[Sanzig]

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.

[SwtCyber]

That's just the basics. To craft a prompt for a complex architectural task, you need to know the solution at least on an abstraction level. If you don't have the right system design in your head, no llm is gonna conjure it out of thin air

[red-iron-pine]

> 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.

aye.

I've posted this here at HN several times but I had my intern try to track down how many CVEs from a list of vulns we found were being exploited in the wild -- couple years ago, pre mythos that is. I also took the list to Copilot and Claude.

All 3 got different answers, albeit off by one or two. The intern told me at least he didn't know about X, which was far more useful. I later had him whip up a plan and some basic code to patch some of them, and the experience comparing his answer to Copilot was similar to before as well -- both mostly worked, but didn't, and in different ways, and mostly due to not knowing institutional best practices.

[0xpgm]

Even if they only fire the juniors and retain the seniors, they have effectively broken the pipeline that creates more seniors for the next few decades.

That is either betting on AI being better than humans then, or closure of the company.

[Legend2440]

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

[bluefirebrand]

What is the point of a comment like this?

This article may not mention anything but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Go search "Ford Layoffs 2025" and see for your self

It's not up for debate whether they did or didn't lay people off recently. They unambiguously did.

[reaperducer]

What is the point of a comment like this?

Deflection.

[red-iron-pine]

brand bots be active on HN as they are anywhere else

[avgDev]

"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]

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.

[nomel]

> 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.

[Legend2440]

The article does not say that any of the former employees had been fired.

You just want to believe in the narrative that companies who lay people off for AI will regret it. Narratives are dumb.

[nomel]

I genuinely don't care about any of this.

I'm just reading what's written:

> And not all former employees were laid off.

To me, this is very clearly saying that SOME were former employees that were laid off, just not ALL were.

[foxyv]

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.