Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901/

by latexr • 6 days ago

114 80 6 days ago

latexr• 6 days ago

https://archive.ph/20260715223901/https://www.theatlantic.co...

maxcb• 6 days ago

Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable.

The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.

I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.

Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.

pixl972• 6 days ago

Right, if you came out with a technology that worked just as well as LLMs at half the power people/companies would jump at it from the absolutely massive savings in hardware and power. AI companies are looking at every other method they can, and inventing new ones, none of them have worked as well as the transformer so far.

watwut4• 6 days ago

They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly.

A lot of that adoption is completely useless crap tho. Like ai in vacuum cleaner that ads absolutely nothing useful to anything. AI buttons intentionally at places I randomly click at, so that I am forced to open it. Google search that defaults to ai, so that we have to use it after then nerfed real search.

There are useful usages of LLMs. But huge bulk of the adoption is companies realizing they wont get investors money if they dont add ai button, it does not have to be useful.

SoftTalker• 6 days ago

Yeah there's a huge part of it that is "the investors want tulips, so we will plant tulips"

bryanlarsen• 6 days ago

Which happens for every new technology. Blue LED's in everything, capacitive buttons on everything, car buttons replaced with ipads, et cetera. Some of the random placements will prove out useful but most won't and will disappear.

JackSlateur3• 6 days ago

"They create value for many people"

They create value for many people because these people are not paying the cost of the tool;

tedggh• 6 days ago

I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere else, the productivity gains of the 100x group have little to no impact, or even a negative impact in some cases due to token overspending.

naveen992• 6 days ago

How about sole proprietors?

unknownfuture2• 5 days ago

Yup. We're just all re-learning Amdahl's Law.

andy_ppp5• 6 days ago

The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being redesigned around things billionaires want and what could be better for them than agents who replace all the white collar workers. You might think you’re safe from this, I don’t.

It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.

efields• 6 days ago

Yup. This is a policy problem.

throwaway323929• 6 days ago

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?

There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.

andy_ppp5• 6 days ago

I love AI and have built many projects with PyTorch and use LLMs daily for all my work and am building a startup in my spare time here: https://veloa.com/

Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.

pixl972• 6 days ago

"All everybody has to do is work and there will be no unemployment" --throwaway323929

Wow, you just solved economics!

Your argument is so incredibly reductive as to be nonsensical. The understanding of the allocation of capital is seemingly below grade school level. Even moreso, your understanding of the business cycle and how it interacts with governments and banks seems to be even more immature.

"manufacturing" didn't "go away", it moved to China so investors could capitalize on lax environmental laws and cheap labor. This engineered trade off of wealth had devastating results to massive parts of the US. On top of that, not every city can become Seattle. There isn't enough 'service economy' to go around and do that, especially as technology tends to concentrate wealth.

watwut4• 6 days ago

disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".

adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive,

Funny, the strategy of creating a company entirely dependent on mercy of another company, vulnerable to destruction with any simple change in TOS has been criticized on HN previously.

blinkbat• 6 days ago

it's really funny when people advise the fix for widespread sociological problems as "just become an entrepreneur and disrupt an industry bro"

inigyou4• 6 days ago

Did you adopt cryptocurrency in 2022? What were your results?

tharmas3• 6 days ago

If AI was utilized to eliminate the "shitty" jobs I'd be more enthusiastic about it. AI Robots that clean toilets so humans don't have to? Yes, please. (Yes, I get it that at present its probably still cheaper to employ a human wage slave to do this job -> the economic argument).

But at present AI seems to be just eliminating the junior programmer positions. That is, the apprentices. Once the more experienced engineers retire and die off who will replace them? AI? Who will have the knowledge and expertise to know what is crap software is and what isn't?

dofm6• 6 days ago

If any of you guys who use the phrase "neo-luddite" had any grasp of who the Luddites were, what their concerns were, and why such campaigns did what they did, you'd be getting ready to fight the future too. Whichever side you're on.

Maybe try to understand the future neo-Luddites before you have to fight them off. Libertarianism made your salaries good but it made them affordable semi-automatic weapons.

It seems to me that it's a bit more likely to be a Captain Swing than a Ned Ludd who emerges, anyway.

tharmas3• 6 days ago

I would argue that it is rent-seeking and asset accumulation that is a big problem. If the wealthy elite invested in production rather than consuming assets that would improve things. I don't share his politics but someone like Elon Musk at least invests in production whereas Blackrock is heavily into asset accumulation.

However, part of the problem of why the wealthy elite don't invest in production is because of the Petro-dollar. When the USA moved to the Petro-dollar that is when the economy started to go K-shaped. The British Empire had the same problem. The Chinese absolutely do NOT want to become the World's reserve currency as they know the same fate will befall them. Perhaps the USA should have listened to Keynes with his Bancor currency after all.

inigyou4• 6 days ago

They are neither investing in production nor consuming assets really. Any billionaire's yacht is an insignificant fraction of the world's resources. What matters is capital misallocation - they are investing in things that aren't productive that they think are productive and because they have too much money to invest, a too great share of society's resources are going towards those unproductive investments and productive activities are seeing shortages (e.g. the RAM crisis in PC and console gaming).

andy_ppp5• 6 days ago

1000% I honestly believe this is why the US is such an economic powerhouse - the rich there deploy capital in a way that assumes optimistic win-win outcomes when they invest in startups! In the UK the investors are trying to get much higher percentages at half the valuation and it’s terrible for everyone even the investors to have people with 25% the upside of US companies.

satvikpendem8• 6 days ago

Due to said industrial revolution, people's quality of life went up a thousandfold, same as in China and other countries now adopting capitalist principles.

andy_ppp5• 6 days ago

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not!

If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in the west if we can’t prevent the rich from inflating and buying all the assets you will own nothing and rent everything from them.

dofm6• 6 days ago

Not at all quickly. People's lives got immediately worse — well within a working lifetime. Life expectancy fell and infant mortality worsened for well over a hundred years. In particular the quality of life for people displaced by the second agricultural revolution degraded radically. It took until the early 1900s for people in cities in the west to be as healthy as a pre-industrial revolution farm worker.

neonstatic5• 6 days ago

The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time.

Europe has done this and look how advanced it is! While Americans talk to computers, we have flying cars, colonies on Mars, and even a cure for cancer. We just had the courage to go forward with that one socialist trick and look how it all worked out so wonderfully!

wonnage• 6 days ago

The top marginal tax rate in the US was 90% for most of the post WWII 20th century and that didn’t seem to hurt anyone. Invented transistors, went to the moon, built interstate highway system, mass construction of nuclear power, and became the world leader in manufacturing

Today we have low tax rates and can’t make chips, still working on that moon landing, can’t build high speed rail, can’t build nuclear, and are trying to tariff our way back to a manufacturing sector

andy_ppp5• 6 days ago

They haven’t even come close to taxing billionaires. Europe has loads of problems with bureaucracy and a lack of dynamism, I’m not persuaded a tax on billionaires is actually workable and suspect we will try WW3 instead…

xg152• 6 days ago

I mean, we do have affordable healthcare and usable trains (in some countries)...

vanuatu• 6 days ago

i dont think the comparison to traditional vc saas is very good

yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale

but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?

not to say that we shouldnt be investing in efficient models, but the efficiency comes after we create another mega shoggoth that we can make more efficient

simianwords• 6 days ago

you think companies are not focusing on efficiency but in reality they are both almost fully correlated. if you make a model more efficient, you get to make it do more reasoning and we know that the upper limit for reasoning is very very high.

we have real proof - GPT 5.6 Luna is 50% cheaper than 5.5. And this keeps repeating.

scotty794• 6 days ago

I can't imagine a successful civilization where non-computing energy usage isn't a rounding error.

nancyminusone• 6 days ago

I can. AI says it will solve all problems, like curing cancer. Suppose it does. Now there are no more problems and no reason to run the AIs, at which time computing energy will fall rapidly.

The alternative is that there will always be problems, and we could spend as much as possible trying to compute solutions, but they will not be found.

inigyou4• 6 days ago

Maybe we'll all upload ourselves to the Dyson sphere, so there will be nothing left but computation.

scotty794• 6 days ago

Now there are no more problems and no reason to run the AIs,

Are you sure we are talking about the same species?

srhtftw• 6 days ago

Approaching an AI version of https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

rglover• 6 days ago

It is, in some ways, but no matter your opinion, AI in engineering will continue unabated.

Wrote about this recently (from a vibe coding perspective) [1]. This applies to corporations, too, as they're betting their futures on fewer engineers, more AI.

[1] https://graybearding.bearblog.dev/they-got-something-on-the-...

erelong• 6 days ago

https://archive.ph/xo7RG

bilater• 6 days ago

https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2077216959930728889

Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.

selicos• 6 days ago

The month to month changes and improvements across free tools is noticeable. A number of skills SE and other roles are built on (or people started with) like more simple scripting and automation work are reachable by a BA with proper requirements, some background with development/coding, and access to AI tools.

It's a continuation of both low code development tools and the ongoing compaction of development groups through DevOps. AI is enabling (vibe) code development by non devs. It's enabling a BA or even direct business rep to take requirements into a prototype or example.

LLMs are out of the box and will continue developing. How/If you use them is up to you.

devin• 6 days ago

The rentier class needs a very strong correction. A lot of the conversation focused on what AI is and isn't is often just a proxy for frustration at the structural problems in our society which are in large part due to the inability for hard-working people to live good quality lives because of the incredible greed of the few.

Varelion• 6 days ago

WOAH! Communism in my homefront? That's an NSPM-7 violation there, buddy.

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

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