by redeyedtreefrog | 2025-06-06 16:54:42+00:00
I am a former employee from a few years ago. I didn't stay very long at all though.

In 2019 its former Chief Business Officer sued them for fraud, claiming that apps were built by Indian developers despite the claim that it was "80%" done by AI. There were detailed articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Verge at the time. I've found one reference saying it was settled out of court (the Telegraph), though I thought I'd previously read the case was dismissed.

When I was there 3 years later:

- the company had been renamed from Engineer.ai to Builder.ai

- the marketing materials still heavily pushed the claim that apps were 80% built by AI, curiously the exact same figure as it had been 3 years earlier

- there was a bunch of automation around small parts of the software development process. When customers went to create a new project there was an AI chatbot assistant (Natasha), which amongst other things asked the customer for their requirements, and created some estimates for how long things would take. There was also some automation for turning UI mockups into CSS styles and then merging the styles with templated React components. These various small bits of automation did have teams of real engineers working on it in the UK and the US. However, by and large it didn't really work. It seemed to me that the Indian outsourced programmers working on client projects totally ignored this technology anyway, and just went about their jobs as though it didn't exist. Despite being employed to work on this tech, I never had any interaction with the Indian developers building real client projects.

- a new team was spun up to use Generative AI to create frontend mock ups of an application from template components. This was integrated into the flow when potential clients were chatting with the Natasha AI chatbot. Some people worked genuinely hard on this project, and to some extent it did function. However, it didn't do much beyond the many other "create a frontend mockup from a single prompt" projects out there, other than having access to the company's internal React component templates. As far as I'm aware these frontend mockups were never used by the Indian developers who built the final projects.

In the tech world there is a very wide blurred zone between "outright fraud, which leads to a conviction in court" and "exagerrated claims". Given the extent to which Builder.ai committed literal fraud with their revenue figures and accounting, and given the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised on very limited real sales, I believe their claims about AI could plausibly also be literal fraud. However, the standards of a court case are much higher than my personal use of the word "fraud". I'm tempted to believe Musk is also bordering on fraud with e.g. the Boring Company, or his repeated claims about how close Tesla is to fully automated self-driving robo taxis. But given Tesla is building a genuine product with genuinely high sales and revenue, and given how much other crazy stuff Musk does that makes these exagerrated claims pale in comparison, it's not something that's ever going to lead to a court case.