Generational knowledge loss is often either discarded as irrelevant, illusory or misunderstood.
It is not a new phenomenon and can easily be traced back to antiquity.
Because _reality has a surprising amount of details_ the entire humanity knowledge at any given time is living in our memories, not written, and even if we had the time and will to try and formalize it, language is not complete enough and we lack the ability to fully introspect what we know.
You can ask a professional Tennis or Chess player to formalize his expert knowledge and it may contains some useful insights, but far from enough to replicate his skills.
So learning is re-discovering many things, a Sysphean task, and the majority is lost, we managed to keep just enough thanks to the invention of writing and books to reach a kind of slow escape velocity.
Because technology is constantly evolving, what is lost is not systematically relevant, like writing poetry in ancient Greek.
But there is the risk of losing too much, too quickly. As a veteran of the videogame industry I can attest that many mistakes that are made today were solved before, but the good designs and principles were largely lost.
Newcomers are not inherently less smart than their parents, quite often they just don't learn because the incentives changed.
I am not entirely convinced the emergence of "vibe coding" and other assistants will be a net gain.
The core problem is the quixotic quest for efficiency. Right now I'll blame JIRA because that's the latest incarnation of this beast, but it's the mindset behind thinking that's a good idea in the first place. As long as I've been working I've been under artificial, meaningless time constraints that seem to only exist to catch cheaters, but that actually serve to make experimentation impossible.
Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.
Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....
Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn.
There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer, musician, or any other the other interest fields there are out there.
We as a society have to look at things like manually drawing as hobbies you can learn if you want that should be put in a book just in case someone wants - but otherwise not taught. There is nothing wrong with what you knew how to do, but there are more important things to teach kids and we need them to move on to the real world not learning everything.
Try enjoying reading for purposes other than spending as few brain tokens as possible to acquire maximum info. It takes time to understand another persons perspective. Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t be as good a movie if you watched the 30-second TL;DR.
To each their own, I found it tedious and annoying. I quit reading maybe 1/4 of the way in. By then already I had loud alarms going off that I need to read the comments because I'm sure many of the points are easy for a real expert to debunk - too much feels off.
Well I found the text to be obviously inflated with AI, becoming much more verbose than necessary, even if syntactically, grammatically and structurally it was correct.
I would write that prose. It’s very powerful to use small sentences with small words to drive a point home. Like when you are in some drawn out argument about th future with your spouse and your child comes in the room. She says quietly, “please stop fighting I’m hungry”. How do you argue with that? You can’t, it’s just true.
I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software.
We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore.
From day one I had the expectation that my knowledge would become obsolete and that I needed to keep learning. That new tools will constantly replace me, my knowhow for doing things manually, and that I will need embrace and learn how to take advantage of new levels of automations.
Frankly my experience of AI hasn’t been much different from when React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust came in for instance, some random examples. You just keep learning and embracing the new technologies. Yes they automate some of what you were good at doing and that part of you is no longer needed, that’s the whole point.
I think we will be totally fine as software engineers, not because we are not being replaced, but because replacing ourselves and adapting to it is the core of what we do!
>> The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software
These abstractions are understandable and predictable. There is no mental model for the current LLMs(in entirety, even though the parts are known), the output might as well come from a genie.
That's not true. The mental model is a distribution over completions. Weird you say LLMs are like genies, genies being magical beings that can accomplish anything.
React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust were deterministic programming languages; they did exactly what the developer specified.
With Claude Code, they are semi-independent non-deterministic agents; they are more like consultants that the developer manages. The fact that they tend to generate verbose code which overwhelms the developer's ability to review is also troubling.
Generational knowledge loss is often either discarded as irrelevant, illusory or misunderstood.
It is not a new phenomenon and can easily be traced back to antiquity.
Because _reality has a surprising amount of details_ the entire humanity knowledge at any given time is living in our memories, not written, and even if we had the time and will to try and formalize it, language is not complete enough and we lack the ability to fully introspect what we know.
You can ask a professional Tennis or Chess player to formalize his expert knowledge and it may contains some useful insights, but far from enough to replicate his skills.
So learning is re-discovering many things, a Sysphean task, and the majority is lost, we managed to keep just enough thanks to the invention of writing and books to reach a kind of slow escape velocity.
Because technology is constantly evolving, what is lost is not systematically relevant, like writing poetry in ancient Greek.
But there is the risk of losing too much, too quickly. As a veteran of the videogame industry I can attest that many mistakes that are made today were solved before, but the good designs and principles were largely lost.
Newcomers are not inherently less smart than their parents, quite often they just don't learn because the incentives changed.
I am not entirely convinced the emergence of "vibe coding" and other assistants will be a net gain.
The core problem is the quixotic quest for efficiency. Right now I'll blame JIRA because that's the latest incarnation of this beast, but it's the mindset behind thinking that's a good idea in the first place. As long as I've been working I've been under artificial, meaningless time constraints that seem to only exist to catch cheaters, but that actually serve to make experimentation impossible.
Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.
Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....
Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn.
There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer, musician, or any other the other interest fields there are out there.
We as a society have to look at things like manually drawing as hobbies you can learn if you want that should be put in a book just in case someone wants - but otherwise not taught. There is nothing wrong with what you knew how to do, but there are more important things to teach kids and we need them to move on to the real world not learning everything.
Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing!
Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.
You're wrong.
I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.
I agree, but I think the same logic could have been applied to the structure of the article. It could have all been 2 paragraphs.
Try enjoying reading for purposes other than spending as few brain tokens as possible to acquire maximum info. It takes time to understand another persons perspective. Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t be as good a movie if you watched the 30-second TL;DR.
I found it compelling throughout
To each their own, I found it tedious and annoying. I quit reading maybe 1/4 of the way in. By then already I had loud alarms going off that I need to read the comments because I'm sure many of the points are easy for a real expert to debunk - too much feels off.
Well I found the text to be obviously inflated with AI, becoming much more verbose than necessary, even if syntactically, grammatically and structurally it was correct.
> He wasn’t following a plan. He was just that kind of person.
Because the article is AI slop, plain and simple.
This one definitely does not feel like AI to me. I could be wrong. But it has too much warmth.
I would write that prose. It’s very powerful to use small sentences with small words to drive a point home. Like when you are in some drawn out argument about th future with your spouse and your child comes in the room. She says quietly, “please stop fighting I’m hungry”. How do you argue with that? You can’t, it’s just true.
Am I AI slop?
How many times would you use that structure in a single article?
> Am I AI slop?
This is the internet, you could be a dog for all anybody cares. If you write like AI though...
I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software.
We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore.
From day one I had the expectation that my knowledge would become obsolete and that I needed to keep learning. That new tools will constantly replace me, my knowhow for doing things manually, and that I will need embrace and learn how to take advantage of new levels of automations.
Frankly my experience of AI hasn’t been much different from when React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust came in for instance, some random examples. You just keep learning and embracing the new technologies. Yes they automate some of what you were good at doing and that part of you is no longer needed, that’s the whole point.
I think we will be totally fine as software engineers, not because we are not being replaced, but because replacing ourselves and adapting to it is the core of what we do!
>> The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software
These abstractions are understandable and predictable. There is no mental model for the current LLMs(in entirety, even though the parts are known), the output might as well come from a genie.
That's not true. The mental model is a distribution over completions. Weird you say LLMs are like genies, genies being magical beings that can accomplish anything.
React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust were deterministic programming languages; they did exactly what the developer specified.
With Claude Code, they are semi-independent non-deterministic agents; they are more like consultants that the developer manages. The fact that they tend to generate verbose code which overwhelms the developer's ability to review is also troubling.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sp-287.pdf sent back an error.
Error code: 404 Not Found
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...
Gptzero and Pangram both say this article was AI-generated. Seems we've forgotten how to do other things as well.
>“Is this the simplest solution?” Silence. That’s not an aerospace problem. That’s the pattern.
lmao
We sacrificed everything at the altar of shareholder value. What we received is a dystopian hellscape.
The present is the best time to be alive for any human in history.
The SLS is a real debacle compared to Saturn V