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.

Doubtful. The engine engineer doesn’t know the chemical engineering of modern fuels nor the code in the engine controller.

In my country in order to earn a true CS degree you need to learn both Chemistry and EE.

I had to learn geology and engineering drawing, because the first two years syllabus overlapped with civil and electromechanical engineering.

This is textbook whataboutism.

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.

Your post is absolute nonsense. Even the people you are referring to do not know how everything works. Does your airplane engineer know the exact tensile strength of the tire as it hits the landing strip?

[delayed]

It's funny that I was just having this discussion with somebody yesterday. I guess it's always a question of degree. An airplane engineer may still not need to know every bit of detail regarding how all of their tools are produced before they can make use of the tools to build an airplane. But I agree that you raised a valid point in that at least they know how the components of an airplane itself fit together. Maybe it would be similar to how software engineers don't necessarily need to know all the details about how a computer is built (even though in some cases this would be beneficial), but if they don't even have the understanding of the actual _software_, building which is literally their job, it might be going too far. Similarly, a car driver doesn't necessarily need to know all the mechanics about a car, but is a software engineer more like a car driver or a car builder? Or indeed, is what we're currently doing with agents akin to wielding tools to build a system, which we still understand on a high level, or driving a black box? There is a balance there which people are still figuring out as everything is still rapidly in flux.

They know the tires are rated for hitting a landing strip under XYZ conditions, they know how to test the tires to ensure they're still confirming to the expectations of that rating, and they're in contact with the trusted organization that's responsible for issuing that rating. Each expert has a comprehensive understanding of their field, and the fields comfortably overlap with no gaps. For any given perspective, there are several people with the complete picture of that perspective.

Contrast this with a vibe-coded "airplane" where nobody actually understands the tires and you're basically operating on a set of assumptions. The tires are not rated and there's no trusted organization. Maybe it works, but you don't actually know. Very different; don't play language games.

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

"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.

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.

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.