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Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

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Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#411
post #405
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?

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.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#412
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing).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).

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#415

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…

[dead]

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#416
post #406
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#418
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#419
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#420

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 re…

> 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.

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