The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code
(techtrenches.dev)
from HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to programming@programming.dev on 27 Apr 06:13
https://feddit.org/post/29065690
from HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to programming@programming.dev on 27 Apr 06:13
https://feddit.org/post/29065690
#programming
threaded - newest
Very interesting read, thanks for sharing.
Author missed one aspect. Even if AI is one day reliable, it’ll most likely be owned by a few companies. What if those companies decide to cut you off?
Open source models ? huggingface.co + lmstudio.ai
Look at the state of software today. Every corporation and government are blindly sticking with Microsoft, Google or similar. Even though there are some ideas to move away and embrace OSS, I doubt it will happen with governments, even less with corps. I foresee something similar in future with AI.
Sure but it’s mostly been that way for awhile. The players on the board shift, but it’s almost always Java, or Microsoft’s flavor of the decade or classic C or objective c or switch or whatever. Are you arguing that big tech will lock down their documentation on APIs and proprietary language behind their own AIs so that developers are focred to “vibe code” them through AI interaction only, and open source models will be unable to train on them?
Are you sure?
rfi.fr/…/20260417-france-to-remove-windows-from-g…
tuta.com/…/countries-ditching-microsoft-choosing-…
It does not take much for things to change, you might like this:
<img alt="" src="https://files.ikt.id.au/y93065.png">
youtu.be/o1R6Aq19A6Y?t=1281
For which you still need massive amounts of memory and compute to run reliably. That, and the fact that chatbots and agents nowadays rely on all sorts of proprietary customizations, outside of the realm of LLMs, to perform certain tasks.
The gap will take decades to close, if it ever does.
2026’s average gaming PC is massive amounts of memory and compute apparently
lol there are plenty of open source models in the top 100 with multiple SOTA models released in the last few months alone
There’s also smaller LLM’s being made like eurollm.io which excel in their own ways
This conversation reminds of me of the old Linux vs Windows conversations I had 20 years ago, linux will die, it’s not as good as Windows, it will never catch up etc yet here I am still using Ubuntu happily :)
So how would I create such an “Open Source” model? They don’t share the data used to create them do they? Let’s not even get started on how much computing power I would need to train one of those things. These selfhosted models solve nothing except some data privacy issues. Sure you no longer send all your code to a shady AI company but you are still 100% dependent on them sharing their models.
It’s really sad state programmers (especially juniors) are in right now, I guess it will get worse over time. I had a meeting with recruiters in my university, many of em just said to me send email and useless stuff that don’t go anywhere but couple of em said they’re don’t even hire developers anymore and make AI do the entire job (I went on one of their websites and it didn’t work :)). Also hackathons are really in bad state, most of em advertise ai and vibe coding, idk how anyone can learn from hackathons in this state they are in
I note that even job offers are written by AI. Every advertisement for, say, embedded developers, seems to use the same generic keywords and interfaces, sprinkled in with words that sound good (like “platform thinking”) but just don’t make sense.
Software engineering is comparable to architecture; if you give a rookie professional tooling, they can maybe build a safe shack or tree house. But you wouldn’t want to visit a skyscraper they’ve built.
Except that architecture has safety codes written in blood. And AI is only good in building lots of walls.
In a few years, corpos will be desperate for programmers. Their codebases will be in shambles and the frontier models (that can barely make anything out of that mess) will not be so heavily subsidized anymore. (Or permanently offline.)
Interesting analogy. The future is hard to predict. Hopefully things turn out better than this prediction.