> people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor

I think that's a bit of a myth. The Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms, but no forklifts. Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators with the wealth and free time to lift weights and box and wrestle. One of the things that we know about the famous philosopher Plato was that Plato was essentially a nickname from wrestling (meaning "Broad") as a first career (somewhat like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, which adds a fun twist to reading Socratic Dialogs or thinking about relationships as "platonic").

Arguably the "meritocratic ideal" of the Gladiator arena was that even "blue collar" Romans could compete and maybe survive. But even the stories that survive of that, few did.

There may be a lesson in that myth, too, that the people that succeed in some sports often aren't the people doing physical labor because they must do physical labor (for a job), they are the ones intentionally practicing it in the ways to do well in sports.

Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then.

My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's strength.

This is application of external resistance (calf) and progressive overload (growing calf) principles at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton

Milo lived before Archimedes.

>if the goal is to build up your own strength I think you missed this line. If the goal is just to move weights or lift the most - forklift away. If you want to learn to use a forklift, drive on and best of luck. But if you're trying to get stronger the forklift will not help that goal.

Like many educational tests the outcome is not the point - doing the work to get there is. If you're asked to code fizz buzz it's not because the teacher needs you to solve fizz buzz for them, it's because you will learn things while you make it. Ai, copying stack overflow, using someone's code from last year, it all solves the problem while missing the purpose of the exercise. You're not learning - and presumably that is your goal.

The same reason we give beginner math students addition and subtraction problems, not Fermat’s last theorem?

There has to be a base of knowledge available before the student can even comprehend many/most open research questions, let alone begin to solve them. And if they were understandable to a beginner, then I’d posit the LLM models available today would also be capable of doing meaningful work.

The point of going to school is to learn all the details of what goes into making things, so when you actually make a thing, you understand how it’s supposed to come together, including important details like correct design that can support the goal, etc. That’s the “getting stronger” part that you can’t skip if you expect to be successful. Only after you’ve done the work and understand the details can you be successful using the power tools to make things.

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edition, chapter 2

If you weren't even "clever enough" to write the program yourself (or, more precisely, if you never cultivated a sufficiently deep knowledge of the tools & domain you were working with), how do you expect to fix it when things go wrong? Chatbots can do a lot, but they're ultimately just bots, and they get stuck & give up in ways that professionals cannot afford to. You do still need to develop domain knowledge and "get stronger" to keep pace with your product.

Big codebases decay and become difficult to work with very easily. In the hands-off vibe-coded projects I've seen, that rate of decay was extremely accelerated. I think it will prove easy for people to get over their skis with coding agents in the long run.

OK, it’s a mech suit. The question under discussion is, do you need to learn to walk first, before you climb into it? My life experience has shown me you can’t learn things by “observing”, only by doing.

This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.

If all I know is the mech suit, I’ll struggle with tasks that I can’t use it for. Maybe even get stuck completely. Now it’s a skill issue because I never got my 10k hours in and I don’t even know what to observe or how to explain the outcome I want.

In true HN fashion of trading analogies, it’s like starting out full powered in a game and then having it all taken away after the tutorial. You get full powered again at the end but not after being challenged along the way.

This makes the mech suit attractive to newcomers and non-programmers, but only because they see product in massively simplified terms. Because they don’t know what they don’t know.

The mech suit works well until you need to maintain stateful systems. I've found that while initial output is faster, the AI tends to introduce subtle concurrency bugs between Redis and Postgres that are a nightmare to debug later. You get the speed up front but end up paying for it with a fragile architecture.

> "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit."

Or "An [electric] bicycle for the mind." Steve Jobs/simonw

No, it's not a mech suit. A mech suit doesn't fire its canister rifle at friendly units and then say "You're absolutely right! I should have done an IFF before attacking that unit." (And if it did the engineer responsible should be drawn and quartered.) Mech-suit programming AI would look like something that reads your brainwaves and transduces them into text, letting you think your code into the machine. I'd totally use that if I had it.

> I want to make things

You need to be strong to do so. Things of any quality or value at least.

A version of this does happen with regard to fitness.

There are enthusiasts who will spend an absolute fortune to get a bike that is few grams lighter and then use it to ride up hills for the exercise.

Presumably a much cheaper bike would mean you could use a smaller hill for the same effect.

> Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid

That's the job of the backhoe.

(this is a joke about how diggers have caused quite a lot of local internet outages by hitting cables, sometimes supposedly "redundant" cables that were routed in the same conduit. Hitting power infrastructure is rare but does happen)

> but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid

Unless you happen to drive a forklift in a power plant.

> expose millions to fraud and theft

You can if you drive forklift in a bank.

> put innocent people in prison

You can use forklift to put several innocent people in prison with one trip, they have pretty high capacity.

> jeopardize the institutions of government.

It's pretty easy with a forklift, just try driving through main gate.

> There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.

Forklifts typically have several axes of travel.

I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either.

So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.

You're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights.

Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..

I feel we are on the cusp of a new era... Civil Engineering bridge analogies about to be replaced by forklift analogies.

Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.