The Fogbank analogy is wrong, and the real risk is narrower

Denis Stetskov’s piece this week, ‘The West Forgot How to Build. Now It’s Forgetting Code’, does a superb job of opening with the Fogbank story and the EU’s failure to deliver a million artillery shells on time. The hook works. The argument that follows, that AI-assisted coding is the same pattern of optimisation eating the talent pipeline, is half right and half a category error, and the half that is wrong is doing most of the rhetorical work. Fogbank failed because the knowledge was physical. The original batch contained an unintentional impurity that nobody had documented because nobody knew it mattered. The workers who handled the material left, and with them went the muscle memory of a process that existed nowhere else. Code is the opposite kind of artefact. It is the most reproducible thing humans make. Every line of every dependency a senior engineer has ever shipped is sitting on GitHub, in npm, in the training data, in a Claude context window the moment you ask. The substrate…