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.<p>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...<p>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
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."<p>-Claude, burning my company's money.
<i>> Claude, burning my company's money.</i><p>And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there.<p>Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be...<p>Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...
Just ask it to "use a workflow" and it'll spin un dozens of agents burning your token allowance in parallel.
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.<p>It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.
Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas.
<a href="https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn</a><p>Get ready for that promotion!
That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?
Stock prices have always been more important than a habitable environment.<p>The really stupid thing is that shareholders are also rewarding useless burns of their money. It's capitalist Stakhanovism.
If your manager is asking you why you aren’t hammering 500 nails a day with your company hammer under threat of replacement, you’re going stop worrying about the surfaces your driving nails in to and simply start swinging.
1. It is not comparable. Idk the environmental toll of 500 nails, but tokenmaxxing definitely has one. Especially when it doesn't have any provable and substantial benefit.<p>2. Your responsibility doesn't end because your manager says so.<p>3. It's not just about the employee who actually burns the tokens, but also about the rest of it: the idiocy up to the top, and the irresponsibility of the companies offering the service.
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.
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.
I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me.<p>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.<p>If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).
> If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription<p>Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash.<p>An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task.
Get out of thay world ASAP. There are still companies actually doing work instead of burning investors money
Why would you assume that?
Velocity implies direction, AI is just speed sans direction, AI only workflows are just really fast brownian motion centred on training corpus mean for a task. Humans can give it direction, how good that direction is depends on human expertise.<p>We still need the humans, there are no cases for novel useful work I can think of, or have seen, where humans are no longer required.
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.
> velocity should never be a first-class concern<p>Some people have not learned that velocity at small scale without global synchronisation is just thermal agitation.
To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.
I wish I could work somewhere where I’m _marginally_ less subject to the whims of the Boardroom class.<p>I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour.
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.
My partner had booked a table for lunch for us and our friends. Six adults and six children. One of the couples had forgotten a party earlier that morning, so we tried to move the booking a couple of hours later.<p>Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking.<p>Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds.<p>I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers.
Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The word "lesson" implies that there'll be some learning involved in the process. I got your joke, right?
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
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From when this story was posted a few days ago:<p>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.<p>Dirt bag media will do anything for your clicks and leave you more uninformed at the other end.
The article has named sources for its quotes, whereas your comment relies entirely on "almost certainly" which sounds a lot less informed.
OP to me sounds more authentic and seems to have inside information.<p>After a quick search I found a publication actually mentioning about these tools:<p><i>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.</i> <a href="https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/ford-says-ai-alone-couldnt-172018472.html" rel="nofollow">https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/ford...</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-uses-ai-cameras-in-factories-prevent-recalls-costly-rework-2025-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-uses-ai-cameras-in-fact...</a>
A fine-tuned classifier purpose fit for a specific task can easily outperform a SOTA LLM on more modest hardware and often makes a lot more sense.
How can it be inside information if it's in a yahoo article? And why does OP alleging they are talking about technology A not B and you finding out they use technology A (while we all know they also use technology B as well) make OP more likely to be right? Very fallacious thinking
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.
> This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots<p>Where does this article say otherwise?
"We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers"<p>The defining motto of the corporate world
Managers believe in the fungibility of engineers and do not understand the concept of institutional knowledge. Always has been.
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.
I think this may be a US thing. Fords built in Europe are pretty decent. Reliable (compared with most other makes), cheap parts and ubiquitous servicing. I've bought Fords (in the UK) for about the last 20 years and have in the main been very satisfied.
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.<p>(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)
(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
Or more realistically a Toyota, and their numbers are reflecting this.
Fix Or Repair Daily
There is also the ‘joke’ - What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.<p>None of the US automakers have good quality reputations. If you want something that works reliably, get a Toyota.
Ebbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
Fix or <i>replace</i> daily. Fixing and repairing are the same. ;)
The other classic one is, “What’s Ford backwards? Driver Returns On Foot.”
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.
Really? Ford’s quality in the last half of the 1990s was the poster child of cheap, vac-form plastics.
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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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".
> <i>I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way</i><p>For you, the best way is to break your code down into modules insofar as possible, so that you don't overrun the context window. Opus Max starts forgetting things the minute it begins compressing your conversation -- and multiple compressions can make for gaps in memory.<p>I find that it's also important to have another model serve as review/critique. I use Opus Max for code and 5.5 Pro for immediate code review. The latter will often pick up on things that might have been missed, and will usually provide good suggestions.
> there were multiple 'please check its all done' separate agent runs/checks<p>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.
Well, at least they learned from the experience, and that’s good.<p>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?<p>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.
I’ve had this happen a few times in the past, back when you’d fire your expensive people and replace them with cheap human labour instead of AI, so I have a word of advice.<p>Be sure to have “updated your rate schedule” recently, which explains why you’re now twice as expensive as before.<p>They know how bad they screwed up and how bad they need you now. I’ve never had anybody refuse a giant rate bump now that we were all on the same page.
Translated: This AI is still undercooked, it need more humans to train it, so we can fire them again.
How do you fix a Ford ?<p>Buy a BYD / Xiaomi / Zeekr / Xpeng...
Amongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.
Why not?<p>Self-driving cars may have a control agent at the HQ that places car orders as needed.
The dystopian future where no one owns cars is already being laid.<p>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.<p>The average user probably doesn’t even want to drive and have AI do it for them.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Pardon me?<p>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.<p>I <i>can't wait</i> 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.
I think you've misread the parent poster.<p>* Their "not owning" means a swap to a subscription/license for the car, which could still be exclusive rather than shared.<p>* Your "not owning" assumes a reduction in the number of cars per capita.<p>In other words, the "dystopia" they are referring to is one that <i>still has today's problems</i> of gridlock, land use, urban planning, etc., with new kinds of problems layered on. Cars not being user-repairable, being nickel-and-dimed on features, a monopolistic used-parts market, and a general shift towards whatever boosts the car-manufacturer's profit margin.
You are injecting a lot of assumptions and wishful thinking to view the removal of ownership from this equation as a net positive.<p>I see no reason to assume that this would lead to the disappearance of parked cars or to more trees. Our corporate overlords will want to make use of that space for more cars or infrastructure to support the new car network, why would they ever just give it back willingly?
Not yet perhaps.
lately I saw a post [1] about Doorman Fallacy [2]. I strongly believe this is another example of that.<p>[1] <a href="https://rozumem.xyz/posts/17" rel="nofollow">https://rozumem.xyz/posts/17</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorman_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorman_fallacy</a>
Talk about making a huge sale to a car sales-man and totally pawning them. Tech has evolved into next-gen "selling science".
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 <i>never</i> 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.<p>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 later, not to mention that trust that erodes with these events.<p>If companies want people to focus on work, those people need to feel secure in their jobs. Laying them off and hiring them back is not job security. It’s a signal that management has no idea what they’re doing. Why would these people follow the leadership of those who can’t even solve the issue of staffing without making a mess of it?<p>It’s also bad when seemingly competent employees are laid off while incompetent ones stick around. It sends a signal that it doesn’t matter what you do, so why try.
* Backfired *
:-D
> while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems<p>Our AI sucked but that doesn't mean less AI. We need better AI, not humans.
[dupe] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446</a>
Why are American tech-bros such loud-mouthed bullshitters ?<p>Reminds me of this disaster at Toyota,<p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-woven-planet-c5579beb" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-wov...</a>
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.
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I'd rather not have a vibe coded car.
AI is here to stay. Like it or not.<p>We will still see several reports of over adoption, mistakes, regression… all will only serve to learn, refine, and hopefully regulate.<p>I think it’s pretty naive to expect the entire world will simply discard the technology and go back to having humans doing it all.