>change your mind in 3 years

I think if people change their mind in six months, let alone 3 years, they would just rewrite it again with something different, or just double down on the AI rewrite to rewrite the rewrite to fix the gaps and so on. It's a rabbit hole.

What people are completely missing with AI is that when a company/someone makes the decision (which is most these days) to go heavily on the AI route, they are probably going to keep going that way.

We don't really know what’s the right balance of AI and People right now.

My personal take would be to leverage AI to fix and improve what already exists in a maintainable way and wait for others to experiment with going heavily AI. It's worked great for Apple who is generally years behind in a lot of things because they wait it out for others to experiment with things.

How is this different from when you join a company and learn your corner of the codebase? In a sufficiently large enough codebase no one had the whole mental model in their head even before AI. What you did was find and ask that one person who knew enough about some part of the project to answer your questions. Now you can ask a model.

I don’t think this changes just because you don’t do a rewrite. This is happening already as engineering leans more on AI tools in our own company.

Things ship and change way too fast and the changes are massive.

Also Reflections on Trusting Trust taken to a whole new level.

I'd say they're betting on AI getting good and reliable enough to not have to go back to the "old" practice.

Once your shared mental model of how the codebase works is gone it seems practically impossible to get it back.

You won't want it back. How much time do you spend surfing through your .o or .obj files today?

Well not really? You are going from a webpage (Electron) to a native application via Rust. Say you port a React website to a Rust native application, is anything about that code actually similar?

I think there are lots of common patterns you find in GC’d languages that don’t translate well into idiomatic rust.

Consequently, porting my game engine from Java to Rust was more challenging than I had anticipated.

Your post is absolute nonsense. Plenty of people know exactly how everything on a plane or car works, or a CPU. I've worked with tons of people who do.

The fear of deskilling is very valid and is already messing things up.

My understanding was that for every component there's someone somewhere who understands exactly how it works at least in terms of smaller components/abstractions and for each of those, recursively, someone knows how it works

We're losing a respect and understanding of how basic competence works.

> Nobody understands everything about how an airplane works, not even the lead engineers. Nobody understands everything about how a car works

Of course people do.

"I'm clueless and don't know how anything works, therefore experts don't exist" is one of the worst takes to come out of this godforsaken tech.

This sounds awfully like the self-soothing mantra slop-kiddies everywhere tell themselves.

Plenty of people have a deep understanding of software/hardware, as that's the context here. I personally can take you from usermode, through the kernel (both NT and Linux), down to the hardware interface, explaining the vast majority of systems along the way, and critically, as they relate to performance concerns.

So can plenty of others who actually know+understand things.

You picked very bad examples. There are plenty of people who know exactly how everything in a plane or car works, how taxes work, how medical billing works, how a Cpu works.

Cal used to require EECS students learn how to make a basic CPU. Students at CalTech learn how to make advanced planes as student projects.

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This is textbook whataboutism.