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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

#501

Post by ModernMech »

mpyne wrote: post #375
rebuilder wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.

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.

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.

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

#502

Post by xantronix »

tudelo wrote: post #396
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #392

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…

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.

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

#503

Post by farmerbb »

Incipient wrote: post #393

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…

> 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.

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

#504

Post by froggy »

xantronix wrote: post #502
tudelo wrote: 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…

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).

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

#505

Post by Forgeties79 »

tgv wrote: post #493
Forgeties79 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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.

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

#506

Post by arjie »

al_borland wrote: post #429
arjie wrote: post #423

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…

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.

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

#509

Post by wanderlust123 »

wookmaster wrote: post #508

It’s so odd to me how companies decided what LLMs are capable of without data backing it up. Were all the execs conned or something ?

These execs suffer from over confidence in their own abilities.

Thats partly why they get so far.

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