> Does that work as well with non-strangers who are your coworker? I'm not sure.

Simply hire people who score high on the Conscientiousness, but low on the Agreeableness personality trait. :-)

> asking for explanations as the starting point instead of "I read all of your code and give feedback." That just won't be sustainable given the rate at which text can now be output.

I claim that this approach is sustainable.

The idea behind the "I read all of your code and give feedback." methodology is that the writer really put a lot of deep effort into making sure that the code is of great quality - and then he is expecting feedback, which is often valuable. As long as you can with some effort find out by yourself how improvements could be done, don't bother asking for someone else's time/

The problem is thus that the writers of "vibe-generated code" hardly ever put such a deep effort into the code. Thus the code is simply not worth asking feedback for.

> while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.

I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.

> There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource.

The capability to write high-quality code and have a deep knowledge about it is still a scarce resource.

The difference from former days is rather that the industry began to care less about this.

This is in tandem with several generations of programming language, tooling, best practices, etc. LLMs haven't suddenly increased people's productivity, improved tooling did.

Back when these tools did not exist yet, a lot of this knowledge didn't exist yet. Software now is built on the shoulders of giants. You can write a line of code and get a window in your operating system, people like Bill Gates and his generation wrote the low level graphics code and had to come up with the concept of a window first, had to invent the fundamentals of graphics programming, had to wait and interact with hardware vendors to help make it performant.

> Heck, getting developers not to rewrite an application in their new favorite framework is a tough sell.

This depends a lot on the "programming culture" from which the respective developers come. For example, in the department where I work (in some conservative industry) it would rather be a tough sell to use a new, shiny framework because the existing ("boring") technologies that we use are a good fit for the work that needs to be done and the knowledge that exists in the team.

I rather have a feeling that in particular the culture around web development (both client- and server-side parts) is very prone to this phenomenon.

I agree.

In the Venn diagram of the programming culture of the companies that embrace vibe coding and the companies whose developers like to rewrite applications when a new framework comes out is almost a perfect circle, however.

In my personal experience, web development teams don't really have much to do, so they create work for themselves.

Simply require from the junior developers that each pull request has to satisfy a very high standard. If they are not sure about something, they may ask, but if they send you some pull request of bad quality to review, and you find something, they deserve a (small) tantrum.

It is likely not possible to completely forbid junior developers from using AI tools, but any pull request that they create that contains (AI-generated) code that they don't fully comprehend (they can google) will be rejected (to test this, simply ask them some non-trivial questions about the code). If they do so, again, these junior developers deserve a (small) tantrum.

The thing is that a "very high standard" is not a measurable criterion. The project can have test coverage requirements and strict linting to catch basic syntax and logic problems, but how do you enforce simplicity, correctness, robustness, or ergonomics? These are abstract concepts that are difficult to determine, even for experienced developers, so I wouldn't expect less experienced developers to consider them. A code review process is still important, with or without LLMs.

So we can ask everyone using these tools to understand the code before submitting a PR, but that's the best we can do. There's no need to call anyone out for not meeting some invisible standard of quality.

The answer is simple: "a very high standard" is what the very experienced developers of the team consider to be "a very high standard". :-)

The developers who try to hold a "very high standard" will be accused of blocking progress and fired.

Under a bad management, this might indeed (unfortunately) happen. :-(

VDI: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Not everybody has the capabilities that are necessary for the tech industry. So do your industrial production somewhere else in the USA where additionally the cost of living is low.

> If there's no adversarial conflict, then who cares where something is made?

I think you just answered your question by yourself without realizing: the signs are that an adversarial conflict might come up - so be prepared for it.

That's presuming that such a conflict would be fought as the sort of industrial war that WW1 and WW2 were. But there's little evidence that's the case: the lead times on modern weapons systems are enormous, and the attrition rate of hardware is enormous too (i.e. consider that the Javelin can put a tank out of action permanently).

It is an unproven criteria that it is reasonable or possible to expect to produce the munitions and equipment for a conflict during the conflict if it's the sort of near-peer thing people usually cite for this - i.e. rather you go to war with what you have, and you're unlikely to rebuild that advantage in time if you don't win then.

Which is the point: localizing a bunch of industries on that basis may not make any sense, compared to simply stockpiling from the cheapest accreditable sources.

> Make things that empower people and give them the ability to be class-fluid. That's what the world really needs, after all.

The problem is: by the way you were raised, you have become deeply brainwashed into the social norms of your class for decades. Becoming class-fluid means getting free of this whole brainwashing, and then get a brainwashing for your destination social class. This also implies that you have to give up all your friends (if you keep them, they will back-brainwash you into your old habits; additionally, by the reprogramming these old friends will be unable to get on with you anymore because you have become a "different person" for them).

Thus, I believe only very few people want that.

Wow! You just articulated a feeling I have had but could not put my finger on it until I read that. I grew up in a blue-collar Midwest US city that was decimated by the loss of domestic manufacturing. I went to college and got a CS degree and went on to enjoy 2+ decades of the tech boom and was paid well for it. Thus, allowing me and my family move into a different class i.e. white collar, educated, entrepreneurial, class-fluid. But now at middle age I don’t recognize any of my friends from the “old” neighborhood as I have changed so much, we don’t really know each other anymore. Our views on many things are so different we might as well be strangers. But due to being raised in that blue-collar environment my thoughts and ideas sometimes don’t mesh with the new class of people I find myself socializing with now. Which leaves me in some kind of limbo. I don’t fit in with the people from my past, but I don’t fit in with the people of my present.

Work on not seeing class at all - this is the ultimate fluidity.

Embrace differing views. It can be done in a way that makes everyone win.