The West apparently also forgot how to write articles without AI.

America still makes a ton of stuff. California is still one of the leading manufacturing locations in the world. California isn't #1 in any industry (outside of aerospace) but is in the top 10 for pretty much everything else (in the U.S.). It's been the world's #4-6 economy for the past two decades.

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 Seems like code quality is outdated and uninteresting all of a sudden.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.

Hope we dont forget humanity one day!

Is this article even worth clicking on? The headline makes it sound like yet another pearl-clutching article extrapolating some trend to the extreme in divergence with reality.

AI has been an effective coding tool for, what, 2 years at most? We've collectively forgotten all of our skills in those 2 years? Really?

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.

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.

Did we forget how to make things? I mean we stopped making some things, but US manufacturing output is higher than ever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

If it's any consolation, this isn't unique to "the West," AI programming has completely taken over in the PRC as well.

One thing you can't really rule out American ingenuity is deciding to do something.

What America did with developing Shale Oil to become viable, so quickly is one example.