> However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.
Either read the source code if you have it, or read the docs and do your best. That's how it worked when I was learning to code as a middle schooler in the early 90s.
In grad school I worked on TinyOS, and my advisor told me to print out the source code and spend a week reading it until I knew how to make the changes I wanted.
When I worked at Google there was no external documentation to use, so if you couldn't find the docs, you better figure out how to read the source. They have very good code search there.
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.