builder.ai has been tricking customers and investors for eight years – selling an advanced code-writing AI that, it turns out, is actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers

oof

If this were true(for all of them), AI companies would be way more competent than they are lol

WHY DID YOU REDEEM IT

Artificial artificial intelligence.

Well, look at this way. If I were being paid as little as they probably were to do what they were being asked to do whilst also not getting recognized for my contributions as a human and also being treated like machine by people who don't even speak the same first language as me, I would probably put out pretty sloppy work too.

Thank you. The company failed due to bad upper management and so-so products on unfair deadlines that weren't novel. The workers themselves did just fine, considering the circumstances and bad leadership.

Indians reported this themselves https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/how-this-billion-dollar-london-startup-backed-by-microsoft-made-700-engineers-sitting-in-india-pose-as-ai/articleshow/121572659.cms

Yeah, I was thinking it's impossible to fake AI codegen with humans, for however terrible it is, it vomits the code it generates quickly.

I of course take issue with:

LLMs were already more than capable of generating high-quality code.

That claim will remain unjustified so long as LLMs equally generate imagined function calls and such as much as they like 'real' function calls.

But in any event, it's also telling that despite ostensibly being a company focused around AI code gen, when it came to doing stupid in-house stuff that didn't need doing they went with a bunch of human developers. And many of those are knock-offs of projects that should be pretty firmly in the territory of LLM codegen to let you 'vibe code'.

But now instead of blaming a junior dev they can hit you with the, "Our apologies for this issue - we are modifying the prompts for the model and re-running in-unit AI tests, will revert back to you", and charge slightly more.

Offshored/outsourced code is generally shit regardless of where it comes from.

Question is generally 'how is it that using this company thousands of miles away is so much cheaper? Business folks like to think it's just because the country is poor, but no, the answer is that it is a grift. It is always a grift.

The good developers in that location? They are too busy doing work for real companies paying real money. Maybe less than an American makes, but not as dramatic as management imagines. So companies looking to offshore will never pay enough to get the actual talent in a geography. What happens when someone competent actually lands in one of these arrangements? Gone in 3-4 months after they get a real job after proving themselves.

So what developers are you getting? People who probably had the equivalent of a high school programming course and didn't really get it, but there's a company that will pay money to anyone with some arbitrary 'certiificate' that they can claim to clients means you are a trained software developer. They don't know your use case, and they don't care. They utterly fail at being competent, but who is going to call them on it? Management has no clue, and besides, it was their idea to outsource, so it has to be a good idea. Leftover technical talent that you kept on as a skeleton crew to supervise the outsourced effort? Oh they are just whining and trying to protect their jobs and being overly dismissive of the offshored staff because it suites their self-interest.

Offshoring is a big old grift wherever they set up shop.

That sifting through crap isn't just an AI thing.

Pretty much any big site with user generated content and moderators has to have people who deal with seeing that shit.

It's a really shitty underpaid job.

It says they'd been tricking investors for 8 years, we'll before ChatGPT. I assume they overpromised in the early years, leveraging labor as a "stopgap" for the developing AI. Then things eventually caught up and they couldn't deliver, leading to the current situation.

Eight years is a long time, so who was "duped" when can really change the narrative of the headline.