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Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
https://archive.ph/DI4Cq https://archive.ph/DI4Cq
- alanwreath 4mo ago[flagged]
- prayze 4mo agoThanks GPT
- alanwreath 4mo agohttps://archive.is/DI4Cq https://archive.is/DI4Cq And the verge is covering it too: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-jd-power-ranking-ai-automated-mistakes https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...
- stogot 4mo ago[flagged]
- lysace 4mo ago[flagged]
- vvpan 4mo agoHumans?
- lysace 4mo agoFord isn't run by humans?
- aspenmayer 4mo agoHN is part of YC, which are VC. What are VCs if not market activists?
- conartist6 4mo agofoot, meet gun
- T-8805-5 4mo ago[dead]
- tossitawayplz 4mo agoI would literally be homeless before I went back to a company that fired me to replace me with AI, then asked me to come back.
- deadbabe 4mo agoHow about if they doubled your previous salary?
- Tade0 4mo agoI guess the crux of the issue is that there's no guarantee that the company would not find a different, equally harebrained, reason to lay GP off.
- fred_is_fred 4mo agoThere's no guarantee in any job that you won't be laid off.
- Tade0 4mo agoTrue, but if you already know that a given company tends to fire on a whim, you'd be excused to feel a little bit distrustful.
- jayd16 4mo agoFor how long?
- bigstrat2003 4mo agoI wouldn't go back, regardless of salary offer, unless I didn't have any other jobs lined up. If I'm not employed than any job (even a bad one) beats being unemployed. But if I was employed, I wouldn't go back to a job where they laid me off for stupid reasons, no matter how much money they offered.
- ryan_n 4mo agoOr maybe people just have bills to pay and/or want to support their families. A little critical thinking and empathy goes a long way...
- cryo32 4mo agoQuite frankly I’m enjoying the schadenfreude on this one.
- idontwantthis 4mo agoI hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.
- zuzululu 4mo agoThey did not. I been saying for decades that software devs form a union. It's just so strange any other profession have unions or bodies that protect their job against this sort of practice. if software devs were lawyers then AI would've been banned
- cbg0 4mo agoYou can negotiate your salary even without a union. Also being part of a union doesn't guarantee you won't be laid off because of AI.
- breakpointalpha 4mo agoA union absolutely can and should protect workers from frivolous layoffs. If the company tries to layoff 10% "due to AI" the remaining 90% can strike. History is full of union solidarity vs idiotic management.
- reactordev 4mo agoThis is going to be the norm across the board as the models have failed to live up to the hype. I do think LLMs and agents and all are great at helping you through tough problems but we aren’t there yet on getting them to do all the work while we just architect and design. Again, it’s close, and for your use cases you might be there already but for low level and big corporate lift and shifts, it’s not there yet. I have agents, agents of agents, and I still find myself having to carve big chunks of my project off and feed it to the dogs because it’s garbage code. (GLM-5.2)
- K0balt 4mo agoDocumentation driven development is your friend here. 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code. The code usually comes out optimal, clean, and bug free (after passing tests) and. Suuuuuper well documented lol. It’s human in the loop over and over again tho
- KronisLV 4mo ago> 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code Some might hate that writing code (which they enjoy) is turning into that, others might doubt the efficacy of doing that and the claims about it working so well. Personally, I’d say that docs help as long as they’re meaningful and not too long (even AI tools have limited context), but you probably also want to codify what you can into code. For example I wrote a tool in Go and goja called ProjectLint (not public yet but anyone can do that in a week) where you write custom rules in regular ECMAScript that can check whatever you want - code conventions across languages, project structure and architecture and all the stuff that goes under “In this project, we do X but don’t do Y” that just telling an LLM about (or colleagues) will be worth nothing (even memories and focus are limited), instead CI gates that. I guess I reinvented a simplified and stack-agnostic version of ArchUnit but whatever, it works for me and I can use the same tool in Python and Java projects and elsewhere as well as parallelize all the read only checks and run sequentially the potential-write ones that might auto-fix stuff.
- vasac 4mo agoThe first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
- shimman 4mo agoThe dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.
- Legend2440 4mo agoDon't talk like a perpetual labor machine wouldn't be awesome if you had it. You just want to make sure you have it, and not your boss using it against you.
- shimman 4mo agoThere was a reason why the phrase "perpetual" was used, to invoked how unrealistic perpetual energy machines are and how futile it is for the human race to chase such dreams. How many tens of trillions of capital have been incinerated in reducing the quality of life for workers compared to actually uplifting them?
- Legend2440 4mo agoSure, you'll need energy inputs, you're not going to beat thermodynamics. But we're not capturing even 0.01% of available energy yet, there's a lot of room to grow. Industrial capitalism has been fantastic for quality of life. Here I am sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing HN during a workday, instead of slaving away in the fields as a peasant farmer. I'll take more automation please.
- vvpan 4mo agoSteer towards that Fully-Automated Luxury Communism.
- feverzsj 4mo agoAnd they just go back to work like nothing happened?
- dethos 4mo agoThat's the interesting question. Are expert engineers willing to go back after being treated that way or knowing what happened to others?
- stagger87 4mo ago> The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom — and fear — that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn’t replace experience. I'm not sure this story is illustrative of that, when you have a VP of engineering saying “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.” He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.
- rapind 4mo ago> He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers. Yup. They jumped the gun. Now they need to hire them back so they can loot their expertise and never hire another senior. I'm not saying this will work, but it's pretty obviously the plan.
- jvanderbot 4mo agoMaybe. That's one interpretation. A lot of hiring/firing decisions get read through the lens of AI, hard pro or hard con. Reality is always a mixed bag. They certainly will want to try to build up a better automated pipeline, but the question is can they, and can they cost-effectively vs hiring a few more people?
- neilv 4mo agoPre-AI version: Oops, you laid off the higher-salaried people without having them train their replacements, so bring them back, long enough to do that. Now, that training[*] will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires. Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be the most cost-effective way to operate/oversee the AI and do whatever it can't. [*] edit: originally typed "replacement" when I meant to type "training"
- teiferer 4mo ago
- gm678 4mo ago> Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product. Clearly a lot of careful thought went into their strategy of using AI and firing engineers.
- nosioptar 4mo agoHad a couple of Taurusii back in the day. 100% ended up having a problem where the power steering pump shit the bed because a plastic piece in the pressurized side failed. Paid to repair one, oem pump broke on drive home due to same plastic piece under pressure. My point being, Ford's had shit for brains for decades. Its a fucking wonder any of their vehicles make it out of the parking lot.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI had a Focus in the 2000's that was the most reliable car I ever owned. Rust got it eventually but it still started instantly at any temperature and ran like a new car.
- nosioptar 4mo agoIf I had a nickel for every broken focus door handle I've fixed... (There's a weak pin that always breaks.)
- SoftTalker 4mo agoLOL yeah I had that too. Forgot about it. Cheap fix was an aftermarket door handle from Amazon or RockAuto or someplace like that. I'm not saying it was a perfect car. The interior was cheap, the sheet metal seemed to be recycled tin cans, and it definitely showed its age by the time I got rid of it. But that engine and drivetrain seemed to be bulletproof.
- nosioptar 4mo ago
- skywhopper 4mo agoThe folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.
- edoceo 4mo agoNice thing about the C-suite is that you get authority and compensation without responsibility. You just claim responsibility when things are good. And when bad, the underlings who have responsibilities but no authority take the heat.
- LNSY 4mo agoAnd this is why the C-suite is the single best target for replacement by AI.
- LNSY 4mo agoThe only job AI's are capable are doing is the role of executive. I think we should replace every C-Suiter with AI.
- jayanaka98 4mo agoThe reason AI fails in Industry is that SKILL.md or other knowledge-injection methods do not guarantee compliance. AI just thinks it "knows better".
- Tade0 4mo agoA friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times. I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.
- Kiln6125 4mo agoPersonally, for me that represents job security. Having a human with a high level of domain knowledge in the loop seems pretty required to get any meaningful results.
- dominotw 4mo agosolution is to always do what it has seen in training data and how it was RL. But ai companies dont tell you that. so you have to reverse engineer its training and stick to to that. These are no general purpose machines. They are shipping a subset mindset not general intelligence like they want us to belive .
- EliRivers 4mo agoA friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times. It's a model of language, yes? Trained on a big corpus of text. I have read a lot of stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and inevitably they did it. Like, lots. Far more than stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and they then didn't do it. If I'm reading a story or account of something, and it's really hammered home that they've been told not to do something, it's kind of inevitable that they will then do that. I'm not even an LLM and I noticed that's the way these things usually go. So is an LLM just doing what it's been trained to do? Sometimes in the stories and accounts, there's a whole lot of time and tension before the bad thing happens, but that's just part of the fun.
- snootypoot 4mo agoamazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.
- arjie 4mo agoHow interesting. So a Ford car is now more reliable than a Toyota soon after purchase but Toyota didn’t fire anyone and Ford fired, implemented automated reviews, and rehired. So their process didn’t bring them back to neutral. It placed them above the traditionally reliable manufacturers. So maybe the key is firing everyone and then rehiring the good guys after you implement automated systems. Though I’m somewhat surprised. I didn’t expect Porsches to top a reliability measure. I thought they were in the “fancy but unreliable” bin. Interesting.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoThe Porsche 911 is pretty reliable, it's basically the same car they've made for over 50 years so they've got it figured out.
- jeffbee 4mo agoThis seems like a totally crazy statement. The only common thing that a current and 50-year-old 911 share is that there are six holes in the engine block.
- LgWoodenBadger 4mo agoAnd the engine is behind the rear axle.
- realo 4mo agoMaybe... but the re-hiring probably involved very substantial salary raises for the re-hirees. An expensive process.
- brianmckenzie 4mo agoI've had two different Porsches, a Cayman S and a Macan. Neither gave me a day of trouble. You just have to do all the maintenance, which is obviously expensive.
- jeffffff 4mo agoporsche is part of volkswagen, so it's not that surprising that they're decently reliable. i probably see 10 porsches for every ferrari, lamborghini, etc that i see, and i think a large part of that is reliability - even absurdly rich people don't want to deal with an unreliable car when there is a more reliable alternative.
- Sanzig 4mo agoSetting aside how shortsighted it is to fire your employees to replace them with AI, Ford also screwed up by firing the wrong employees. LLMs work best in the hands of experienced senior engineers who can work at a high level of abstraction because they already understand all the pieces underneath. In a sense, using an LLM agent is like providing instructions to a very smart, very quick junior who despite being brilliant has some blind spots and lacks institutional knowledge. That's something that seniors excel at, so by firing your seniors you've fired the people best positioned to make full use of LLMs.
- Legend2440 4mo agoWho says Ford fired any employees? The article doesn't.
- avgDev 4mo ago"Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" In order to rehire someone they must laid off or fired? You don't rehire new employees?
- Legend2440 4mo agoFarther down it clarifies that only some of them were former employees, and others were poached from other companies: >Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers And not all former employees were laid off. Senior 'greybeards' have many job opportunities elsewhere and often leave for better offers.
- nomel 4mo ago> many of them former employees > And not all former employees were laid off. Thanks for confirming that the article does say that Ford did, indeed, fire and rehire some employees.
- 4mo ago
- rvz 4mo agoSo "AGI" was not found internally at Ford and they didn't know they needed actual engineers to keep the lights on? It's OK to just say that the plan was to rehire back the engineers for far less compensation.
- mhurron 4mo ago350 of how many laid off? If 350 is a fraction of the total replaced with AI that's going to be counted as a win for AI reducing costs, they just were a little to ambitious with the initial round. That'll be counted as a learning experience because we're early in the replace people with unintelligent tools process.
- K0balt 4mo agoThis is exactly the idiotic use case of AI coming back to bite them. The short sighted gains (and I’ll assume that they are chasing quarterlies as usual) are to be had by firing most of the junior engineers, keeping the seniors because with AI they can n* their productivity. Basically you can fire 2x junior engineers for every senior engineer you keep. But the senior engineers are the keystone here, and without juniors eventually becoming senior engineers you’ll eventually be screwed. But, that’s a problem for the -next- c-suite gang… so…
- neversupervised 4mo agoThis just feeds a certain narrative and allows people to take exactly the wrong conclusion. Just because there’s some uncertainty at the edge, it doesn’t change where things are going.
- migueldeicaza 4mo agoI do wonder if the rehiring was just at a lower compensation level. "Welcome back, you are now two levels down"
- simonw 4mo agoThis HN headline is editorialized, the Bloomberg headline is "Ford AI Hiccups Push Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Inspectors". The editorialized headline is also misleading: "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" - there is nothing in the original story that suggests Ford were expecting AI to "train juniors". And since the Bloomberg headline is behind a paywall the editorialized headline is most of what we have to go on. This Verge story would be a better link: "Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems" https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-jd-power-ranking-ai-automated-mistakes https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-... And the crucial detail: nothing indicates Ford laid off the 350 people who were re-hired. It looks to me like it could be bringing back people who retired.
- justonepost2 4mo agoCope
- simonw 4mo agoWhat exactly am I coping with here? The headline gives the impression that Ford fired 350 engineers and tried to get AI to train the replacements and then re-hired them when that didn't work. That impression is false, which means we're wasting time having conversations about it. (The top comment thread on here right now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675092 - starts with the assumption that Ford execs made the mistake of laying off 350 people and then discusses if they got good severance packages etc. - here's the best comment I've seen calling that out so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675486)
- qsxfthnkp2322 4mo agoManagement at these USA companies could give zero fucks about you. It’s a disease that has spread throughout all of capitalism. But that’s USA 250 years.
- SE5pc3JhY2lzdA 3mo agoAs opposed to? The government? union leaders? Nobody really cares about you, unless you are a friend or your family.
- khriss 4mo agoInterestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playing with people's lives via layoffs, since it's the 'in' thing to do. The incentives are huge on the upside and zero on the downside for them.
- cyanydeez 4mo agocorporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.
- nekusar 4mo agoYep. I'm prosperous because god/market deems me worthy.
- yifanl 4mo agoIf they gave the engineers appropriate severance packages, then they're at least out that much as a stupidity tax, but that's probably the most we can expect as far as consequences for the exec suite.
- mikepurvis 4mo agoPresumably they're also out the top 10-20% of talent which immediately found jobs elsewhere and would have little interest in returning to Ford to work under such incompetent management.
- calgoo 4mo agoThey could always be hired as contractors at x5 the cost for a fixed contract over 2 years to train the ai.
- 4mo ago
- small_model 4mo agoAI is a great revolutionary tool for work, but it is still a tool and needs humans to drive it. Obviously companies heard the promise of "Replace your large headcount expense with cheap tokens" and creamed their pants. Its funny to see them walk back, it will be at least a few years if not more before it replaces humans fully (and will need another breakthrough)
- bwfan123 4mo agoBack in dot-com, there used to be a website called f'ed company that chronicled the dot-com dead pool. This time around there needs to be a similar website that records AI walk backs so it helps the mgmt class not make stupid decisions.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dolphinscorpion 4mo agoThey will try it again next year, after they slap an AI camera on the rehired people.
- prescriptivist 4mo agoSorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...
- foxyv 4mo agoThere are two kinds of knowledge. There is explicit knowledge which can be codified easily in markdown files or a wiki. Then there is tacit knowledge which is mostly encoded in the experience of an organization's individuals. Explicit knowledge is like the tip of a giant institutional knowledge iceberg.
- HPsquared 4mo agoMaybe they could use a distillation process. Have the AI prompt the senior engineers repeatedly (don't do this). Like squeezing the oil from olives!
- bobson381 4mo agoOne of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/communities-of-practice/the-soul-of-maintaining-a-new-machine/3?redirect-latest=1 https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...
- foxyv 4mo agoI think that this is doable. Similar to having a new employee shadow a more experienced one and observe, you could implement a sort of program where AI shadows experienced employees and asks questions when they do something it doesn't understand. But this is difficult to implement since AI doesn't have a body to follow someone around and it would take immense amounts of compute to do so using telemetry and cameras. You would literally be spying on employees 24x7 for weeks at a time with the express goal of replacing them someday.
- khuey 4mo ago> You would literally be spying on employees 24x7 for weeks at a time with the express goal of replacing them someday. Isn't this almost exactly what Zuck is trying to do at Meta? https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/meta-start-capturing-employee-mouse-movements-keystrokes-ai-training-data-2026-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
- josefritzishere 4mo agoThe impression I'm getting over this huge number of AI roll backs is that AI is useful in some circumstances, but it's just not a cure-all. It is expensive, and increasingly so, straining the ROI scenario. My expectation is that the use-case for successful AI implementations is ultimately going to be narrow.
- nova22033 4mo agoWere these engineers fired and replaced with AI? Article implies they brought back retired engineers.
- Noaidi 4mo agoIf AI thinks so much faster than humans. does it age fater than humans? and in that case, does AI have dementia already?
- meerita 4mo agoThis is excellent news. I'm glad some executives are starting to understand that AI will never replace an engineer with knowledge. AI is just a tool that needs guidance. If they put people without knowledge in charge of the machine gun, they will never be able to hit any target. Junior and mid-level engineers will never become super engineers by telling AI, "Just do this."
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- exabrial 4mo agoFor those of us who lived through the "Offshoring" Craze of the mid-2000s, this has the exact same arc. Corp CEOs / CFOs golf buddies coouldn't stop yapping about how much they saved paying people less by offshoring. So step 1, they fire a bunch of people and send work overseas, driving up their financial metrics for 5-6 quarters until their staff and their organization finally break at stage 2. Turns out cultural and communication barriers are things we haven't really figured out how to communicate across efficiently, and that only a handful of people are truly rockstars at it; others just aren't cut out for it. Stage 3 anyone that is competent to get another job already left, leaving a smoldering shell of company that dies by attrition at stage 5.
- calgoo 4mo agoThis is still going on, just that they try to keep a few internal tech people. The problem is the incentive for the internal people to stay as they, in theory, should not be making any changes just help out.
- graemep 4mo agoThe solution is clearly to use an AI to communicate across cultural barriers. It can do translation too so your offshore workforce does not even need to speak your language which will cut costs even more. /s
- mathattack 4mo agoYou’ve hit on a big reason - short term gains. The partners at Accenture, Infosys and the rest circle the execs at old industry companies. The companies start performing worse, though nothing some accounting gimmicks can’t cover. Then they have a very bad quarter, enough that it will ruin their fiscal year. Fingers start pointing, and talk turns to “belt tightening” and “turning fixed costs to variable.” All of a sudden the proposals from Big Consulting that provide savings bankable this fiscal year sound very good. It doesn’t take long for the cracks to show: - Not enough program/project management. - An intuition that service dropped but no good metrics. - Retrain the outsourcers after the first team quit. - Inability to size new projects. - Shadow IT departments form in the business units. - The outsourcers don’t care about things like vendor consolidation or holding other vendors feet to the fire. All of this might still be worth it if it’s done strategically to improve a chronically underperforming IT department. It’s rarely effective when rushed to cover up poor performance of the core business.
- moomin 4mo agoI feel like "Company ditches staff in favour of AI" stories currently fit into two categories 1) The CEO is actually ditching staff for other reasons like falling revenue, but "going AI first" sounds a lot better 2) The CEO is making a mistake.
- bonesss 4mo agoMy speculation is straightforward: adding “AI” to the sticker ups the share price, dropping headcount improves the balance sheets upping the share price, and doing both at once could be perfect for a CEO bonus or strategic board member sell off.
- tamimio 4mo ago> Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it I would rephrase it as it’s only as good as you know what you are doing. Even if the trained input is good, keeping it to scope and making sure it delivers without workarounds requires a human brain who have the past experience.
- jmartrican 4mo agoFord Authority also covered this story: https://fordauthority.com/2026/06/ford-unified-operations-hired-back-engineers-to-improve-quality/ https://fordauthority.com/2026/06/ford-unified-operations-hi...
- gorbachev 4mo agoSo...don't buy any Ford vehicles designed and/or manufactured in the last 8 months or so?
- maxothex 4mo ago[flagged]
- justonepost2 4mo agoAll the people happy about this are just holding back the progress of our species smh. won’t someone think of the lightcone!
- flowerthoughts 4mo agoI wonder which of the management consulting companies caused this fire/rehire experiment.
- dessimus 4mo agoIt's not like those consultants recommended something the CEO and Board didn't want to hear. They are paid to be the shield that blocks the arrows from shareholders. If they can get paid twice, once to recommend laying off 350 engineers and again to later recommend refilling 350 engineers all the better.
- breakpointalpha 4mo agoUS software engineers need a union. If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.
- d_silin 4mo agoThis should be way higher.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoThis is a boom and bust industry. Projects come and go and only to a lesser extent if you work at a software company. I would recommend IT/server administration as that is a constant business need, if you prefer stability with more limited upside.
- SE5pc3JhY2lzdA 3mo agoUnions add another layer of bureaucracy to make small changes. This is the exact opposite of how software and technology works.
- GL26 4mo agoProblem with thinking you can replace your employees with AI, this is not the case. This is like thinking you could replace your NASA engineers with IBM computers in the 60s. The AI revolution changes drastically the way people work, and empower them, they multiply their productivity, but they never ever replace domain expertise, and business logic.
- csours 4mo agoI've lost my ability to believe that things will feel 'normal' at work. I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
- WarmWash 4mo agoFord 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.
- Schiendelman 4mo agoYeah, it looks like this wasn't AI related. I hope yours grows to be the top comment!
- mrandish 4mo agoYes, it seems like many are missing the crucial aspect of the timing. The mistake was realized 3 years ago and auto design and manufacturing process lead times are long. Plus the occasion for the story was 'Ford returning to the top of the JD Power Quality Survey rankings', so that's another 6-18 months of reporting lag. That puts the original layoff mistakes being made 5 to 8 years ago. I don't know when the "MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots" you mention were implemented but another possibility is the Ford PR team saw that 'AI Backlash' stories are currently trending and opportunistically focused on that to explain a positive news event which likely had many causes. IMHO, we should view these 'AI Backlash' themed stories as no more valid than the 'AI Downsizing' themes they previously seized on to justify layoffs they wanted to do anyway.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago>Yes, it seems like many are missing the crucial aspect of the timing. First day on the internet propaganda-discourse machine? If the article doesn't support your preconceived biases that's no problem, assume the title is true on it's face and comment reinforcing it. If neither of them support you then attack them. Welcome to internet comment sections.
- dang 4mo agoSubmitted title was "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors", which is not what the article says. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (We've reverted to the article's title now) p.s. Article titles are sometimes rotated by the publications, in which case the submitter usually followed the guidelines but it takes time for us to catch up.
- draginol 4mo agoThis is what we are finding a lot with the "AI normies". Because the AI responses are so confident new users of it think it must be correct. AI is confidently wrong a lot. And so you can imagine a lot of execs thinking the AI can do a lot more than it really can.
- catlifeonmars 4mo agoWhat does it mean to “train the AI”?
- motbus3 4mo agoThey should charge at least 30% more because now they know that they can't keep production going
- niko323 4mo agoYeah, but they are short-term re-hires. Once they "get encoded" it will be bye Felica: "Ford just wants to first seasoned engineers walked out before their decades of knowledge could be encoded into automated workflows." https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-let-ai-take-over-then-brought-them-back https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-l...
- namuol 4mo agoOver-hiring during the bygone era of free money is now seeing an overcorrection. AI is a true if small part of it, but mainly it’s an excuse that doubles as posturing to the investor hive-mind.
- wartywhoa23 4mo agoI hope those engineers demanded 2x higher salaries this time.
- random3 4mo ago(shooting from the hip) What if the 350 engineers had built a company instead? Union-like efforts could focus on creating new companies (having the "union" is about ensuring a certain level of organizational knowledge, like YCombinator creates a structure around startups) I think companies would more careful about how fast and lose they operate, if firing may mean having to contract with a 3rd party.
- jhack 4mo agoThis is going to happen more and more. AI is a tool that should make your employees more efficient not replace them outright. And if it doesn't make your employees better? I guess AI isn't applicable to your business then. I can see a lot of companies coming to this realization over the coming months and years.
- gibbitz 3mo agoExactly. 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.
- xyproto 4mo agoOh how the wheels have turned.
- mathattack 4mo agoInteresting as companies like Ford like to show they’re on the leading edge of AI, but do they really have the capabilities and 10x engineers?
- freeopinion 4mo agoI have a simple mind. I think of a company with 100 employees building a dozen houses at a time. That company could replace a six-person framing crew with a two-person, one-robot team as an experiment. They could do various experiments to see if there was a better option here. It would be at the expense of four employees. A company with 1000 employees that builds 100 houses at a time might cut a dozen employees to create three robot crews. A 10,000-employee company that builds 1000 houses at a time would still only need to experiment with a handful of crews, affecting only 20-30 or so employees. I marvel that a company has let themselves grow so out of touch with their business that they can't understand the impact of changes without carnage at this scale.
- I_dream_of_Geni 4mo agoOh grand! And I bet that these rehires are going to be FULLY emotionally invested and fully loyal for the future. just stupid all the way around...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- aberrahmane_b 4mo ago[flagged]
- willmadden 4mo agoWhoopsie, quick, let's boost our quarterly bonus by 50% for being bold and experimental.
- vvpan 4mo agoDo we have any hard data about AI improving any business metrics yet? I am not skeptical that it might, but I have yet to see anything.
- SwtCyber 4mo agoFunny how almost every wave of automation starts the same way: "we're gonna cut headcount," but ends with "we're just shifting roles" AI is pretty good at scaling existing knowledge, but if the actual knowledge is just in the head of an engineer who can hear that a press is acting up, the model doesn't really have much to go on
- ChaoStatiX 4mo ago[dead]
- murphomatic 3mo agoGet 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.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3mo agoNah, 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
- number6 3mo agoOh, it solves two problem at once: overpaying wages and overdelivery of quality. You just have to get the input coefficient right. The least amount of acceptable quality with the least amount of costs is the sweet spot. /s
- rowyourboat 3mo agoYou're being sarcastic, but...
- xantronix 3mo agoYou 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.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoWhy would you assume that?
- 3mo ago
- rmason 3mo agoBack 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.
- kortilla 3mo agoEbbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
- AceJohnny2 3mo agoIt'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. (most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)
- pmontra 3mo agoAnd 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.
- AceJohnny2 3mo agoeh, 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.
- zkmon 3mo agoTalk about making a huge sale to a car sales-man and totally pawning them. Tech has evolved into next-gen "selling science".
- htoqwiejqlekr 3mo agoWhy are American tech-bros such loud-mouthed bullshitters ? Reminds me of this disaster at Toyota, https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-woven-planet-c5579beb https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/toyota-bet-technology-wov...
- zkmon 3mo agoAmerican 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.
- onetokeoverthe 3mo ago[dead]
- bartread 3mo agoWell, 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.
- dotcoma 3mo agoAmongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.
- bombela 3mo agoNot yet perhaps.
- moomoo11 3mo agosoon agents will live for us the ~game~ matrix
- tiew9Vii 3mo agoThe 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.
- tasuki 3mo ago> 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.
- Herbstluft 3mo ago
- noisy_boy 3mo ago> while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems Our AI sucked but that doesn't mean less AI. We need better AI, not humans.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446
- gnabgib 3mo agoTune your bot, this is the 3rd time (at least) you've duped this dupe and deleted. You still have this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48704222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48704222
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[flagged]
- oxonia 3mo ago* Backfired * :-D
- Alien1Being 3mo agoHow do you fix a Ford ? Buy a BYD / Xiaomi / Zeekr / Xpeng...
- downrightmike 3mo agoSAd thing is Toyota owns Ford and they have gotten very far from Demming practices
- Incipient 3mo agoI 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".
- KronisLV 3mo ago> 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.
- A_D_E_P_T 3mo ago> I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way 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. 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.
- aytigra 3mo agoI've made it write a /status-line thing to display context tokens in the status line and also a hook to stop and ask to continue or compact whenever it reaches 250k tokens. For subscription I have also made it stop at 90% usage so Claude chat is not unusable between coding sessions. The greatest addition so far.
- aussieguy1234 3mo agoI'd rather not have a vibe coded car.
- arjie 3mo agoThis 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.
- al_borland 3mo agoThe 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 later, not to mention that trust that erodes with these events. 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? 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.
- arjie 3mo agoWell, 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.
- rezaprima 3mo agolately I saw a post [1] about Doorman Fallacy [2]. I strongly believe this is another example of that. [1] https://rozumem.xyz/posts/17 https://rozumem.xyz/posts/17 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorman_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorman_fallacy
- draw_down 3mo ago[dead]
- kevinten10 3mo ago[flagged]
- jasonkester 3mo agoI’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. Be sure to have “updated your rate schedule” recently, which explains why you’re now twice as expensive as before. 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.
- barnabee 3mo ago"We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers" The defining motto of the corporate world
- grebc 3mo agoChange engineers to employees and you’re spot on.
- thot_experiment 3mo agoManagers believe in the fungibility of engineers and do not understand the concept of institutional knowledge. Always has been.
- pammf 3mo agoAI is here to stay. Like it or not. We will still see several reports of over adoption, mistakes, regression… all will only serve to learn, refine, and hopefully regulate. 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.
- hdgvhicv 3mo agoThe value of the ai firms isn’t in building a useful tool to increase productivity of your staff by 20%. It’s not an electric drill. It’s to replace 99% of your staff. In every industry. Ai will be a useful tool, but either companies like OpenAI are massively overvalued or the economy will completely vanish at a high speed and their valuation will be meaningless.
- frgturpwd 3mo agoThe world might slowly realize that a lot of generative goodness and direction is the result of our limitations and constraints as builders, not necessarily our velocity.
- horizion2025 3mo agoThe article is not about generative AI at all.
- pvaldes 3mo agoTranslated: This AI is still undercooked, it need more humans to train it, so we can fire them again.
- horizion2025 3mo agoPredictably, now office workers and engineers (including here) will say "What I always knew - LLM's can't think, be creative, don't have nuance. My job is safe!". I predict the article will be quoted again and again at lunch tables and family gatherings. However, one should be especially careful when something confirms ones own biases. Firstly, the "AI" discussed here is not LLM's. They are talking about visual quality inspection systems. There's been many other articles in the press: Ford's new quality automation is computer-vision defect inspection, built on IBM's visual-inspection tech, iPhones photographing parts on the line, running since 2020. By most reporting it works fine, pushing detection rates from ~70% manual to 99%+. This is classical CNN at work doing the job of quality inspectors... completely unrelated to desk-work by an engineer or what LLM's do... yet that's exactly the inference the headline invites (and many here in the comments seem to be making). The timing only underlines it: rehiring is presented as the cleanup. Apparently the rehirings started 3 years ago, so whatever it's undoing is older still and therefore unlikely to be LLM driven. While ChatGPT did come out 3.5 years ago it seems doubtful someone would fire people left and right the moment they saw the first ChatGPT... only to then regret almost it immedaitely and rehire them - all within the span of 6 months. This further supports that the article is about years-old automation bet being quietly unwound, and is completely unrelated to mainstream discussion about AI and jobs today. Also, 350 rehires is just noise. Ford is shedding thousands right now: plant pauses, battery-plant retooling, projected restructuring in the 8–13k range. Finally, as always with corporate announcements... ask why an internal staffing decision is even a press story. To me this feels like PR (a nice feel good story that ties into to a subject people discuss a lot now). It takes the sting out of all their announced layoffs. There's probably also internal company politics to it (someone suggested rehirings and now want to say 'see what a great idea this was' and maxx it out).
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- wookmaster 3mo agoIt’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 ?
- wanderlust123 3mo agoThese execs suffer from over confidence in their own abilities. Thats partly why they get so far.
- elzbardico 3mo agoMost executives are complete imbeciles when it comes to the actual work their organizations do.
- raverbashing 3mo agoThat sounds obvious, but here's the thing: that's what a tautologically good manager does. They delegate and hire subordinates to do a job. It is by design that the communication won't involve 100% of the work done You hire people to do a job, not to be a remote controlled puppet
- nathan_compton 3mo agoDelegation does not have to be because of a lack of knowledge. In fact, it seems like if one delegates for this reason its probably a sign of trouble to come. We delegate because of lack of time. I guess its impossible for an executive to know ALL the details of the work they delegate, but I'd be willing to wager that executives who understand the details function better in the long run. It certainly isn't tautological that executives be imbeciles about the businesses they run.
- therobots927 3mo agoMaybe it’s not a binary? Maybe managers should both be able to delegate AND occasionally put in the effort to learn how things are working on the ground? Otherwise after about 3 layers of hierarchy all of the signal is gone in a massive game of telephone, leaving high level executives completely clueless.
- conductr 3mo agoI hope they demanded salary of 2x or more to return
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- onemoresoop 3mo agoI was thinking the same. Sadly they don’t have the leverage to pull that but hope Im wrong.
- PaulKeeble 3mo agoQuite a few of the top talent has been picked up by their competitors, whatever they do they are not going to restore their team. The psychological safety has been broken and that will hamper their productivity forever.
- etchalon 3mo agoEveryone thinks AI can do everyone else's job, but not theirs.
- LNSY 3mo agoThe only job AI's can really replace are in the C-Suite.
- aitchnyu 3mo agoTangential, what is this "JD Power Initial Quality Survey" flaunted in this article?
- llm_nerd 3mo agoProblems reported in the first 90 days of ownership. Overwhelming minor niggling complaints like a piece of trim making a noise or even just misunderstandings about systems. American automakers love crowing about that survey because it's easy to do well on. And then the car falls to shit six months later, but hey, it held together for the first 90 days so all good.
- frontiersummit 3mo agoA survey is sent to car buyers with a huge number of questions related to their satisfaction. Automakers, Tier-1 suppliers, and probably others get to buy this data to mine for market research. At a past role with a Tier-1, we bought part of the dataset. A quick regression showed that satisfaction was strongly correlated with buyer age, and there was very little signal otherwise. (Young people with overtime work and daycare pickups don't respond to surveys unless they have a serious axe to grind while retirees aren't so constrained)
- polytely 3mo agothey should try and replace some executives with AI, seems like there is way more room for improvement there.
- Avicebron 3mo agoAt the very least they should be held accountable for their actions. Weird how ruining people's lives is rewarded and celebrated with bonuses.
- rileymat2 3mo agoIt makes sense if ruining lives is good for the company, firing and layoffs that are /necessary/ are hard for anyone with empathy. They should be rewarded for doing that.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- micromacrofoot 3mo agoarguably one of the best cases for AI, it can definitely spin anything to shareholders
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoMaybe not. You're absolutely right, Charles Schwab, we should cut 10% of our workforce tomorrow!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- contingencies 3mo ago[flagged]
- thephyber 3mo ago
- napierzaza 3mo ago[dead]
- moshegramovsky 3mo agoI 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.
- FromTheFirstIn 3mo agoWhile being slow to pass judgment or disregard an approach is a valuable trait in a senior Eng, I think 3 years is plenty of time to wait for proof of concept to pan out. It’s not panning out, it doesn’t seem on the verge of panning out, and soon the real cost is going to be passed on and the subsidies will end. LLMs see ripe to be the new IDEs, but not the new Engineers
- softwaredoug 3mo agoThe gray beards were always least threatened by AI. It’s the junior market that’s getting decimated.
- jackkora 3mo agoThis was too predictable! Maybe one day AI can wholesale replace roles, but not yet. If anything, we need more seasoned people that are experienced enough to steer AI and find mistakes it makes. Even when AI gets better, we will always need people who can troubleshoot AI itself.
- fielddakesdawn 3mo agoI was diagnosed with Parkinson disease in 2018, I had tremors and severe muscle weakness, I also had stiffness and balance issues. In 2022, I was introduced to PD-5 Ayurveda treatment program from Limitless Natural Wellness (Go to Limitlessnaturalwellness .com). I read some studies and immediately started on the PD-5 protocol; I noticed changes within months. I noticed the tremors stopped and my mobility improved; the body weakness and balance/gait issues also improved significantly. After completing the treatment, I am happy to report that my Parkinson disease is well under control. I feel very good and energetic these days!
- drivingmenuts 3mo agoI hope they got themselves a nice pay raise in the process. Ford will can them again as soon as it can.