Nevermind that the update cycle seems to be 6-10 months for changes like "You can now reset your radio presets directly from the radio settings menu", while bugs like temperature control resetting to max cool every start-up never get fixed.
I would love to read about why that stuff is the way it is from the engineers, hmm that might be a good spelunking. I really must be missing something that makes it harder than I think it really should be.
CarPlay works great though.
It’s not just American cars
Carbage in, carbage out.
Leave it to Claude and you will.
The quality of software has overall decreased in the last decade. Testing is avoided, fixing bugs is done through redesigns.
and they are!
It's really annoying how at some ASIL levels you need 100% code coverage of unit tests. With AI, all you have to do is to get your agent to generate the tests! Likewise with all the MISRA C requirements. Need your cyclomatic complexity to be less than 10? It's just one prompt away! Now your spaghetti code can easily satisfy the safety requirements with much less effort.
If you want 100% coverage, you just autogenerate the test cases. LLMs can't properly check MISRA requirements, so they're really just a layer on top existing automated checkers. Same for complexity metrics, it doesn't get merged if it violates that (or it's a vendor dependency you won't touch anyway).
If you care about the spirit of the rules, they're not that big a difference. If you don't care, there are already ways to do this. In either case they're an incremental change, not what I'd call a godsend.
AI can't be held accountable, it shouldn't be writing the tests that determine whether car systems function correctly.
I hear this all the time. Why does it matter? Punishing a human for making a mistake does not prevent mistakes, nor does it undo the harm of the mistake. A human saying "my bad, I messed up" and an AI saying "my bad, I messed up" are equally worthless, in a functional sense.
I don't understand these words. Does "AI-native workflow" mean vibe coding?
I am now seeing a lot of roles asking for "AI-enabled engineers". And I am not sure what that means either. I am sort of afraid to ask because the answer will probably confuse me even more. Maybe it's my understanding of what LLMs are and how they work that makes these words mean very little to me.
To say nothing of their cars.
Man, the only advice I can give people is do not sacrifice time with your loved ones for a company that doesn’t give a shit. Your kid is only going to graduate once. Those family vacations are priceless in the long run. Hell, I take time off to hang out with my dogs now and then. The job can wait.
I've been down quite a few rabbit holes like that which made me think that a lot of major 'issues' appear to be meticulously engineered to protect a certain set of interests at the expense of others.
It's like; "Damm, houses are expensive, I'm going to live in a caravan" then you realize you can't park it on your own land without council approval... Then you find out that council will never approve due to it "negatively impacting the charm of the area."
Then you become homeless and realize that you can't legally put your tent anywhere and all the camping sites in the wilderness which you used to go to as a child now charge you fees to stay there and have rangers patrolling constantly (paid for by your own tax money you used to pay). Also, you can't get a job without an address and it's a literal catch-22... Then if you lose hope and start doing drugs, bad actors (possibly sponsored by foreign states) put fentanyl in the drug supply to finish you off. Then the media fully covers it up by distracting people with slop.
People are dying and it is covered up in the most targeted, effective way imaginable... They are not only killed, they are blamed for what is system failure on the way out. "Should have gotten a job," or "Shouldn't have done drugs." And the people doing the most blaming and defending the system are passive-income shareholders who have a lot of time on their hands and sit at home all day and further rig the politics in their favour. It's cooked all the way down.
It's like the dystopian book "Brave New World" is looking pretty good by comparison to where we're heading. At least in BNW, the "savages" had a designated reserve they could escape to.
Tells you everything you need to know.
Firing people with institutional knowledge? So what? It's going to improve profits short-term.
Example: AI Agent Engineer (https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/jr-202606937/ai-agent-...)
> We are seeking an AI Agent Engineer to design, build, and operationalize AI-powered agents that enhance employee productivity and decision-making in a complex enterprise environment. The ideal candidate combines strong AI/ML foundations, hands-on experience with agent frameworks, and a pragmatic approach to delivering business value in partnership with cross-functional teams.
Does not look like pure vibe-coding to me. More like developing wrappers over LLMs.
I would definitely pass on this job.
"...In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines — not just use AI as a productivity tool."
Cheaper younger people who dont think vibe coding is bad
Is this a good idea - probably not
It would be like hiring a junior to lead a team. They're the worst choice for that role.
When the business field turns you into a pariah because you refuse to bow to the uninitiated's desires tends to be my red line for an exit. I will not do reasonably foreseeable net harmful work for an industry that won't take no for an answer. My definition for reasonably foreseeable sets the minimum bar for analysis of consequence at enumerating 3rd and 4th degree consequences minimum.
They don't want engineers. They want Operators for whom thinking isn't in the job description.
People will demand training, ignore it, and continue to be a drain on the company. There will be those people out there that have one very very very specific skill and that's all they want to do; "I remove people from Active directory that have names that start with A,B or C" or "I run this Ansible Playbook someone else wrote, and that's my entire job."
Re Germans: I’m not sure it’s a new thing. I can remember trying to uninstall a seat in a 90s BMW and wondering how they had managed to make something that could be accomplished with 4 bolts into something so complex.
Tell the family of the person killed by a semi truck driver who showed up to work drunk or high: "Don't worry - the driver went to jail! Accountability prevented anything bad from happening!"
Accountability alone fails to prevent deadly mistakes millions of times a day; millions of mistakes are avoided daily through process, redundancy, independent review, and formal methods.
"Accountability prevents mistakes" is a comforting delusion. In reality, accountability is only marginally related to whether or not mistakes are made.
...in his desperation to finally win an argument online our hero advanced, grimly ignoring the concept of Engineering.
"millions of mistakes are avoided daily through process, redundancy, independent review, and formal methods."
Ahh spoke too soon, Engineering has finally joined the chat. So what mechanism do you propose lead to the foundation of process, redundancy, independent review, and formal methods?
A human also knows they might get punished if it messes up bad enough, which might cause it to think twice before doing something bad. For an AI there is a reward, but there is no risk.
So while both might lie, only the human will be worried that it will be found out. That makes a difference.
What you are describing is a hypothetical "rational person". In real life, even the most rational people you know do completely irrational things routinely.
The Therac-25 engineers were accountable. The 737 MAX engineers were accountable. Accountability is doing much less work in the safety story than you seem to think.
The real work is done by process, redundancy, independent review, formal methods. None of these inherently require someone to be penalized for making mistakes, and penalizing people for making mistakes is a demonstrably, empirically unreliable mechanism for preventing mistakes.
Where on earth are you getting this?
Accountability alone is insufficient, and the things that actually prevent mistakes don't require it. The mechanisms that do work: independent reviews, redundancy, formal verification where applicable, staged rollouts, testing against adversarial inputs... these all function on the artifact, not on whether or not the entity producing the artifact can be held accountable. A formally verified proof is correct whether a human or an LLM generated it. A code review catches the same bug regardless of who's liable for shipping it.
The argument isn't "let's get rid of accountability", the argument is "it's ridiculous to suggest that the reason you shouldn't use AI is that AI lacks accountability - lacking accountability isn't the reason AI makes mistakes, and adding accountability to AI won't prevent AI from making mistakes - the answer to preventing mistakes with AI rests in process, and accountability does nothing to inherently ensure that".
Accountability is nothing but a transmission mechanism, and is blind to the values instilled through it. Accountability is literally what caused the 737 MAX disasters. The FAA decided it was more accountable to industry efficiency than it was to safety when it allowed Boeing to self-certify, which violated a process control of independent reviews. Boeing's board decided it wanted to more accountable to shareholder value maximization than it was to safety when it allowed MCAS to experience scope creep without re-review, which violated a process control of formal verification. Boeing's designers and engineers decided to be accountable to shareholder value maximization when they decided to make MCAS rely on only one of two flight control computers, which violated a process control of redundancy. Engineers at Boeing flagged these failures, but they ignored when management decided to be more accountable to shipping on time, which violated a process control of incorporating adversarial inputs and feedback.
Accountability did not prevent these mistakes, it caused them. Failure to abide by process controls caused the mistakes. Adding more accountability wouldn't have prevented these mistakes; maintaining strict adherence to the process controls that used to be in place would have.