alt Hacker NewsThe West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
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> 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Hope we dont forget humanity one day!
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.
I wish this article wasn’t AI slop. It wasn’t X, it was Y.
Just look how MS try to get rid of
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The defense industry thought peace would last forever, too.
Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.
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.
> 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!
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.
exactly, as they say everyone has to learn to code.
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
> 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_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.
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.
>Denis Stetskov
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Putin's propagandist, or just useful idiot.
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> 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).
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.
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
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.
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/
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_USM...
Is this written by a real person though?