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

Meirambek_VIDI

Do you think this is a tooling problem or more about incentives and how engineers are trained now?

tjwebbnorfolk

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.

bsder

> 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."

shevy-java

> 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).

whycombinetor

>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?

wg0

>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.

rvz

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

> 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.

whatever1

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.

jdw64

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.

lava_pidgeon

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

ktallett

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.

skybrian

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.

BrenBarn

> 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

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.

locallost

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.

heinternets

When you've run out of ideas just portray "the west" as some monolithic portrait in some decline-porn fan fiction as clickbait.

trhway

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

> 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.

allending

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.