The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

Management, incentives, and short‑termism

• Many see the core problem as managerial and ideological: optimizing for quarterly profit, headcount reduction, and “efficiency” instead of long‑term capability and resilience.
• Cutting “slack” (time for mentoring, R&D, maintenance) is argued to hollow out organizations: tacit knowledge isn’t transferred, only superficial documentation and automation remain.
• Some tie this to shareholder capitalism, private equity behavior, and concentrated corporate power; others argue this is just basic cost minimization and consumer preference for lower prices.

AI coding tools: productivity vs de‑skilling

• Supporters report concrete productivity and profitability gains when combining LLMs with strong tests and existing engineering discipline (e.g., TDD, good integration tests).
• Critics argue LLMs encourage “vibecoding”: lots of plausible but fragile code, ballooning review costs, shallow understanding, and eventual loss of deep skills.
• Several note that writing code is now faster than reviewing it; maintainers feel buried in “LLM slop” and foresee projects restricting PRs.
• There’s concern that LLM use erodes the ability to reason without them, especially among juniors and non‑experts who can’t reliably tell when the AI is wrong.

Institutional knowledge and the junior pipeline

• Strong agreement that institutional and tacit knowledge (how systems actually break, subtle domain rules) cannot be fully replaced by docs or tools.
• Reduced junior hiring plus pressure to “let AI do it” is seen as setting up a future shortage of people able to debug, refactor, or rebuild complex systems.
• Others counter that this pattern (skills atrophy, then get painfully rebuilt when needed) is historically normal and can’t be fully avoided.

Manufacturing, defense, and globalization analogies

• Some think the article overstates “the West forgot how to make things,” noting that US/EU manufacturing output remains high but more automated and specialized.
• Others point to COVID supply shocks, ammo shortages, and lost manufacturing lines as real examples of capacity and know‑how atrophy.
• Debate over NATO, Russia, China, and offshoring: some see a strategic hollowing‑out; others say outsourcing and JIT were rational under peacetime assumptions.

Meta: AI‑authored writing and “slop”

• Multiple commenters suspect the article itself is AI‑assisted, and express fatigue with recognizable LLM rhetorical patterns and filler.
• This is framed as symptomatic of a broader “slopification” of text and code: surface‑polished output, weak substance, and more work for humans to sift signal from noise.