Reminds me of this post:

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

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

First of all this is clearly AI-assist writing (being charitable here).

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.

The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation.

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.

I wonder if the real problem is short-term thinking in culture and incentivised by markets. By optimising next quarter's profits over investing in long-term growth and capability, things like this happen.

The Fogbank example is the most chilling part. It's not just that they lost the people — they lost the ability to know what they didn't know. Nobody could even write down what was missing because the knowledge was never formalized in the first place.

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.

But - albeit briefly - a lot of value for the shareholders has been created

This is why a comprehensive computer science degree is necessary. Seeing and working only with the trees leads to destroying some forests, eventually.

I don’t know. Partly true. I came to web development, when low level things solved: frameworks, ORMs, OSs, databases. I don’t know sql nor c++ well. But I can create a system, a value based on the abstractions. Everyone told me: Ruslan, you don’t know SQL, what a shame! Well I do not have problems and did not have about it.

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.