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murphomatic 3 hours ago [-]
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.
xantronix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
plaguuuuuu 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
tudelo 31 minutes ago [-]
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
tgv 5 minutes ago [-]
That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?
oblio 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
lordkrandel 4 minutes ago [-]
Get out of thay world ASAP. There are still companies actually doing work instead of burning investors money
groundzeros2015 2 hours ago [-]
Why would you assume that?
xantronix 2 hours ago [-]
The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.
Retric 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wiether 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
tonyhart7 1 hours ago [-]
or they just need really capable AI that are better than 99% human
lazide 2 hours ago [-]
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.
xantronix 1 hours ago [-]
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'?"
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rebuilder 2 hours ago [-]
To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.
mpyne 2 hours ago [-]
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.
delusional 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
21 minutes ago [-]
hsbauauvhabzb 3 hours ago [-]
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
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
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.
calcifer 1 hours ago [-]
The article has named sources for its quotes, whereas your comment relies entirely on "almost certainly" which sounds a lot less informed.
achow 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
Incipient 45 minutes ago [-]
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".
rmason 3 hours ago [-]
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.
AceJohnny2 3 hours ago [-]
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...)
pmontra 2 hours ago [-]
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.
AceJohnny2 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fn-mote 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xprnio 2 hours ago [-]
(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
DaSHacka 2 hours ago [-]
Or more realistically a Toyota, and their numbers are reflecting this.
petersellers 2 hours ago [-]
Which numbers are those? Their sales numbers or their numbers of vehicle recalls due to defective engine manufacturing?
kortilla 2 hours ago [-]
They destroyed their heavier truck reputation with this new Tundra unfortunately
adgjlsfhk1 2 hours ago [-]
what's wrong with it?
kenhwang 2 hours ago [-]
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.
samudrijan 2 hours ago [-]
Fix Or Repair Daily
sublinear 14 minutes ago [-]
Faulty Obsolete Ruinous Decline
Grum9 1 hours ago [-]
Found On Road Dead
lazide 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kortilla 2 hours ago [-]
Ebbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
docjay 1 hours ago [-]
Fix or replace daily. Fixing and repairing are the same. ;)
koolba 2 hours ago [-]
The other classic one is, “What’s Ford backwards? Driver Returns On Foot.”
nativeit 2 hours ago [-]
Really? Ford’s quality in the last half of the 1990s was the poster child of cheap, vac-form plastics.
18 minutes ago [-]
lowbloodsugar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rmason 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lazide 2 hours ago [-]
JD power is pay to play. Ford just kicked in more money this year.
morkalork 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bartread 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dotcoma 3 hours ago [-]
Amongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.
tiew9Vii 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tasuki 42 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bombela 3 hours ago [-]
Not yet perhaps.
moomoo11 2 hours ago [-]
soon agents will live for us
the ~game~ matrix
noisy_boy 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zkmon 3 hours ago [-]
Talk about making a huge sale to a car sales-man and totally pawning them. Tech has evolved into next-gen "selling science".
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.
onetokeoverthe 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dmix 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"
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.
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.
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...
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".
(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)
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.
The fact that you find this acceptable is amazing to me.
Sounds like a complete failure of quality control.
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.
None of the US automakers have good quality reputations. If you want something that works reliably, get a Toyota.
https://archive.is/VcL8c
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.
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.
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.
the ~game~ matrix
Our AI sucked but that doesn't mean less AI. We need better AI, not humans.
Buy a BYD / Xiaomi / Zeekr / Xpeng...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48704222
Reminds me of this disaster at Toyota,
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-wov...