaxxing is the new paradigm, who cares about the end result as long as it's runs for now and passes all (AI written) tests! But don't suggest these people shouldn't get $100k+ salaries, after all, they still "software engineers" in their minds, they're running the agent orchestration harness in the terminal after all, not everyone anywhere in the world could do that! They're special and deserve to be well compensated for their hard vibe coding work! This industry is rotting from the inside.
• TonyAlicea10 5mo ago
  “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 enough to read it?
  • barankilic 5mo ago
    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 words are not meaningful or easy to follow that same must apply to AI-generated code, which may be harder to read or understand since it is not written by human. Let's stop being hypocrites. Note: My comment is not specific to this comment. I just wanted to express myself at somewhere and this is where I think it may be suitable.
    • wiseowise 5mo ago
      > I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. That’s the problem.
    • alansaber 5mo ago
      Slop is slop.
    • avocabros 5mo ago
      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.
      • SoftTalker 5mo ago
        That's the difference to me. Code is used as instructions to computers. Written human language is used to to communicate thoughts, ideas, feelings to other humans. I disagree with the premise that "we" are all OK with AI slop computer code however. Even if it's just for consumption by machines, for at least some developers it is a creative outlet.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• jongjong 5mo ago
  This is why I advocate for making everything as simple as possible. The more complex the tech, the more likely it will be lost through the passing of time. It's kind of insane how much knowledge a human being needs to have to build certain technologies and it's taken for granted. AI might make the knowledge easier to acquire but it's still a lot of knowledge that people have to internalize.
• zwischenzug 5mo ago
  It's a great story, and a nicely written piece. But civilisations have always forgotten things and then had to re-engineer them. We only recently recreated Roman-equivalent concrete; knowledge required to create the Saturn V rockets had to be re-engineered; we can't recreate medieval stained glass exactly, or Viking Ulfberht Swords; we would struggle to create Betamax tape today. Many of the examples I found (as expected) relate to military or commercially sensitive technology that did not get written down (for obvious reasons). It also reminded me when I read Thomas Thwaites' "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch", where to make a smelter from scratch he relied on a 450 year old book ("De re metallica" by Georgius Agricola), as well as a friendly Metallurgist. We already lost the widespread ability to write assembler in an artisinal way. Now we have AI we will also be lazy about how we write individual bits of artisinal code. So what? Yes it will cost more (in time and money) when we need to re-engineer, but how much would it cost to keep alive all the knowledge and skills we might possibly need in the future? We had better make sure we write down and preserve the recorded data though :)
• rbbydotdev 5mo ago
  Needn’t worry, such incompetencies are rooted out by the 8th or 9th round of interviews.
  • alansaber 5mo ago
    A key pain point addressed by Cluely or some such
• Liftyee 5mo ago
  I wonder if the real problem is short-term thinking in culture and incentivised by markets. By optimising next quarter's profits over investing in long-term growth and capability, things like this happen.
• ianberdin 5mo ago
  I don’t know. Partly true. I came to web development, when low level things solved: frameworks, ORMs, OSs, databases. I don’t know sql nor c++ well. But I can create a system, a value based on the abstractions. Everyone told me: Ruslan, you don’t know SQL, what a shame! Well I do not have problems and did not have about it. Probably we are going to be fine with AI abstraction too. People will use it, stuck with problems, dig deeper, learn, improve, same as we had with frameworks and its source code.
• black_13 5mo ago
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• khalic 5mo ago
  We’ve been automating every single industry that we touched for decades without a single word, bringing up tepid responses like “it’s capitalism” or “business is business” when called out on it. But now that the time has comes for us to automate and change, we’re all up in arms and using ridiculous arguments like this post to fight it. The hypocrisy is mind blowing
  • alansaber 5mo ago
    I hope we'll still be able to sell our beautiful artisan chrome extensions in second hand flea markets in the future
• scotty79 5mo ago
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• agentbc9000 5mo ago
  Chinese models run around $2 to $8 dollars per million tokens - Claude is 10x that cost - when will the bean counters move to chinese models, USA bans these models for national security reasons - Anthropic, Openai, Meta, X all move to China where the models will be cheaper
• croes 5mo ago
  Just look how MS try to get rid of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881805
• subwatch_dev 5mo ago
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• mfgadv99 5mo ago
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• fauigerzigerk 5mo ago
  The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation. Automation is the exact opposite of tying knowledge to people. It's extracting knowledge from people and transferring it to a machine that can continue to produce the goods. Yes, AI can lead to problems and some of these problems will be related to gaps in knowledge that was thought to be obsolete when it really wasn't. But that's a totally different problem on a totally different scale from what happened with defense production after the end of the cold war. Nobody is shutting down or reducing software production. On the contrary, we're going to be making a lot more of it.
  • matwood 5mo ago
    Exactly. The US hasn't forgotten how to manufacture, in fact a ton of manufacturing happens in the US. What's happened is that it's been automated. And automation is one of the better ways to extract knowledge from a person who will one day switch jobs, retire or pass away.
  • maxnevermind 5mo ago
    I'm also confused with that as well as the moral of the story as the whole. I get the sentiment but what is the lesson here, leave production capacity keep going as well as a "hiring pipeline" and just stock pile the output forever? Also, given article's take on the current situation of AI assisted coding, it seems to suggest that we need to apply that same logic to other industries too, so just don't let any industry/practice die and keep it alive? I would appreciate some inputs into some sort of actual solution or at least ideas of the solution but that is not present in the article.
• nojvek 5mo ago
  I wish this article wasn’t AI slop. It wasn’t X, it was Y.
• pHequals7 5mo ago
  thankfully with code and coding agents - the tacit/tribal knowledge always lives via the codebase itself unlike atoms based manufacturing processes..
• SillyUsername 5mo ago
  Space programmes have this issue too - everything had to be relearnt and un-obsoleted for Artemis Moonshots
• anovikov 5mo ago
  Talking of military stuff: it's not a problem really. No one can keep the non-needed capacity in existence, it's not even possible if no one consumes the product. Make sufficient buffer stocks to have time to re-learn the process when needed, and that's it. There is no realistic way it could work any different, otherwise it's like: maintain entire Cold War era production capacity and keep it idle or working at 5% workload, just to be able to ramp up when needed? But it means keeping almost all of the Cold War budgets still flowing. Wasn't going to happen - and of course, in Russia it also didn't happen, and couldn't. In the end of the day, Russia burnt through their entire Soviet stocks in roughly 2-2.5 years, while US spent a very small proportion of theirs and Europe, maybe about half. And now consumption on both sides is similar with expenses on the Western side to feed that machine being almost invisibly small. Nothing bad happened.
• chvid 5mo ago
  I have forgotten all about Apache Wicket - will this cause the downfall of western civilization?
• _the_inflator 5mo ago
  That's why I am looking forward to be a 70 year old demanding tons of money for doing the things I came to love and was cut off by AI. What a bright future! But the rest is a big no from my side. "In hindsight" - Southpark, please take over. What if there was a continuation of producing unused weapons during the last 20 years? "Waste of money", "Old tech", "useless" - dilemma. Also the generalization is awfully misleading: "The west". Let's say all are suffering from military dementia the same way. Who do think has an easier time to recover? USA or Europe? Europe relied and relies or freeloads on USA in especially military affairs. As you wrote: some veterans teach building, handling cruse missiles to young guns like having an exciting time with the boy scouts. Germany? "Never again! Demilitarize Germany." Decades long hatred towards USA was pretty much summed up with the slur "Ami go home!" which was a phrase used to protest US military bases in Germany - and then, when most of them finally left, it was all just fun and games (losers). So USA has some sort of infrastructure and intellectual property to recover and never stopped treasure it as part of the country's history: Veterans' Days, Unknown Soldier, Arlington - Hegseth did a great job stopping the decline here. Meanwhile Europe: You couldn't have a hold out in secrecy. Some enquete commission would investigate, and addresses would be leaked and people doxed. Have a look at the representatives of the Germany Army: overweight nice guys. Sorry to say, but I think there is something wrong with this picture. Europe has nothing to restart. They never had in the first place. Many tend to forget that the US provided massive supply to all allies during WW2. Russia would have been wiped out if it wasn't for the US logistics and money. After the war there was a joke told by survivors of the Eastern front: The first Sherman got shot on the Eastern front not the West. Europe was always on life support. France military forces outnumbered Germany at the start of WW2. But they were tired and instead of fighting build a wall so to say. Netherlands and Denmark was taken without any resistance. And it is the same for programming. How many European companies dominate globally like FAANG? Exactly. None. 30 years of Internet and it is getting lonely at the top for the US. "The West"? Nope. During the 80th, while Chucky Cheese was all the rage, in Germany you got massively socially ostracised for showing your interest in computers. Playing electronic handhelds put you up on notice by teachers, demanding correction by the school administration - true stories. Another one: What do all FAANG like companies have in common? The founders and top managers have a background in CS. What do European managers have in common? They haven't heard of CS so far. Europe is a mess. US is maybe having a cold start but gets its shit done. Germany killed of its industrial sector. Energy producers as well. Germany does what Morgentau had in mind but what off the table: no more wars and weapons, just farmers and horses. USA is save in every regard. It is not that something has been lost. This happens or why do we don't know anything about Rome? You have to distinguish recovering from losing. Once you were at the top, at least you know how to get there while others in most cases will never get there. These are different abilities: conserving knowledge and rebuilding it. USA needs to reactivate, while Europe needs to build from the ground up without any starting point - without money, energy, moral support, nothing. USA is already the winner here. And this pattern keeps repeating. 250 years and what we have is an epoch were USA saw kingdoms rise and fall, USA is the only constant there is. Treasure it. You are in a save spot despite all the dire circumstances. A blessing in disguise.
• austin-cheney 5mo ago
  The west hasn’t known how to write code for the 20 years I have been doing it, at least at major .com brands. It’s a 85/15 rule. These big companies hire hundreds, possibly thousands, of developers but most of them cannot code. Some of them struggle to write emails. About 15% of those people provide 85% of the value. Here is where it all went wrong. The goal of software, the only goal, is automation. That means eliminating human labor. The goal of these big companies is hiring, which is mostly the opposite of eliminating labor. That conflict results in people who cannot do the jobs they are hired to perform and whose goals are to retain employment in preference to automating anything. Worse still is that you can’t talk about if 85% of the people doing that work find this very subject completely hostile. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair.
• doginasuit 5mo ago
  I write all my own code and then run it by the LLM for analysis and suggestions. I'm probably not a 10x developer, but this has 10x'd my own progress. I make fewer missteps and build a deeper understanding of the problem space. I used to brace myself for a lengthy debugging session whenever testing a new section of code and now it tends to run as expected, more often than not. It may take a few years but I expect people who are using LLMs in the backseat will pull out ahead as the leaders of the future of software.
• bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  Very frustrating to have an ‘article’ so heavily AI-written take up this much space and attention. What’s really happening is that we are all forgetting how to think
• jmull 5mo ago
  I don’t see it as so dire. Software developers have been learning what they needed to know to do the job the whole time. That’s pretty much the job description. What you need to know has changed a lot recently. Like always. > The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore. That’s certainly not true. I’d take a hard look at my hiring process if it was performing this inefficiently.
• julik 5mo ago
  But - albeit briefly - a lot of value for the shareholders has been created
• epolanski 5mo ago
  Idk, if I look at major os software it looks to me like the west still holds a huge number of brilliant contributors.
• pwarner 5mo ago
  Did we forget how to make things? I mean we stopped making some things, but US manufacturing output is higher than ever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
• resters 5mo ago
  Just like we forgot how to shoe horses, drive elevators, and mill corn!
• dana321 5mo ago
  You are not using as much of your brain (solving problems, thinking etc.) so you end up in a cycle of becoming stupider and stupider the more you use ai, so eventually your prompts get worse and worse then you start asking "why is it not working as good as it was two weeks ago"
• FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  "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.?
• 01100011 5mo ago
  Is this article even worth clicking on? The headline makes it sound like yet another pearl-clutching article extrapolating some trend to the extreme in divergence with reality. AI has been an effective coding tool for, what, 2 years at most? We've collectively forgotten all of our skills in those 2 years? Really?
  • threepts 5mo ago
    It's a big strawman. "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" It passes the blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being hired. You don't need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something to get hired. It's opposite.
• Arun2009 5mo ago
  The west also "forgot" to calculate by hand. Because they invented calculators and computers. The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.
  • dkrich 5mo ago
    This raises a good point. The analogy in the article implies that eventually there will again be a need to know how to write code at a large scale and nobody will know how to do it. I don’t think the analogy holds if you think of AI as a sort of orchestration and abstraction layer which at the end of the day, all software development tools are. But I do think there’s another thing going on quietly in corporate America currently that will have major ramifications for companies that have prioritized using AI and that is a loss of technical excellence in general. I can’t put my finger on it but sometime around 2023 or so there was a noticeable falloff in technical competence at companies I work with because the higher ups went all in on a generative AI future. No longer were they investing in training new hires and having rigorous certification standards. Instead people were encouraged to use AI tools to answer questions and would regularly pass off the output to more knowledgeable workers for refinement. These people clearly had no idea whether what they were sending out was accurate or not but it looked and felt like real work. I think there will be a consolidation across the tech industry and AI will not be a differentiator and only those who are actually competent will succeed but right now AI is allowing a lot of incompetence to go undetected throughout a lot of organizations.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• chromacity 5mo ago
  I just can't get over the incredible irony of so many of these "AI is bad for you, mmkay" articles being LLM-generated. If the author sincerely believes the thesis that AI makes you vulnerable / dumb, they are either incredibly hypocritical. But more likely, they're just cynical and trying to get traffic to their website. And you're not getting back the time you spent reading this and arguing with it.
• faidit 5mo ago
  They "forgot" how to make them? The greatest superpower in the world? Isn't it obvious that "Stingers" were a giant hoax and we never went to Afghanistan? Maybe the US needs to go "back" there just to prove we can.. /s
• drzaiusx11 5mo ago
  The west did not "forget", it merely decided to participate in the "commoditization of everything" which has the exact outcomes we expect and easily observe today: skilled labor becomes unskilled labor in service to the machinery of capital.
• osigurdson 5mo ago
  The author calls it out at the end but still spends a long time creating a false equivalency. Offshoring to humans in another country is not the same as having machines do work domestically. Really, the only thing that matters is: "Maybe AI gets good enough, and the bet pays off. Maybe it doesn’t." Of course, we are all wondering if AI will be good enough in 5 to 10 years such that you don't have to look at the code (at all). If so, then very few programmers will be needed it seems. If not, its possible that roughly the same number will be needed. It seems oddly binary to me since as soon as you need to understand anything about the code, you have to effectively onboard yourself to a foreign codebase and develop the needed context.
• scotty79 5mo ago
  I think comments on such posts have bimodal distribution. On one end there are people who see the utility of AI models for programming and are generally eager to see more capable models and ways of using them. On the other there are people who see AI destroying programming and have no idea how AI could change to be a force for good. I had idea what might be the difference between the groups. I think for the latter group the code is important part of the goal. They see software as rather ends than means. Not entirely of course. And the first group considers artifacts that the software produces to be the goal. So as long as AI written software is capable of producing valuable artifact they are willing and eager to go with it. And AI does that. If the result of my code is finetuning of a neural network, I don't really care how it happened. I can benchmark it afterwards and know if the code that AI made for this purpose was good or not. I can inspect the code, investigate it, pinpoint ideas I don't like, suggest some ideas to try that I believe could give better results. I can restart, or try doing same thing few times in parallel trying different harnesses and models. All in service of the result, that is not code. If you have a program that needs to do something and are willing to try AI to write it, think foremost about how you can rephrase the problem so that the output of AI written program becomes an artifact that can be independently verified, how to turn desired behavior into an artifact to evaluate.
• booleandilemma 5mo ago
  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.
• avereveard 5mo ago
  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.
• threepts 5mo ago
  Just like how "The West" offloaded most of its manufacturing to China as people don't have sew their own shoes. I see this as a sign of increase in productivity, the important software will still have a human centered development team, but we don't need another dev team on say, tinder for dogs.
• culanuchachamim 5mo ago
  Well, I think it's a good sign that society forgot how to make weapons. The sad thing is that they need to re-learn again.
• threepts 5mo ago
  "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.
  • techblueberry 5mo ago
    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.
    • threepts 5mo ago
      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).
• nobodyandproud 5mo ago
  Leadership and management problem, exacerbated by the Chicago school. Good, knowledgable employees are not fungible. The in-house culture that built the engineering takes an entire generation to build. The winner-take-all MBA class of the 1980s to the 2000s and the congressional leadership developed during this era are squarely at fault and their policies need to be replaced.
• tim333 5mo ago
  The thrust of the argument seems the wrong way around. It's roughly: - Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code. In reality if they'd used AI the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file. The article seems AI written with punch sentances and mixed up logic.
• tim333 5mo ago
  The thrust of the argument seems the wrong way around. It's roughly: - Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code. In reality if they'd used AI, the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file. The article seems AI written with punchy sentences and mixed up logic.
• htunnicliff 5mo ago
  > I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. > > In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  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.
  • conqrr 5mo ago
    License makes a lot of sense. Many engineering fields have licenses. Needs to be made mandatory. Tech rapidly evolves which was an excuse. Well, a lot has stabilized now in terms of technologies.
  • auggierose 5mo ago
    > 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. That presumes that they still build frameworks, libraries and tools with technical manuals worth reading.
• outloudvi 5mo ago
  The article speaks well but the situation for coding is more severe. Shells are not needed once they are not in needed. Code does not: customer need is always there. Before forgotting how to code, The West will first get round up by their own Monsanto, voluntarily.
• crusty 5mo ago
  I feel sad that evening I read now has to pass through my "is this LLM slop?" filter, and if it gets caught, the content loses focus and the worthless puzzle of truth takes over. So there was this: "I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. While Raytheon was struggling to restart production from forty-year-old blueprints, the US was shipping thousands of Stingers to Ukraine. RTX CEO Greg Hayes: ten months of war burned through thirteen years’ worth of Stinger production. I’ve seen this pattern before. It’s happening in my industry right now." The filter flashed the warning on the telltale signs and I stopped reading. Now I've got the puzzle I don't want to do. Did someone trying to argue against "AI assisted" coding use an LLM to author that argument? But this is HN, I can also just move on to the next story.
• andai 5mo ago
  Basically, we forgot the human neural nets must also be trained.
• diogenescynic 5mo ago
  We've forgotten how to do most basic things. Roads are paved terribly, food quality is equally gross, our colleges are diploma mills, homes are built like crap... Everything has steadily been going in the wrong direction my entire life. It feels like we're almost in a dark age where basic skills from a generation ago are being forgotten.
• RataNova 5mo ago
  The worrying scenario is not that AI writes code. It's that companies stop creating the people who can tell whether the code is any good.
  • therealdrag0 5mo ago
    Do you think judging code quality can’t be automated?
    • RataNova 5mo ago
      The risk is that if companies stop training humans to make those calls, the automated judge becomes unquestionable rather than useful
• linsomniac 5mo ago
  This post uses the war machine to demonstrate AI=bad. I'm far removed from the conflict in Ukraine, but from the reporting it seems like they are making extremely good use of well understood, inexpensive technologies like drones with mundane munitions. I'm sure Stinger missiles have their place in the battlefield there, but a $120K stinger doesn't seem like a very good countermeasure against a few thousand dollar drone. So, counterpoint: We also need to understand how to embrace the changing face of software.
• VikRubenfeld 5mo ago
  These LLMs are great for now, but they have to go by their training materials. And if people stop creating new ways to code, new languages, new coding patterns, etc, then the code LLMs produce will be stuck in 2026 forever.
  • linhns 5mo ago
    Someone will use LLMs to create new languages, from which new patterns will arise.
• j45 5mo ago
  One thing you can't really rule out American ingenuity is deciding to do something. What America did with developing Shale Oil to become viable, so quickly is one example.
• komali2 5mo ago
  If it's any consolation, this isn't unique to "the West," AI programming has completely taken over in the PRC as well.
• b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
  At least here in America, we've been offshoring coding since at least the late 90s. Often, that code isn't so great (this is not an indictment of foreign workers in general but these off-shore operations are not always on the up-and-up). And just like offshoring dev work, we may see the rebound effect when there's all kinds of poorly written LLM outputs in production and companies are running around trying to re-hire high quality devs to fix all these fires that they themselves started.
  • linhns 5mo ago
    And when foreigners reach some levels of decent expertise, their jobs are offshored to cheaper nations again.
• Rahil_Jain 5mo ago
  [dead]
• phillipcarter 5mo ago
  Just a small datapoint, but: > Salesforce said it won’t hire more software engineers in 2025. Some headline somewhere reported this, but Salesforce plenty of engineers (in the US at least) in 2025. One of them is a junior engineer on one of my scrum teams.
• mtzaldo 5mo ago
  This is a great article, make sure take a moment to read it and digest it.
  • windowshopping 5mo ago
    Literally written by AI
• recvonline 5mo ago
  Funny enough that this article is written with AI.
• slibhb 5mo ago
  Yes, and textile factories involved people "forgetting" how to weave. Whitehead: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" It remains to be seen whether this implies some kind of constraint on human progress. I doubt it.
  • rini17 5mo ago
    If we suddenly needed huge amounts of textile or clothing, we would run into same issues. This is not about progress as such.
  • lowsong 5mo ago
    We're not talking about replacing "writing code", we're talking about replacing your ability to think about the problems critically at all.
    • slibhb 5mo ago
      People said the exact same thing about computers.
      • lowsong 5mo ago
        So? The research on AI is showing again and again that people that use AI are losing their skills not just in the specific task but more generally. This isn't a "change of skills" it's a fundamental reduction in the skills of knowledge workers.
• frogperson 5mo ago
  There is no incentive to work hard for most organizations. They will take credit for all your work and maybe give you a $1000 bonus at the end of the year, if they havent laid you off by that time.
  • d3Xt3r 5mo ago
    You guys get bonuses?! I've been working for 15+ years (various organisations) and have never once seen a year-end bonus, or even heard of anyone getting one here.
• sutterd 5mo ago
  I’m working on a side project and AI is writing all the code. The code it produces is not good, and this comes from someone who has experience producing bad code. One thing I’m worried about is places like GitHub being full of AI code, which leads to AI being trained on AI code. It seems like this will lead to a downward spiral.
• gamblor956 5mo ago
  America still makes a ton of stuff. California is still one of the leading manufacturing locations in the world. California isn't #1 in any industry (outside of aerospace) but is in the top 10 for pretty much everything else (in the U.S.). It's been the world's #4-6 economy for the past two decades.
• p0w3n3d 5mo ago
  This Is exactly how civilizations die out. When AI was incoming I wrote similar predictions. This WILL happen, sooner or later. People will stop understanding what programming is. What is hard drive. Why storing files in cloud is not the same as having them on your HDD. And similar things
  • notepad0x90 5mo ago
    what other civilizations died out this way?
    • willhslade 5mo ago
      The bronze age collapse? The end of Rome?
      • notepad0x90 5mo ago
        I thought the cause of the bronze age collapse wasn't known (it wasn't a single civilization either), and the end of Rome, whichever "end" you ascribe to isn't caused by failure to manage or adapt to new technology. they weren't out-teched by anyone, or forgot how to do some technical work.
        • p0w3n3d 5mo ago
          look at the roman roads and compare them to the contemporary ones. Those ancient roads are superior in some aspects (unbreaking, not filling with water etc), and still people try to find out how were they made. Having that said, I agree with you: the forgetting of the technology was not a direct reason of the fall, it was a feature though... I'm from Poland, and I have comparison with my colleagues from east. They can fix things we've already forgot how to fix in Poland. My friend fixed a broken Sony TV with a microscope and a soldering gun. I'd pay just 1000$ for the new TV, as he got advised in the official repair store, but since he was Russian, he fixed it by himself.
• bakugo 5mo ago
  The West apparently also forgot how to write articles without AI.
• rbren 5mo ago
  Forgetting how to code is not a bad thing. Forgetting how to make software is.
• notepad0x90 5mo ago
  Opposite take here: the west is resisting AI too much, and not implementing guardrails to protect the public from human-hostile AI usage. I don't predict that will be its downfall (I think other factors have already started the process), but it will lead to losing a competitive edge over China and the rest of the world. Right now, silicon dominance is what's keeping silicon valley afloat. that and the power of the American consumer base. The world is having to adapt to not relying on the US for consumption due to tariffs among other things. Not only that, attempts to curb competition from China by restricting chip exports, and imports of their tech (I don't disagree in principle with either) has led them to be more self-reliant and invest more on domestic R&D. All this to say, there is no way around winning, and the fact of the competition is also real. You can't deny the competitive advantage proper use of LLMs brings. It's also hard to deny the destructive power of LLMs to societies. In China, companies are heavily regulated by the state. This means being competitive against the west is a state matter, it also means harming citizens is somewhat tolerated if the economic benefit to the whole country is good, but companies chasing their own profit at the expense of the public good isn't tolerated. I don't agree with their way of doing things, but the only thing limiting their victory over the west is their hesitation and intolerance to all things outside of the SE-Asian sphere of influence. But then again, the anti-migration trend of the US also removes that slight technical advantage the US always held. There are many problems that can't be solved by LLMs, and expecting developers' value to be the number of lines they type is silly. It doesn't matter so much if you use LLMs or don't use them, what matters is results. Westerners attitude in general is to resist LLMs. This is partly a result of (in my opinion), not realizing that there is non-western competition. It is absolutely possible to use LLMs to ship high-quality, performant and secure code, you just don't take the dumb approach of letting LLMs do everything and a human "reviews it"; how exactly depends on each development team and company. Keep in mind, that for decades outsourcing developers offshore -- where usually sub-par code is tolerated because of lower cost to ship -- has been a prevalent trend. If companies can't get Western devs to learn to use LLMs, then they can just ship it offshore to companies that do use it. That didn't lead to the west forgetting to code, and LLMs won't either. What will hopefully happen is you'll get less developers learning to code, which means the developers that do the work, will get paid better (it's been on the downturn) so long as they learn to sue LLMs. What people are having a hard time coping with, is the expectation of needing armies of developers to get things done being an antiquated concept. Computers, and then the internet have done this to many industries. You used to have lots of travel agents in the past, you still do, but very few. The bigger issue is refusal to learn from history. Concepts like capitalism, communism, market economy, centrally planned economy, etc.. are like half a century out of date. There was no "capitalism" 200 years ago (not in so many words at least). Economists and politicians aren't catching up to changes in technology. Historically, adapting to these changes has been brutal. I won't claim to predict what will happen, but one way or the other, LLMs won't go away in response to resistance from western workers, similar to how other changes in tech didn't go away like that. Economies will have to adapt or get decimated until they do. In the mean time, there is ample opportunity for the dominance of the west to fade within our lifetime, should that opportunity be taken advantage of by the competition. If China starts being less dependent on local companies, and starts importing a lot more, they can displace US and EU consumption needs, and perhaps even force the west to be producers for their domestic demand. unregulated western companies (from Coca cola to Disney!) have been trying to achieve just that, because of the large earning potential in China. But again, China could take advantage of all that, they could have more influence over the west, but they're too inward thinking. They're so afraid of relying on a hostile west, they're preventing the west from becoming reliant on them completely. But this new image of an ineffective and declining US/West, and perhaps some success over Taiwan, and establishing a solid non-western global trade economy can give them that extra confidence?
• pelasaco 5mo ago
  i will never forget to program in ruby. neither c. The question is how usable it will be in the next years. I would love to be able to only code ruby forever. Everywhere.
• sminchev 5mo ago
  This is like saying: nobody can do woodworking with with manual tools anymore these days, because there are machines since 30 years that do woodworking. There will be always a room for good developers.
  • d3Xt3r 5mo ago
    Yes, but it's very hard to find quality handmade furniture these days, or even capable carpenters for that matter. I visited a few older relatives recently and realised most of them have really well made 50+ yr old pieces of furniture with detailed, intricate design - which you can't get these days. And unfortunately the same trend is already being seen in code - just look at the vast amount of utterly rubbish apps going around. Even popular apps like BitWarden are being coded in Javascript and built with Electron, and somehow people think that's acceptable. I was shocked to find out recently that even bitwarden-cli was also coded in Javascript. And now AI has just compounded the problem exponentially. Just look at the state of Windows 11 for instance, which I'm forced to use at work. Thankfully, Linux and macOS are faring a bit better, but for how long? Sure, good developers may always exist, but I'm afraid their work will get drowned in a sea of garbage - and we're forced to swim in it.
    • sminchev 5mo ago
      I fully agree with the garbage. It is extremely difficult to release a product these days. Everybody are trying to vibecode something, without any knowledge of basic software development, validation, reviews, specifications. Even if there is something good, and written with focus on the details, it just can't popup and be seen, because the overproduction of software.
• Brian_K_White 5mo ago
  It's the trusting trust problem cubed or worse.
• DicIfTEx 5mo ago
  I can't recommend this 2019 talk about software engineering by Jonathan Blow, entitled ”Preventing the Collapse of Civilization”, enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
• peter_d_sherman 5mo ago
  >"Rebuilding Takes Years. Always. [...] Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was. [...] Now map that onto software. A junior developer needs three to five years to become a competent mid-level engineer. Five to eight years to become senior. Ten or more to become a principal or architect. That timeline can’t be compressed by throwing money at it. It can’t be compressed by AI either." Well said!
• atlasagentsuite 5mo ago
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• BLACKCRAB 5mo ago
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• h14h 5mo ago
  A lack of tool & die isn't the West "forgetting how to make things" so much as it is the West choosing not to make the things that make things. To the extent that AI is analogous to automation in manufacturing, and "writing code" to working on an assembly line, it's hard to argue the West is any thing other than a global leader in "software tool & die", so to speak.
• Noekodomo 5mo ago
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• manjuc 5mo ago
  Wrote something about this same dynamic as a fable a few weeks ago. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/the-pond-of-golden-light/ https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/the-pond-of-golden-...