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
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'?"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
(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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"
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.
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.
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...