Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly
the-independent.comRecent and related:
Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446 - June 2026 (321 comments)
Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality.
You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.
AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world.
At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.
It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on...
Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns
The other day claude spun up 100 agents and took an hour to type 30k token document to tell me something was impossible to do. I googled it, found a pr on the 3rd link that showed it was possible. "You're absolutely right!!"
"You can't use reflection if the classes aren't in the class loader" "I see why you would think that however this should work, let's test it."
-Claude, burning my company's money.
> Claude, burning my company's money.
And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
> I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
When AI use starts to be a line item cost on public companies' financial reports + Anthropic and OpenAI have IPOed and have to file financials too + they kill their growth-hack monthly all-you-can-eat plans.
The entire house of cards falls down when the success metric shifts from "Are you using AI?" to "What return value are you getting for the money you're spending on AI?"
Some smart companies / departments are going to be able to demonstrate stellar AI ROI, but I'm going to be shocked if the bulk of current demand isn't revealed to be naked. Mostly because middle management is always stupid about adopting and using new technology.
There's nothing people run out of faster than other people's money. I expect this second half of the year we see that the cracks in the AI business grow and bring the whole thing down.
Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
Worse'n crypto… which I would not have believed possible.
There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there.
Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be...
Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...
I am of a particular disposition that makes it difficult for me to do lie about my work, especially if I were in a firm where people are reading my chat transcripts. As much as I want to stick it to The Man, it feels a lot better for me to just say "no" and burn through my 401k until this blows over.
I'm not too proud to admit that this whole thing scares me though. I fail to see how anything will get better.
Congrats, you have a moral compass and you sound raised by good parents. The other people in these threads bragging about burning tokens, not so much.
I’ve sadly had the same thoughts lately to cash out my 401k and say farewell to software development. I’m hanging in for a little longer, I think the AI/greed fever breaks sometime soon (months not years).
Just ask it to "use a workflow" and it'll spin un dozens of agents burning your token allowance in parallel.
And the more uselessly amusing thing is that the manager who requests higher tokens usage probably also doesn't care whether it's producing slop or not. Metric goes up; managers happy until CFO is reported income hasn't gone up as quickly as costs, and that makes the CEO optimistically concerned. Never expect underlying thought from a messenger.
It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.
Let us not forget /ralph-loop “explore the codebase for bugs, write tests for each bug found but do not fix the bug, only capture its existence in testing” will ensure your agent never stops burning tokens.
Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas.
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
Get ready for that promotion!
I love how the images are an AI-generated fever dream. Normally I hate those things, but in this case it's a perfect match for the AI clown world.
The real unlock is at line 149 of bin/burn
That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?
Stock prices have always been more important than a habitable environment.
The really stupid thing is that shareholders are also rewarding useless burns of their money. It's capitalist Stakhanovism.
It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly.
Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.
@ihsw you’re currently greyed out so I can’t reply, but lol holy shit i’d be updating my resume if i were you
Or maybe that's the wrong direction and this is where most of the world is headed once the true costs and ROI are fully revealed.
Hello, I am from a company whose IT leadership that saw this silliness 3 months ago.
Yes, all developer-focused AI subscriptions have been cancelled, and only AI features tacked onto existing subscriptions are part of the AI strategy (eg: Jira+AI, Confluence+AI, Analytics suite du jour+AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro (SHUDDER), etc etc etc.)
Yes, it is virtually impossible to get any additional spending approved.
Yes, there is no more Claude, there is no more Codex, it is all gone now. The AI hype occurs only in company-wide emails about commitment to modernization (with AI), reorganization (with AI), and consolidation (with AI), where no actual strategy is proposed other than what the management consultants advise (with a caveat that there is no budget for anything other than AI features that are tacked onto existing subscriptions at no additional cost.)
If your manager is asking you why you aren’t hammering 500 nails a day with your company hammer under threat of replacement, you’re going stop worrying about the surfaces your driving nails in to and simply start swinging.
1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit.
2. Your responsibility doesn't end because your manager says so.
3. It's not just about the employee who actually burns the tokens, but also about the rest of it: the idiocy up to the top, and the irresponsibility of the companies offering the service.
> 1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit.
Then pretend it was 5 million nails a day from a newly invented nail machine gun. This also has no provable and substantial benefit. Build a house that way and it will quickly be more nail by mass than everything else combined.
I don’t disagree. The point is capitalism operates entirely on incentive to keep our jobs or die on the streets. If they say “use all the nails or you lose your job,” people aren’t going to care about the waste or broader costs. Nails, AI, choose your example. It’s the same result unfortunately.
The point about capitalism isn't really accurate. Communism had the same problem. It's more about greed and power, and a system that sustains it than about the ideology behind it, I think. However, their ideological opposites, anarchism and liberitarianism, offer false ways out, too, as humanity is simply not capable of sustaining that.
I'm sounding a bit like a broken record, but the only political system with a proven track record in modern society is still social democracy: educate the people so they don't bash each other's heads in, distribute wealth and power better, and regulate the markets. It unfortunately died through the unholy matrimony of material well-being and social media.
The reason I’m saying capitalism is because the context is employment + the US. In the US employment is everything. It’s social status, it’s the roof over your head, it’s healthcare, it’s your identity.
Similar issues exist in communism too. It doesn’t mean you can just go “but communism” to dismiss me when I raise an accurate and valid critique of the system Ford operates in.
It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company.
No one is leaving their job because their manager is too obsessed with AI. Especially not in this economy/job market.
I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me.
There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on.
If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).
> If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription
Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash.
An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task.
I've had great success with OpenCode Go and DeepSeek v4 Flash for Terraform code refactorings and extensions. It's cheap enough to pay it yourself ($5 first month, $10 afterwards). Ideally you provide the model a feedback loop (e. g. passing tests) so it can safely iterate.
There will always be more work to do, especially for someone else's company.
What's the rush? Friday will still come at the same speed, and it's unlikely you will receive an increase in pay to account for your increase in productivity.
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available.
Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available.
Fantasy: automated productivity
Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy
as a CTO, its been crazy pushing back against these AI mandates. Almost always from VCs and non technical contributors. I'm pretty liberal about using AI but it has its limits. I think of them like swim fins. you can dive much deeper with them but if you didn't earn that ability, you can find yourself too deep to get your next breath of air. likewise, its important to never let the ai do work more than one ring outside of your knowledge base lest it do things you dont' understand and therefore can't audit.
It's not unreasonable to mandate that one should try it for some of its safer uses, or to spend time teaching people what the good uses are, which keep growing... but mandating a significant part of the day-to-day is telling employees they have no agency in how they achieve objectives. For people that aren't technical, it shows they aren't good at the social either.
Get out of thay world ASAP. There are still companies actually doing work instead of burning investors money
Why would you assume that?
The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.
Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here.
They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.
I'm confused by your answer because I can't tell which way you're going.
Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere?
Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests?
I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones.
He's just making a general "efficient markets" argument. He's arguing that whatever happens in a couple of years will be the right thing, no matter what is happening now.
That is essentially not an argument in any direction.
It’s also one which ignores the “market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”
Inshallah
If it works. Where is this 100x software output? I just see more AI tools to check it does not derail, but where is the actual software revolution, where all developers are fired? I'm still closing AI PR slop here
If it is 100x anything more interesting than line count, it will be micro-projects: Local barber wants a new website. Architecht wants to put their own plan into a numerical physics simulation library someone else wrote that has its own syntax. Schoolkid wants a customised word puzzle app for the foreign language they struggle with. They couldn't possibly code it themselves, but they can check what it is doing.
Trust without verification though, we're waiting for AI's Challenger disaster equivalent.
I'm not going to speak to the output side of your comment, but yes, developers are being fired over AI.
> The latest layoffs across all tech companies. So far in 2026, there have been 421 layoffs at tech companies with 157,807 people impacted (882 people per day). In 2025, there were 783 layoffs at tech companies w/ 245,953 people impacted (674 people per day).
The fact that rich CEOs firing saying "it's because of AI" doesn't make it true. It's just marketing for investors
or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human
If that ever happens the limiting factor will be management.
Perhaps that's where it gets interesting.
That just means he’s not a middle manager or exec, not that he isn’t cashing the check from someone who is clearly a short sighted idiot.
It wasn't meant to be a literal statement, more just a reflection that the situation is so bleak that I cannot imagine a better future; anybody expressing even a little bit of it seems to me like a somebody who has not been crushed into compliance through force.
Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"
Velocity implies direction, AI is just speed sans direction, AI only workflows are just really fast brownian motion centred on training corpus mean for a task. Humans can give it direction, how good that direction is depends on human expertise.
We still need the humans, there are no cases for novel useful work I can think of, or have seen, where humans are no longer required.
Good analogy but Brownian motion is not the only type of motion in the nature. Constraints give the direction in a physical system, not humans. Evolution is the best example.
I think objections to the Theory of Evolution and some objections to the feasibility of Artificial Intelligence have many similarities. Most people (because of their world view) assume an “intelligent” Designer is mandatory for organisms to evolve and for nature to work. They assume the nature is “random” and directionless by itself. Only a higher (supernatural) intelligence (God) can give it a “direction”. So “intelligence” is basically an external, supernatural and unexplainable (since its above our nature we don’t have access to it) phenomenon.
The exact same argument applies to AI. But instead of atoms and DNA we have bits and activations. AI is random and directionless. Only a superior intelligence (a human) can give it a direction. Like nature, a computer can’t have intelligence by itself. Intelligence is external, supernatural/supercomputational and unexplainable. You can’t compute it, you can’t understand it, you can’t replicate it.
This is because human intelligence, like God’s intelligence, lives in a supernatural realm. Some people even believe that it’s the same thing as (or a copy of) the divine intelligence. Some others don’t believe that but still have trouble accepting their human intelligence is not a unique phenomenon and not something above this mundane world.
There, I said it. I think without this warning most of the debate and “philosophical” arguments against AI are useless. They are more like wishful thinking, shaped with the world view of the person. It’s about belief and not technical feasibility.
From the technical perspective, most of these rehired Ford folks will be replaced again in a few years. This was about overestimating the short-term effects of the automation. But in the longer term Ford will indeed have much less humans.
BTW, this new trend of “extracting the knowledge of skilled senior workers to replace them” deserves its own name. This is not a good thing for humanity, but this is exactly what they are doing.
I like the analogy with brownian motion, thanks for sharing that
As we have seem with offshoring, any company whose main business isn't producing software, isn't coming back in-house, even if the quality for engineering team themselves sucks.
> velocity should never be a first-class concern
Some people have not learned that velocity at small scale without global synchronisation is just thermal agitation.
Someone should tell this to Bungie’s Justin Truman
To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.
I wish I could work somewhere where I’m _marginally_ less subject to the whims of the Boardroom class.
I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour.
No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.
My partner had booked a table for lunch for us and our friends. Six adults and six children. One of the couples had forgotten a party earlier that morning, so we tried to move the booking a couple of hours later.
Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking.
Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds.
I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers.
It's the conceit of capitalism. We've structured our entire society around giving the boardroom class most of the rewards from our societal output, so they've taken that to mean they create most of the value. They are job creators, deliverers of technology, builders of nations, and how it gets done at the low level is an fungible implementation detail. Whether it's slaves or workers or robots down in the fields / mines / factories, the board are the ones driving the ship and therefore doing the real, important work.
And yes, this does mean they view us workers as somewhere between slaves and robots, replicable by a token predictor.
Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.
Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.
This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.
The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.
I find this comment, on it's face, very hard to understand. An apparent abundance of qualifiers without definition. Is this an example of circular reasoning?
It seems to me that the text is saying that generalised labour produces value, but then only specific labour produces actual value. What is the difference between actual value and value in general? Is some value somehow more valuable that other? Are we even speaking the same language? Is this just making shit up as you go along and hope nobody notices because the general idea is appealing?
> Speed should only come as a side-effect of quality.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
- US Navy SEALs
who would have thought :)
The word "lesson" implies that there'll be some learning involved in the process. I got your joke, right?
Nah, that’s the future executives problem, the current executive gets to brag about how their AI integrations cut costs while maintaining an acceptable yet enshittified quality
Oh, it solves two problem at once: overpaying wages and overdelivery of quality.
You just have to get the input coefficient right. The least amount of acceptable quality with the least amount of costs is the sweet spot. /s
You're being sarcastic, but...
From when this story was posted a few days ago:
Ford has hired 350 engineers over the last 3 years which happened alongside short comings in using AI inspection tooling. This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware to do visual inspections.
Dirt bag media will do anything for your clicks and leave you more uninformed at the other end.
The article has named sources for its quotes, whereas your comment relies entirely on "almost certainly" which sounds a lot less informed.
OP to me sounds more authentic and seems to have inside information.
After a quick search I found a publication actually mentioning about these tools:
Ford previously told Business Insider that it had developed two bespoke AI-enhanced scanning tools that helped validate that cars were properly assembled before rolling off the lot. The tools, called AiTriz and MAIVs, both debuted in 2024. https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/ford...
And after doing cursory research on these tools, it is clear they are rudimentary (as compared to SOTA LLMs), they were essentially smartphone mounted on stands and doing visual checks using the camera - so OP could be very right.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-uses-ai-cameras-in-fact...
A fine-tuned classifier purpose fit for a specific task can easily outperform a SOTA LLM on more modest hardware and often makes a lot more sense.
If your data is sufficiently noisy or your relationship sufficiently simple a linear regression will outperform a SOTA LLM.
How can it be inside information if it's in a yahoo article? And why does OP alleging they are talking about technology A not B and you finding out they use technology A (while we all know they also use technology B as well) make OP more likely to be right? Very fallacious thinking
Nothing in the article contradicts their (IMHO accurate) claim. Three years ago boardrooms were not drinking the LLM Kool-aid yet, while ML-powered QC has been around for years. Remember Silicon Valley's hot dog vs not hot dog? That's pretty much all you need, only the hot dog is a car part.
Apparently it is not all you need, according to the article.
> This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots
Where does this article say otherwise?
The dirt bag media! Making insinuation that I actually projected onto their article!
You said that you misinterpreted the article in the same way in another comment 1 minute before you left this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705638
Back in the nineties Ford ran a lot of ads about how quality was job one. But in the last twenty years their quality declined by a large amount at the same time other brands were getting better. I say that as a lifelong fan of Ford, quality was why I left the brand two years ago.
I think this may be a US thing. Fords built in Europe are pretty decent. Reliable (compared with most other makes), cheap parts and ubiquitous servicing. I've bought Fords (in the UK) for about the last 20 years and have in the main been very satisfied.
Ford is not as protected from competition in Europe.
Putting timing belts in oil was quite a bad idea from them though.
That's fair. Got stung by that a couple of years ago. Fortunately there are plenty of models without that.
Ouch, did not expect to get triggered by this on HN
- Peugeot 2008 owner but not much longer
Fords have a really bad name in Australia. The cheapest Hyundai will outlast even a high end Ford.
But in terms of reliability, here Toyota is king
It's impressive all the recall notices I get on my 2020 Escape Hybrid. At this point I joke with my friends that they're love-letters from Ford.
(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)
And yet all the time you spend performing those recalls should be annoying. Maybe you don't plan to eventually sell your car on the second hand market but if you do, a car without all the required recalls could have a lower value than one with all the recalls applied.
eh, every 6 months to a year I bring the car in to the dealer to handle the stack of pending recalls, during which I get a rental, courtesy of Ford. It's not much of a deal for me.
Few of the issues I've experienced with the car were clearly tied to quality issues: 1) Battery died a few times, but maybe that was user error 2) squirrels/rats nibbled the engine cable harness, a not-uncommon occurrence in our area. Only 3) auto-unlock on passenger side being unreliable is clearly a quality/design issue.
Honestly, I actually love the Escape. The pedal feel is very responsive in all driving modes, compared in particular to the 2020 Hybrid Rav4, which felt like driving a boat (maybe I didn't find the drive mode?), or the 2020 VW Tiguan which had a shockingly slow automatic transmission for an ostensibly "sporty" vehicle. And I'm not even a car guy. I also love its actual buttons on the dashboard, instead of the idiotic "everything on a huge touchscreen" that too many cars do nowadays.
> every 6 months to a year I bring the car in to the dealer to handle the stack of pending recalls
The fact that you find this acceptable is amazing to me.
Sounds like a complete failure of quality control.
Cars here are inspected yearly anyway or you go change winter tires for summer tires. (Because we lack the place to store them in typical houses.) So you are at the garage anyway every 6 months to 12. Then they can also do the other stuff
Still enjoying my 05 Focus, in which I have done zero recalls, although I did have to fix the persistent trunk leaks with bathroom sealant.
(As a non American) I remember hearing a joke that goes something like “How do you fix a Chevrolette? Buy a Ford”, but nowadays I guess a bike is a better option
Or more realistically a Toyota, and their numbers are reflecting this.
Which numbers are those? Their sales numbers or their numbers of vehicle recalls due to defective engine manufacturing?
They destroyed their heavier truck reputation with this new Tundra unfortunately
Appreciate my 2UZ-FE more every year.
what's wrong with it?
The new Tundra TTV6 had a manufacturing process defect that allowed shavings to get into the engine bearings, which causes catastrophic engine failure.
They still don't have a solution to the problem. The shavings amount/size is supposedly common among all engine manufacturing processes, but the new engine design has such tight tolerances that it's now problematic.
Fix Or Repair Daily
Faulty Obsolete Ruinous Decline
Found On Road Dead
There is also the ‘joke’ - What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
None of the US automakers have good quality reputations. If you want something that works reliably, get a Toyota.
Ebbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
The other classic one is, “What’s Ford backwards? Driver Returns On Foot.”
Fix or replace daily. Fixing and repairing are the same. ;)
If a company is saying “X is job one” it’s because they suck at X. They sucked at quality. They still suck at quality.
Actually in the latest J.D. Power initial quality ratings they took a big step up in quality. I think it was the first time in 15-20 years that they were on the list of recommended major brands.
I'm very skeptical of the initial quality studies. No idea how well predict long term (or even 5 year) quality.
JD power is pay to play. Ford just kicked in more money this year.
Really? Ford’s quality in the last half of the 1990s was the poster child of cheap, vac-form plastics.
The same Ford whose bean counters caused them decades of reputational damage over skimping on rust protection? Seems like they haven't learned any lessons at all.
"We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers"
The defining motto of the corporate world
Change engineers to employees and you’re spot on.
Well, at least they learned from the experience, and that’s good.
The more interesting question, I think, is what proportion of businesses will choose the learn from Ford’s experience without first choosing to relive it?
Often people, and therefore also organisations, struggle to usefully learn from the experience of others without repeating the same mistakes, and experiencing the same pain.
I have spent a SOLID 3 full days 8h/day (plus long running tasks overnight) thrashing out a random idea for a Web application using purely Opus (mostly Max, sometimes ultracode version). I'm not a project manager, but I genuinely tried a full 3-tier spec out - design->specs->build details.
While it was significantly better than previous attempts, it still misses very basic things - sporadically. Eg. A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients, explained clearly and comprehensively. The ability to add clients was entirely missed in the build and iteration (there were multiple 'please check its all done' separate agent runs/checks).
I can imagine in a fully autonomous deployment, in even moderate complexity, even to this day would still occasionally mess up - badly enough to cause non-trivial business issues.
I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way, but my latest thinking is really having boil down tasks to almost unit operations "add UI button, wire to Api call. End".
> I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way, but my latest thinking is really having boil down tasks to almost unit operations "add UI button, wire to Api call. End".
And at that point you might as well just code the thing yourself.
> I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way
For you, the best way is to break your code down into modules insofar as possible, so that you don't overrun the context window. Opus Max starts forgetting things the minute it begins compressing your conversation -- and multiple compressions can make for gaps in memory.
I find that it's also important to have another model serve as review/critique. I use Opus Max for code and 5.5 Pro for immediate code review. The latter will often pick up on things that might have been missed, and will usually provide good suggestions.
Hard to say exactly what went wrong from outside, but a frontier model not being able to implement a simple CRUD feature after 3x8 = 24 hours of work isn't "it can't do this". Let me hazard a guess from what you wrote. The 3-tier spec (design → specs → build details) may be the cause rather than the cure. A big upfront spec has two failure modes the model can't help you with: it can quietly contain contradictions, and it can be ambiguous in ways the model resolves by guessing instead of asking. "Adding clients" is a good example of the trap, even assuming your real spec was more detailed than the comment. "Client" is overloaded — a customer in the domain? An API client? A consumer of a service? And "A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients" is very imprecise: does the model add them, or build a UI so the end user can add them? I know this was just your comment and sorry to sound harsh but if the spec had sentences like that I can definitely see it going off the rails.
Your own conclusion, smaller, concrete units, is the right direction. Except by units I don't mean partitioing the program into smaller units (files, modules). In fact, you should stop thinking about implementation at all. I'm thinking more about the way of asking the LLM to build it. One feature at a time etc. so you can tighten the feedback loop. Then you can early on (in the first hour say): "I also need a way that the user can add/manage clients - basic CRUD" and that small sentence might be enough the model makes it all (UI, API, backend etc.) to enable that and put it in a proper place in the app. A big ambiguous spec defers that discovery to the worst possible moment.
> And "A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients" is very imprecise
That's not a sentence they literally gave the agent. This is their full quote.
> A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients, explained clearly and comprehensively.
Why are you assuming they described this so ambiguously?
> there were multiple 'please check its all done' separate agent runs/checks
You could ask it to go through the spec point by point and then mark what is done and WHERE/WHY, then it'd point you towards exactly what might be missing.
Managers believe in the fungibility of engineers and do not understand the concept of institutional knowledge. Always has been.
How do you fix a Ford ?
Buy a BYD / Xiaomi / Zeekr / Xpeng...
Amongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.
Why not?
Self-driving cars may have a control agent at the HQ that places car orders as needed.
The dystopian future where no one owns cars is already being laid.
Cars are more and more becoming white goods appliances with the driving experience becoming less and less a priority. Even enthusiast cars now are about raw numbers and need electronics to reign them in to make useable for the average driver on the average road.
The average user probably doesn’t even want to drive and have AI do it for them.
Repairability is becoming less viable as mechanical parts replaced with screens and digital locks. Parts availability is already an issue, only going to get worse especially with the pace of new cars are being churned out from China.
The end will be car as a subscription. We already have it with leasing, and BMW having to pay to use your electric seats.
> The dystopian future where no one owns cars is already being laid.
Pardon me?
We're living in the dystopian present, where most everyone has a car or several. Cities are crowded with cars -- both moving and parked -- and it's awful for humans who aren't cars.
I can't wait for the moment people switch to a subscription and the cars are shared and drive themselves. The streets will be just as full of moving cars, but at least the parked cars hopefully disappear, giving us more space for trees or sidewalks or anything but cars really.
I think you've misread the parent poster.
* Their "not owning" means a swap to a subscription/license for the car, which could still be exclusive rather than shared.
* Your "not owning" assumes a reduction in the number of cars per capita.
In other words, the "dystopia" they are referring to is one that still has today's problems of gridlock, land use, urban planning, etc., with new kinds of problems layered on. Cars not being user-repairable, being nickel-and-dimed on features, a monopolistic used-parts market, and a general shift towards whatever boosts the car-manufacturer's profit margin.
You are injecting a lot of assumptions and wishful thinking to view the removal of ownership from this equation as a net positive.
I see no reason to assume that this would lead to the disappearance of parked cars or to more trees. Our corporate overlords will want to make use of that space for more cars or infrastructure to support the new car network, why would they ever just give it back willingly?
Probably be used for more ones for cars
Not yet perhaps.
soon agents will live for us
the ~game~ matrix
I’ve had this happen a few times in the past, back when you’d fire your expensive people and replace them with cheap human labour instead of AI, so I have a word of advice.
Be sure to have “updated your rate schedule” recently, which explains why you’re now twice as expensive as before.
They know how bad they screwed up and how bad they need you now. I’ve never had anybody refuse a giant rate bump now that we were all on the same page.
lately I saw a post [1] about Doorman Fallacy [2]. I strongly believe this is another example of that.
Talk about making a huge sale to a car sales-man and totally pawning them. Tech has evolved into next-gen "selling science".
The world might slowly realize that a lot of generative goodness and direction is the result of our limitations and constraints as builders, not necessarily our velocity.
The article is not about generative AI at all.
Predictably, now office workers and engineers (including here) will say "What I always knew - LLM's can't think, be creative, don't have nuance. My job is safe!". I predict the article will be quoted again and again at lunch tables and family gatherings. However, one should be especially careful when something confirms ones own biases.
Firstly, the "AI" discussed here is not LLM's. They are talking about visual quality inspection systems. There's been many other articles in the press: Ford's new quality automation is computer-vision defect inspection, built on IBM's visual-inspection tech, iPhones photographing parts on the line, running since 2020. By most reporting it works fine, pushing detection rates from ~70% manual to 99%+. This is classical CNN at work doing the job of quality inspectors... completely unrelated to desk-work by an engineer or what LLM's do... yet that's exactly the inference the headline invites (and many here in the comments seem to be making).
The timing only underlines it: rehiring is presented as the cleanup. Apparently the rehirings started 3 years ago, so whatever it's undoing is older still and therefore unlikely to be LLM driven. While ChatGPT did come out 3.5 years ago it seems doubtful someone would fire people left and right the moment they saw the first ChatGPT... only to then regret almost it immedaitely and rehire them - all within the span of 6 months.
This further supports that the article is about years-old automation bet being quietly unwound, and is completely unrelated to mainstream discussion about AI and jobs today.
Also, 350 rehires is just noise. Ford is shedding thousands right now: plant pauses, battery-plant retooling, projected restructuring in the 8–13k range.
Finally, as always with corporate announcements... ask why an internal staffing decision is even a press story. To me this feels like PR (a nice feel good story that ties into to a subject people discuss a lot now). It takes the sting out of all their announced layoffs. There's probably also internal company politics to it (someone suggested rehirings and now want to say 'see what a great idea this was' and maxx it out).
This doesn't seem like it backfired. Firing these people and rehiring a fraction of them catapulted Ford to the top. In fact, these roles were apparently there for over a decade before modern AI even came to exist and Ford was never top. This actually presents a formula for improved reliability - fire almost everyone, then hire back the cadre with value. A very DOGE-esque approach and I'm surprised it worked.
The best people are the least likely to come back, and going through all of that will surely impact productivity.
Just two days ago at work a call of 15+ people spent a non-trivial amount of time recounting the scars of colleagues being laid off, or they themselves having to sign severance papers, only to be saved in the final hours. These events happened 10-15 years ago and they still cost the company time a decade later, not to mention that trust that erodes with these events.
If companies want people to focus on work, those people need to feel secure in their jobs. Laying them off and hiring them back is not job security. It’s a signal that management has no idea what they’re doing. Why would these people follow the leadership of those who can’t even solve the issue of staffing without making a mess of it?
It’s also bad when seemingly competent employees are laid off while incompetent ones stick around. It sends a signal that it doesn’t matter what you do, so why try.
Well, the fact is that it seems to have improved productivity. While we can theorycraft in many ways, the reality appears to have been that firing everyone and bringing back a select few takes you to heights you could never reach for 16 years prior.
> while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems
Our AI sucked but that doesn't mean less AI. We need better AI, not humans.
* Backfired * :-D
Translated: This AI is still undercooked, it need more humans to train it, so we can fire them again.
Tune your bot, this is the 3rd time (at least) you've duped this dupe and deleted. You still have this:
Why are American tech-bros such loud-mouthed bullshitters ?
Reminds me of this disaster at Toyota,
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-wov...
American tech is basically a sales machine. An ounce of tech will be coated with a ton of selling force. Everything in America is a business, presentation or a talk-show - including government, education, relationships. People do selling and faking to themselves sometimes.
I'd rather not have a vibe coded car.
AI is here to stay. Like it or not.
We will still see several reports of over adoption, mistakes, regression… all will only serve to learn, refine, and hopefully regulate.
I think it’s pretty naive to expect the entire world will simply discard the technology and go back to having humans doing it all.
The value of the ai firms isn’t in building a useful tool to increase productivity of your staff by 20%. It’s not an electric drill.
It’s to replace 99% of your staff. In every industry.
Ai will be a useful tool, but either companies like OpenAI are massively overvalued or the economy will completely vanish at a high speed and their valuation will be meaningless.