Tell HN: Twilio support replies with hallucinated features
15 comments
·October 29, 2025gdulli
There used to be a contract that a business had something to lose by providing bad service, that customers would leave and seek better service elsewhere.
I believe the most important and least discussed phenomenon of modern consumer culture is that consumers have passed a threshold of passive and docile behavior such that businesses no longer fear losing customers. Partly because the customers have shown willingness to eat shit, partly because there's a new understanding that all businesses will adopt the same customer-hostile behaviors (AI customer service in this case) so consumers don't have significant choice anyway.
jermaustin1
It's not so much the willingness to eat shit, but that no matter the service I use, I will have to eat shit, so who's shit tastes least bad for the benefits.
A lot of VoIP/SMS providers exist, but compared to Twilio, they are just DIY API and SIP providers, which might be what we as developers want, but not what a business "needs".
reactordev
It’s this. You went to a buffet but all they have is shit pie.
azemetre
This is mostly due to not trust busting enough in society. If there were actual competitive markets, not monopolies/oligarchies/monopsonies/cartels, the business world would be completely different.
Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.
falcor84
I tend to disagree. While there are definitely monopolies/oligopoly for every domain, I'm actually constantly impressed with the very long tail of other providers available in that area.
Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.
I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.
azemetre
Legislation can help in a variety of ways, like taxing digital goods to provide work grants for open source developers. The federal government could create a public payment processor.
There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.
stronglikedan
> There used to be a contract
That was before crony capitalism became rampant.
Refreeze5224
It was back when militant labor presented an actual threat to the owning class. Now they know they can act with impunity, and they do.
ivape
It's interesting that you bring that up because I was just thinking about this concept in an undeveloped form. Egregious salesmanship is to sell an inferior or poor product while bolstering the overall brand reputation. How could that even be possible? With lies. You're absolutely right, the salesman in our world is in his purest and most demonic form.
With Brand management specifically, they specialize in servicing an ornate roof on a house so as to distract from the rest of the house. The ornate roof can be seen from miles away, and so it is the greatest ad you can buy in terms of reach.
I think I was thinking about this because of all the AI startup ads I've been seeing on Youtube. You wouldn't ever know how unworthy their product is based on how much branding and marketing they do. But that is the dance they do, the managing of the delta between product quality and brand quality, the management being the logistics of veiling that delta (not actually closing it).
Taking down a brand means to be diligent and aggressive in exposing that delta. Seems like common sense, but I'd urge you to consider it as more a "classical" formalization of what it is and what needs to be done. There is a terrible phenomenon within the human experience that results in humans trying to lie to each other for money.
It's the classical Theory on Being a Piece of Shit.
quinnjh
These tools are perfect for deployment where providing plausible-but-incorrect info is aligned with business outcomes, like cutting your support staff and giving disgruntled customers fake information.
I’ve seen most of the frontier models hallucinate their capabilities, not surprising they might do so for api completions regarding a product they barely know about.
Unless they lose more money from cancelled subscriptions than they saved on cutting support staff, it’s probably the new normal.
trollbridge
Twilio registered my business name as “My Twilio Account” and is unable to change it. My application for 10DLC also got rejected since I wanted to do something other than send marketing messages with it and I can’t figure out how to describe an opt-in only service that is strictly for employees, to their provided phone number, with a signature opting in to get payroll information texted to them.
As a test, I set up something to send junk quality marketing texts. Was approved.
barbazoo
None of them know what they're doing. Even Google's own AI integrated into their own apps, hallucinates about those very apps, e.g. asking Gemini in Docs about how to do something in Docs. It's laughable. LLM have great utility but this is not it.
lab14
"Hallucination machine, responds with hallucinations".
But seriously, entreprise customers (and any big spender account) usually get access to a dedicated (human) account rep and private support channels in Slack, so they never really interact with this.
mikeandrees9921
Yeah true. Abstraction reigns king lol
I was investigating some bug with our voice system and asked support where I can find some debugging information and event logs.
They told me where I should go in the interface to see that and reassured that they checked logs and this event exist.
It turned out these features and information doesn't exist anywhere in the interface and impossible to retrieve in any way. The support message with hallucinated features is mostly AI written.
CEOs tell us AGI is around the corner but in reality it just unreliable information and AI can't even restock the vending machine.