[simonw]

That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company.

You need to get through the Bloomberg paywall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-...

> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions. [...]

> “We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems” and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We brought back technical specialists” and “they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

(I made these points on the HN thread about it 3 weeks ago and got voted down and I'm still salty about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446#48675045 )

[daveguy]

> That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company.

Oh come on, Simon. Are your glasses so rose coloured they are opaque? They fired, and then re-hired because the AI couldn't do the job. They had to re-hire the quality folks. So, no, it wasn't LLMs, it was quality control -- which is a much more well established domain for automated systems. LLMs are a complete shitshow compared to industrial process automation.

Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short?

[simonw]

Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired.

Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here.

The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of LLMs do you think they were using back then?

> Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short

I think my record is looking pretty good here. I was early to the "LLMs are useful for writing code" thing, especially with the code interpreter pattern (both write and then execute code in a loop) which I now realize was our first hint at coding agents.

A couple of years ago I was one of the few people talking about what a natural fit LLMs were for the commandline - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/17/cli-language-models/ With hindsight maybe I should have doubled-down on that!

I've also written plenty about the weaknesses of these models - in terms of security in particular - which has aged well.

[daveguy]

3 years ago is about when the BS "AI can do anything!" hype started. So, it is not a misinterpretation, but an accurate assessment of the hype cycle. Exactly the kind of things managers are bumbling into because "AGI any day now!" for the last 3-4 years. GPT 3.5 was released May 2022. I'm curious how many AI project in industry have crashed and burned during this hype-Summer before the Winter. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that "software dark factory" you were gushing over a while back?

[simonw]

When I said "misinterpretation" here I was talking about people assuming that the Ford story was a simple case of "Ford fired their employees because they thought AI could replace them, then had to hire them all back again". That's not what happened.

A TON of AI projects have crashed and burned in the past few years. This stuff is really hard to adopt at an organizational level, much more so than for individuals.

I've been pretty consistent in saying that I think the dark factory stuff is interesting more as an exploration of the edges of what this stuff can do. It's a great way to highlight the question of how we can get agents to demonstrate their work without reviewing every line of their code.

I've released two pieces of software inspired by those ideas myself - Showboat https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/10/showboat-and-rodney/ and shot-scraper video: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/30/shot-scraper-video/

[aragilar]

I think it's not clear from the article why they left (e.g. could be anything from retirement to going to work at another firm/contracting to being fired to switching careers), and likely it's going to be a mix, plus not all were previous Ford employees. Similarly the "AI" isn't clearly defined (but like you I would be surprised if it were LLMs). I suspect though why the article exists (and a possible source of your downvotes) is signalling against "AI", which if Ford wants more expert employees (given their issues), is something Ford wants to present.