- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
the luddites had a point… in the moment… kinda… but i think have largely been pretty conclusively proven wrong… clothing is now plentiful, and i doubt anyone would want to go back to paying taylors to make all their clothes for 10x more, even if the clothing would be much higher quality, which i even doubt: clothing quality doesn’t come down to artisan skill any more, it comes down to choices you make, and an artisan can still make cost cutting decisions on fabric, construction, etc
It’s the sweatshops, man. The sweatshops suck. I would absolutely rather have one set of tailored clothes, vs. endless variety from sweatshops where Bangladeshi children work for pennies and hour.
Have you seen (well, read about) 19th century working class living conditions in Britain? The main issue was always working conditions, and they were 100% right about that. And it’s not an either/or, you can absolutely do industrialization without 16 hour shifts at poverty wages but that’s clearly not what the plant owners were going to do. The offer was shit, and they turned it the fuck down.
So…have you not heard the damage fast fashion did to the planet? Sure, it make making cloth quicker and cheaper and widely available, but in the end it’s a huge source of chemical waste, landfill waste, and microplastic. Because clothing are so much cheaper to buy new than fixing it, we lost a lot of skilled labour to automation.
The same thing happened everywhere, automation take away human agency, and that take away skill learning. In the end humanity will suffer because less and less people gonna learn how to fix the shit that they rely on. That didn’t happen on accident, that’s by design. We all thought AI gonna upskill a lot of people, but i feels like instead of making a nation of artisan it gonna make a nation of 7/11. Just look at Destin’s struggle to make a fucking bbq brush fully American, the nation of 300millions people can’t even provide parts that fully made within the nation.
Fast fashion would be the other end of an extreme. Another way is for stores to have one of each size, you try the one you want and place an order. The store delivers in batches and enough orders are placed.
That’s not how clothes work, these days you either get fast fashion or tailored. There’s basically nothing left in between because of the economics of the industry. If you’re doing readymade clothing, you gotta do it at scale (and it’s never going to fit a lot of people). This is exactly what the Luddites predicted; tailored clothes for very rich people, slop for everyone else.
No. They weren’t proven wrong, pauperism was the consequence and it was horrible. Luckily we shifted that back to regimes that don’t like to report much on terrible living and environmental conditions so we don’t have the filth at our doorstep.
yeah… as i said, they had a point in the moment
in 2026 we have retraining programs and social security programs… these are the solutions to industrialisation; not ignorance… the longer you fight industrialisation the harder it hits because rather than happening gradually it happens all at once and society has a harder time absorbing it
Stupid Uyghurs, should just make use of their “retraining programs and social security programs” instead of being forced to produce our cheap shit.
china having human rights abuses is not an argument against retraining people when technology starts to make jobs redundant
Their point is that the people being abused in sweatshops aren’t the same people who are benefiting from retraining and social security. Because the Luddites were basically correct about everything
Maybe. I think a sizable group of people would rather put fast fashion back in the bag.
Fast fashion is a different topic from the machine produced vs tailor point they’re making.
Made to order is getting more and more traction, because we have machines able to fully automate it. Making higher quality clothing more available than ever
i definitely agree, but plenty leading to waste doesn’t mean that plenty is a bad thing
having enough food to not worry about food waste is definitively a good problem to have. ideally we don’t have food waste because we don’t have enough food for everyone, but just because plenty leads to waste at least initially isn’t an argument against plenty
what are you agreeing with you dummy? you definetly agree to disagree or what? fast fashion clothes become waste because people don’t actually want to wear them after a few times, or even if they do the clothes are so bad they get damaged very soon.
its also not just about the waste products, its about the pollution and the destruction of our environment
I agree. A lot of blame that should be squarely laid at the feet of bad distribution of wealth via capitalism, is being put onto technological advances making things more efficient. The fact is, even in a utopian society where every person has access to any material needs they could want, we’d want to be able to produce those things more efficiently to get them into the hands of more people at a lower cost to society as a whole.
If we had a fair system - firms having to be run as worker cooperatives, wealth going into the hands of the working class instead of a few capitalists, etc - none of the Luddite-esque complaints would hold. In this example, yes, cost of clothing would go up if we fairly paid all textile workers and if they owned part of the company they work for. It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than bespoke, hand made clothing requiring one skilled worker tens or hundreds of man hours of work.
And as hard as it is to change that system, I actually think that’s easier than trying to put the genie that is technology back in the bottle.
I think what people don’t get about the Luddites is that they were aware that the technology itself wasn’t the main issue, but who owns the technology and what working conditions they offer.
IMO you can see the same thing with AI, OpenAI, Microsoft etc. clearly don’t have our best interests in mind and everyone wants to do layoffs while social security is being dismantled, nevermind having a serious discussion about universal basic income or the massive resource use in the middle of a climate catastrophe.
The one glimmer of hope is open models and especially fully open source ones like K2 Horizon. Open models and tooling for running them locally are rapidly evolving such that the tech will be democratized instead of a couple capitalists having a stranglehold on the tech.