West atrophies as technical expertise fades

The essay posits that software engineering is repeating the catastrophic industrial mistakes of the 20th century, where optimized "just-in-time" systems destroyed the surge capacity needed for survival. Tacit knowledge dies with experts; restarting production of Stinger missiles required 70-year-olds because paper schematics were insufficient. AI-mediated development produces "pseudo-juniors" who can generate code but lack the foundational judgment to debug distributed failures. The human talent pipeline is atrophying as 54% of leaders believe AI will permanently reduce junior hiring, bypassing the formative mistakes required for growth. Technical competence takes 5-10 years to build; this timeline is incompressible and cannot be bypassed by capital or LLMs.