This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is fallout of the broader problem of ultra-extreme centralization and shortsightedness in pursuit of line go up. We eagerly run into a climate catastrophe for the same underlying reason. It's not a matter of understanding the problem, but a matter of willingness to solve it.
Collectively, we are not willing to solve problems that might require a measure of compromise today.
What you correctly observe as shortsightedness and unwilligness to make compromise are side effects created by our economic system. Competition for profit and capital literally creates the short horizons. If you don't make the money for me this quarter, I'll move my capital to your competitor who would. Your stock price falls and with it further falls the ability to raise capital to fund profit generating ventures and products. As a board and CEO you know that so you set appropriate quarterly profit targets and your exec layer cascades those down to concrete measures down to the junior devs. If your competitor introduces monthly profit targets and executes them consistently, you'd have to match as capital us going to start moving towards your competitor because your quartetly plans would look risky in comparison. Worse, when I say competitor, that's any firm producing profit, not a firm in your product market. Basically any firm that takes capital from capital markets is in competition with you for capital.
My point being it's not a culture or individual (group) behaviour thing, it's structural systemic drive that can only be solved by structural systemic changes. It's not a new occurrence either. It's been moving in this direction for decades, it's just gotten painfully obvious for most lately.
I’m sorry but I’m not buying it. We’ve been sitting on top of abstractions for years.
What, you think the average engineer knows assembly? You think they know how to design gates? You think the gate designers know how to make lithography work?
How do you build a new factory, of anything? By using machines that have been built other factories! We’ve got a highly redundant, interwoven mesh of things that rely on others things to be made. There is no “starting point” that you can trace today - all is done with something else that’s also complex.
Ignoring rapid deskilling being forced on us by the tech sector is naive at best. This is not like the things you tried to compare it to.
It's about as naive as insisting man-made climate change is no big deal because climate change has always been around.
You propose we do what exactly with AI?
And I’m not ignoring “rapid deskilling”. I’m specifically arguing against the very specific point that TFA made that “we will forget how to code”. That’s clearly not what will happen.
Some people today still know assembler. Some people still how to design CPUs. Some still know lithography. Not as many as before, because we just don’t have the need.
I marvel at the number of engineers who don’t think about memory allocations at all. But it’s ok - they probably don’t need to, for the task they’re solving.
You propose we do what exactly with AI?
I'm not proposing anything. That's a whole different conversation. I'm not proposing ways to fix climate change either. Doesn't mean they aren't bad.
Corporate-backed vibecode tools want coders to cease thinking about their own code, which is different from software engineers not being able to build hardware. Apples and oranges.
Not as many as before, because we just don’t have the need.
The point was that we don't know what we're going to need in 10 years but we can see that we're deskilling what we have with no guarantee that AI will fill the gap.
That means if AI doesn't neatly fill that gap in 10 years, because it measurably does not now, we've lost the institutional knowledge and that can take a long time to recover from.
The net result is that we're replacing competence with a thing that is measurably incompetent and while the odd individual company may benefit, the net result is that we're collectively moving backwards with the hype-fueled hope that something will save us in the future.
It may be just another abstraction layer, but it could just as easily be a dead end. We won't know until the future, but we're burning the capability today.
I'm optimistic about AI, but this is a huge risk to take as a country and the people making that decision are ones that stand to benefit today regardless of the outcome to us all in the future.
If only we has a functioning political system to grapple with this issue... Maybe the EU will manage better.
(Until then I'll learn a bit of German and Mandarin.)
because we just don't have the need
The market isn't perfect at matching needs and abilities. We famously have a shortage of COBOL programmers, which is crazy given how much of our infrastructure still depends on it. A Nobel prize winner predicted that radiogists would be obsolete eight years ago, and we've been suffering a shortage ever since because people believed him and stopped studying it.
The most interesting argument I've heard is that vibe coding is to coding, what baby formula was to breastfeeding. When formula was introduced, it took only one generation for us to lose a lot of the generational wisdom and cultural infrastructure surrounding nursing.
We haven't completely forgotten COBOL, or radiology, or breastfeeding, and technically speaking, we won't completely forget coding, either. But we might forget enough that it becomes a huge problem when we need to remember.
