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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

>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?

Link: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf

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.

What’s really happening is that we are all forgetting how to think

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.

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.

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.

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...

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".

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.

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.

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.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

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.

You mean the world?

Deepseek was being glazed here, Im sure chinese programmers use it like CC

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.

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.

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.

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.

It doesn’t seem much like defense industry problems.

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

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.

I'm going to steal that one and add it to Stross': "Efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience."

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881805

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.

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.

Same thing that happened to the unfortunate Dr. Jekyll!

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.

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.

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.

？

Putin's propagandist, or just useful idiot.

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).

People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.