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

> For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code.

Yeah, this is nuts because at every company I've worked at it's assumed that engineers are thinking about things like product market fit, how a feature would be sold/ the "value" of the feature itself, how we would support the feature (not just the code, but how support would manage it), etc.

I don't think people realize how much of a hand engineers have in these conversations because we don't champion that, but we think a lot about the product as a whole. Obviously we don't spend as much time thinking about how the product will be sold as a sales person will, but we absolutely think about it, in my experience.

We think a lot about the business, like a massive amount about the system as a whole across these organizational boundaries.

I was wondering the other day why we didn't put this level of effort into building a highway across the Atlantic and the Pacific. It seems to me if we just piled bricks made with all the money dumped into AI in the ocean, we could easily have done this. Likewise we could have just build a canal across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These efforts would have drastically reduced shipping costs and risks but they look impossible (and stupid) on paper so no one tried them.

Why is AI different?

Because it happens in a computer and many people think that makes something easy, like CGI or computer hacking in movies. It's intangible magic and belief is the product sold to investors.

I have mostly enjoyed AI programming and I do like using Codex. The truth is that it sometimes makes me more way more productive, but not usually. Many days are spent writing specs and babysitting prompts and it can suck. Even expensive Codex 5.4/5.5 with high thinking writes code that is just ... lazy. It takes a lot of work to get it to write excellent code. It's definitely a full time job all by itself.

I'm not talking about rocket scientist code either - I'm talking about things using raw for( instead of range-based for, or writing code that is absolutely fucking riddled with imperative logic, hacks, and kludges, when something should clearly be data-driven. Stuff that is so bad I have to tell it to start over. It routinely designs amazing architecture and absolute shit architecture, sometimes on the same day. It's just so weirdly inconsistent. If you ask it to fix a bug then you have to double check if it used a hack and sometimes it will admit to it. Sometimes it lies.

I just do not see how AI is going to replace large numbers of seasoned engineers. That would be a disaster for companies that try it. Could it replace large numbers of juniors? Yes. And maybe I am being fantastically naive. I'm 100% willing to concede that it's possible or even likely.

Exactly. Tools by definition have users. LLMs (real things) are tools. AI (science fiction) is a "person". When the "AI" demands a wage, I'll consider it real. Until then it's an LLM which is a tool. You wouldn't replace a plumber with a wrench.