from Hacker News

Builder.ai did not "fake AI with 700 engineers"

by tanelpoder on 6/12/25, 5:47 PM with 98 comments

  • by Fraterkes on 6/12/25, 10:04 PM

    The headline as stated is categorically false, buuuut... I think it's pretty salient that a company called "Builder.ai" only had 15 engineers working on actual ai and actually mostly functioned as an outsourcing intermediary for 500-1000 engineers (ie, the builders). When it comes to these viral misunderstandings, you kind of reap what you sow.

  • by stego-tech on 6/12/25, 10:57 PM

    > Builder hired 300 internal engineers and kicked off building internal tools, all of which could have simply been purchased

    Dear god, PLEASE hire an actual Enterprise IT professional early in your startup expansion phase. A single competent EIT person (or dinosaur like me) could have - if this story is true - possibly saved the whole startup by understanding what’s immediately needed versus what’s nice-to-have, what should be self-hosted versus what should be XaaS, stitching everything together to reduce silos, and ensuring every cent is not just accounted for but wisely invested in future success.

    Even if the rest of your startup isn’t “worrying about the money”, your IT and Finance people should always be worried about the money.

  • by alerter on 6/12/25, 9:34 PM

    > Builder hired 300 internal engineers and kicked off building internal tools, all of which could have simply been purchased

    Tempted to say there was a bit of corruption here, crazy decision. Like someone had connections to the contractor providing all those devs.

    otoh they were an "app builder" company. Maybe they really wanted to dogfood.

  • by mellosouls on 6/12/25, 8:10 PM

    Kudos to the author for the update - and also to others including @dang for calling it out at the time:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169759

    (Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5B 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Indians'?, 367 points, 267 comments)

  • by sandcat_ on 6/13/25, 12:57 AM

    I interviewed there a few years back. I bailed on the interview within the first fifteen minutes, the first time I’ve ever done that. I told them they’d given me the ick — not my most professional moment, admittedly! But it was an awkward and unpleasant interview.

    They spent the first ten minutes of the call predicting the death of software engineering (this was a software engineering interview) and complaining about expensive devs (ahem). I wouldn’t have minded so much if the only demo apps they had on their website weren’t some of the worst, non-native iOS apps I’ve ever seen. Truly awful.

    A month or two later I noticed on LinkedIn that a dodgy CTO I’d worked with, who had attempted to avoid paying me (and did avoid paying several colleagues of mine), had joined there too. It felt like a good fit.

    Yeah, I have to say, none of this is a surprise to me.

  • by wnevets on 6/12/25, 8:09 PM

    Are there people who actually believe that a user would enter a text prompt than a human programmer would generate the code?

  • by joshstrange on 6/13/25, 10:38 AM

    I don’t find this article particularly convincing. The main argument seems to be “It couldn’t be real engineers, it would be too slow” but I have no clue what the Builder.ai interface or response times were like. Also it says 10-20min would be too long… kind of? Not really though? Depends on the output. Claude Code has run for quite a while on its own before (I’ve never timed it) but 5-10+min doesn’t shock me. Yes, Claude is giving real-time output but I’ve seen a number of dev tools that don’t (or didn’t, this area is moving fast).

    Also, re: hiring outsourced contractors

    > However, we didn't anticipate the significant fraud that would ensue

    First time? Every experience I have personally had with outsourced contractors has been horrible. Bad code quality, high billing hours for low output, language and time barriers, the list goes on. I’m quick to flip the bozo bit on anyone pushing for outsourcing, engineers are not just cogs in a machine to start with and outsourced contractors are almost less useful than current LLM coding tools IMHO. If you already have to explain things in excruciating detail, you might as well talk to an LLM.

    People really want this black box that they can feed money and input into and have full-fledged applications and platforms pop out the other side. It doesn’t exist. I have only seen failures with outsourcing on this front and so far LLMs haven’t been able to do it either. Don’t get me wrong LLM’s are actually useful in my opinion, just not for writing all the code unsupervised or “vibe coding”.

  • by troysk on 6/14/25, 7:20 AM

  • by quantadev on 6/12/25, 9:53 PM

    I always knew this story was fake. Even if you have a trillion expert developers it would still be impossible to get fast enough answers to "Fake an LLM". Humans obviously aren't _parallelizable_ like that.

  • by firesteelrain on 6/12/25, 9:58 PM

    “ building internal versions of Slack, Zoom, JIRA, and more…”

    Did they really do this or customize Jira schemas and workflows for example ?

  • by cratermoon on 6/12/25, 6:07 PM

    Unnamed former employees of a dead company say company didn't fake it. Film at 11.

  • by thru47fhbghb on 6/12/25, 11:05 PM

    The deep seated hate for Indians (and among them, Hindus) had been going on unchecked in the West for many hundred years. That's precisely why such fake-news go viral so quickly.

    Hell, when the woke "bleeding-heart" academics are the leading voices behind this hate festival, you know there's something deeply wrong.

    I was so shocked by the things "South-Asia depts." do in the US that it's hard not to to consider them to be in the same bag as the medieval religious nuts, pagan-hunting padre "saints" & "race-science pioneers".

  • by tomasphan on 6/12/25, 8:12 PM

    I don’t believe that their business entirely depended on 700 actual humans, just as much as I don’t believe that to be true for the Amazon store. However, both probably relied on humans in the loop which is not sustainable at scale.

  • by gamblor956 on 6/12/25, 8:56 PM

    LLMs are all fake AI. As the recently released Apple study demonstrates, LLMs don't reason, they just pattern match. That's not "intelligence" however you define it because they can only solve things that are already within their training set.

    In this case, it would have been better for the AI industry if it had been 700 programmers, because then the rest of the industry could have argued that the utter trash code Builder.ai generated was the result of human coders spending a few minutes haphazardly typing out random code, and not the result of a specialty-trained LLM.