Setting 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.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who says Ford fired any employees? The article doesn't.

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avgDev 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Farther 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.

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foxyv 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think most of them were losses by attrition. Where they don't replace lost employees. That's usually the preferred method of downsizing if you can get away with it.