As @simonw said, the Ford example isn’t a good one.

As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Here on HN and with the engineers I know, you see people claiming multiples of productivity on coding tasks. But you also see people complaining about drowning in slop PRs.

I think there’s a lot of confounding factors to these reports. The type of work matters a lot: bug fixing good, prototyping good, big legacy codebases not so much, but maybe good for increased understanding. The type of automation matters: aggressive autocomplete good, vibe coding bad, dark factory (vibe coding with fancy harnesses and auto-“correcting” eval loops) questionable.

And then finally, the perennial mistake our industry makes, which is to value speed of creation over maintenance costs. Personally, I think this is where AI-assisted engineering is going to fall down really hard, but the jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, there’s a really big spread in experiences with AI, that I think chalk up more to all this context rather than religion and belief. OP didn’t address it at all, which I think is a big gap in their essay, but I do think think they describe the executive-level mania pretty well.

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ethin 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out.

Anecdotally, AI-assisted engineering has helped me flesh out ideas or to learn extremely complicated APIs faster than trying to understand the docs (which usually are labyrinthine). MS COM ones, for example. I can go read the docs but it's easier to get a quick idea of what I need to do if I ask Claude to provide me an example of doing something specific with it, because MS's code samples (particularly their full ones in, say, the windows Desktop SDK repo) have always been annoying for me to wade through because I have to filter out a bunch of noise. I can't (and won't) try to guestimate "productivity" improvements though, but as an assistant AI has (somewhat) helped. I still do all the engineering work though. Along with it giving me tips on using more modern language features for languages like C++.

	▲	badsectoracula 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The Microsoft API docs are a special case where i'd say you pretty much need LLMs nowadays because after a bunch of document format conversions over the years they degraded massively. If you can find some MSDN CDs/DVDs from the early 2000s, the content is much better (and you can clearly see that the current docs are often missing descriptions and names for method arguments or even entire paragraphs).
	▲	inigyou 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		LLMs are good at natural language search. They're bad at everything else.