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

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.

  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.

> 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."

> 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).

>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?

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

"the west" ?

You mean the world?

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

How do you become a senior engineer if no one hires you as a junior anymore.

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.

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.

Hope we dont forget humanity one day!

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.

Nobody stops anyone from learning anything. You move up the value chain. If using animal carts was good enough, you would not have moved to motor vehicles and then to high speed trains or jet engines. If AI made things easier, it means its time to move up the chain. Either way, like it or not, it is going to happen.

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

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.

Reminds me of this post:

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

Yes. Just like globalization created companies like TSMC, AI will do the same with software engineers that don't rely on LLM code generators be cause they can do it cheaply and sustainably.

Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, I 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.

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.

Oh no this is terrible news.

All those computers will sit there useless because no-one knows how to program them any more.

I guess the computer revolution has come to an end because we forgot how to code. Very sad.