alt Hacker NewsMany people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)
I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so for a modern mill-made scarf.
Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.
Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most of the traditions and techniques are lost.
Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector.
Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't know where we will net out on software, and I do think the complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified. They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not enough.
I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were 10 years ago.
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only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre.
Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.
Software engineers are anything but Luddites.
This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen,
First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable).
Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom company in US and employees with "software engineer" title were doing mechanical tasks following some scripts, like daily system reload - run the script, verify status, open a ticket for a sub-contractor if anything is wrong, support the contractor via the ticket system until it's resolved. To be fair, two of my close family members work in FAANG and say COVID over-hire created a similar landscape there too.
My point is, creating CRUD internal tools was not an engineering to begin with, it was a craft, matching most craftsmen features such as small-scale, bespoke work, hands-on practice, tacit knowledge, apprenticeship-like learning (even if it's SO or tutorial), iterative refinement, tool mastery, adaptation during build.
I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization:
A set of clothing used to cost a month's wages. Yearning for the pre-industrialised era is an unintended pean to aristocracy, whitewashed by fiction and movies to be clean and virtuous.
At the moment, a single line of production code costs hundreds of dollars. I'm not talking about the bedrock of technology, like compilers, mysql, the Linux kernel, which represent hundreds of billions of value. I'm talking about the shitty code that powers Salesforce and ERP integration, Drupal modules, intranet customisation, insurance company call centre agent policy workflows, the thrice cursed apps that ship with cheap Chinese android phones, the putrid code to analyse our shopping loyalty card purchases and turn it into business insights.
All that code is shit, and it costs a fortune. Meanwhile regular people have no code. Even I run my life on almost no code, I have to use SaaS (like Gmail and Docs). If I want something like a financial analysis to be understood by my family I don't code it in python, I use Excel. I use whatever automation comes in my car. But once simple code becomes a process of thinking about what you want rather than knowing esoterica like calling conventions, allocation lifetimes etc, then we have made custom software accessible to billions of people, people who are clever and industrious.
So stay in your cathedral and illuminate your manuscript if you like, there is a need for excellent code, and tooling like Lean that can define what correct means, but let the people eat.
I found that it normally takes one prompt early-on to go from 'vibe-coded spaghetti' to something having a decent architecture.
I love this comment. Thank you for your provocative first sentence, esoteric historical anecdote, and nuanced take. Goddamn Hacker News rules.
> Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.
This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There’s nothing admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be passed down in person.
I don’t see this as the Luddites being right at all because they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to document anything and only passed it down from person to person we wouldn’t be speaking in awe and wonder, we’d be rightly criticizing their terrible decision making.
That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we got something similar.
But you missed the reason why we wouldn’t want to: An ultra-thin scarf isn’t going to work as well as a thicker one for keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a fundamentally inferior product. It’s interesting to see as a museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but not so much as a practical garment.
A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.
I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.
A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.
Before mass production, the women of the household would be forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of their other work, making fabric.
Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day in the fields.
Never again.
> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)
Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.
You're right. Automation often trades quality for speed and quantity.
The difference between automating the creation of software and automating the creation of physical products is that software is everywhere. It is relied on for most tools and processes that keep our civilization alive. Cutting corners on that front, and deciding to entrust our collective future to tech bros and VC firms fiending for their next payout, seems like an incredibly dumb and risky proposition.
>the Luddites were right
The Luddites were right in the sense that the social order had changed in a negative way. In a careless way.
In the same way that we look at America now that has effectively put a plutocracy in absolute control of the country, at the same time that there is going to be a massive devaluing of labour. Elon Musk likes to talk about the coming golden age of automation, but I hope Americans realize that unless they happen to be a billionaire, they will enjoy zero fruits of that advance. Quite contrary, plump yourself up to be Soylent Green because it turns out that giving a bunch of psychopaths/sociopaths absolute control of government isn't good for the average person.
>One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down
Then people will choose the better quality items and it will be easy for them to compete? Right?
luddites were right
I get there are many things happening today that are frustrating or moving some element of human life in negative or ambiguous directions, but we really have to keep perspective on these things.
Nearly every problem today is a problem with a solution.
The feelings of panic we have that things are going wrong are useful signals to help guide and motivate us to implement those solutions, but we really must avoid letting the doomerism dominate. Just because we hear constant negative news doesn't mean things are lost. Doesn't even mean things are bad.
It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.
This is what it looks like for progress to not be monotonically increasing.
Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses.
And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.