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AI-First Company Memos
- SoftTalker 8mo agoReminds me a bit of the old f*ckedcompany website, where internal layoff notices and other insider gossip got posted.
- nemomarx 8mo agoThat Fiverr one seems especially cold somehow. I guess it lines up with their business model though.
- some_random 8mo agoIt also lines up with what has to be their outlook on the market, their model is especially challenged by AI. Years ago I paid for a Ukrainian to write me some scrapers, today that would be a quick project in Cursor. Lots of people used it for cheap art, voice work, etc, now the low end is all AI.
- whiplash451 8mo agoIt's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it. [1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and Accenture in my ranking.
- debo_ 8mo agoUnfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".
- mjhay 8mo agoThe executives pushing AI use everywhere aren’t basing it on actual performance (which is an orthogonal concept). It’s just the latest shiny bauble.
- debo_ 8mo agoPerformance management isn't rating how people are doing. It's transforming the resources of the company into something that you want it to do. If they want to transform the current state of the company into something that has AI use as a core capability, that is performance management. There are good books on this: e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Next-Generation-Performance-Management-Superstition/dp/1681239329 https://www.amazon.ca/Next-Generation-Performance-Management...
- tikhonj 8mo agoIt's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance management" is neither necessary nor sufficient.
- munk-a 8mo agoIf performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too! It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.
- jahnu 8mo agoIf the person who wrote this is reading, many of us block tracking in our browsers and all we see for each of those X embeds is "X trackers and content blocked Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads." Screenshots don't track me so they would be ok.
- burkaman 8mo agoI'm not sure a person wrote this website, but FYI on Firefox Nightly the text of the tweet is shown below the blocked tracker in a box labeled "Content from blocked embed". It doesn't have images or longer posts, so not that useful for this specific website, but it's a nice feature. It also gives you a link to the tweet so you can easily open it in a private window or XCancel if you want to.
- upupupandaway 8mo agoI work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. There were 9700 created in a month or so. Imagine the amount of tech debt, security holes, and business logic mistakes this orgy of agents will cause and will have to be fixed in the future. edit: typo
- coldpie 8mo agoI'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoThen, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :) Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
- coldpie 8mo ago> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.
- blindriver 8mo agoIf you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further. I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
- ej88 8mo agoseems to be a pattern: [Company that's getting disrupted by AI: Fiverr, Duolingo]: rush to adopt internal AI to cut costs before they get undercut by competition [Company that's orthogonal: Box, Ramp, HFT]: build internal tools to boost productivity, maintain 'ai-first' image to keep talent [Company whose business model is AI]: time to go all in
- gowld 8mo agoWhy wouldn't HFT be disrupted by AI? AI-enhanced trading algo designs are likely to be competitive? AI disrupts everything on the computer from the low-end on up. The higher end requires more expensive or custom models that aren't as easy to obtain yet.
- lossolo 8mo agoBecause HFT is about adversarial play with a lot of hidden information. Relevant article from two days ago https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning
- _se 8mo agoHFT is about the last technical domain that could possibly be touched by LLMs. There is next to no good training data and there is zero margin for error.
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- yencabulator 8mo agoI could see analyzing news getting easier with LLMs. They have a history of using NLP there for sentiment analysis.
- ej88 8mo agoi mean llms happy to be corrected but im not aware of any direct improvements llms bring to ultra low latency market making, time to first token is just too high (not including coding agents) from talking to some friends in the space theres some meaningful improvements in tooling especially in discretionary trading that operate on longer time horizons where agents can actually help w research and sentiment analysis
- palmotea 8mo ago> Within weeks, CEOs across industries posted their own versions. The AI-first memo became a genre. Here they all are. That may be all the publicly-posted ones, but I'm skeptical. They have 11. There were a lot more internal memos.
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- MontyCarloHall 8mo agoWhatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
- malfist 8mo agoRemember when companies all forced us to buy smartphones? Or switch to search engines instead of books? Or when Amazon announced it was "react native first"?
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- Mordisquitos 8mo agoI agree with the sentiment you're expressing but, to be fair, companies forcing us all to use smartphones (as consumers or as citizens) is, unfortunately, happening implicitly.
- jezzamon 8mo agoProductive output is a lagging indicator. Using AI tools is theoretically leading???
- nitwit005 8mo agoI had you a power tool, and your productivity goes up immediately. Your IDE highlights problems, same story. Everyone can observe that this has happened.
- Noumenon72 8mo agoOn the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.
- andrewshawcare 8mo agoThe Klarna guy: >The misconceptions about Klarna and AI adoption baffle me sometimes. >Yes, we removed close to 1,500 micro SaaS services and some large. Not to save on licenses, but to give AI the cleanest possible context. If you remove all your services...
- pdntspa 8mo ago[flagged]
- dang 8mo ago"Please don't fulminate." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rvz 8mo agoThis is "AGI". Also notice how almost all the stocks of these companies except Meta who have announced AI-first initiatives are at best flat or down but more than 20% YTD. What does that tell you?
- daniel_iversen 8mo agoIsn’t there tons more, like the note from Andy Jassy at Amazon and the CEO at Airwallex etc? Maybe you can use an ai agent to find all the other big examples? ;-)
- stuaxo 8mo agoI like to think if someone can't be bothered to write something, I can't be bothered to read it.
- wussboy 8mo agoThere was an article on here a few months ago that I agreed with. "Just give me the prompt".
- thedangler 8mo agoIts easier to adopt AI when starting from scratch or code base is well maintained.
- Mave83 8mo agoThe software defined storage company croit.io announced it in their Workation in May 2023. AI is just another tool and people have to understand that it's not going away. As a company, you still need people to make use of this tool.
- plaidfuji 8mo agoFiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc. Then concludes his email with: > I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future. I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??
- azinman2 8mo agoThe irony is if you take this to the limit, ChatGPT replaces fiverr
- yencabulator 8mo agoI assume Shelly Paran is Fiverr's Chief of Staff, and a human. You already knew that rules don't apply to CEOs.
- politelemon 8mo agoMay I suggest directly hosting the images and text instead of embedding the x and linked in posts.
- warkdarrior 8mo agoYou could use AI to summarize the website without X and LinkedIn embedding code.
- CountHackulus 8mo agoThis reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.
- munificent 8mo agoCEOs want productivity. They don't want employees. Employees are a cost center.
- goatlover 8mo agoEmployees also make for customers. Not sure how AIs and robots will be replacing human consumers once CEOs realize their dream.
- wussboy 8mo agoThis often confuses me as well. If no one has a job, no one can buy any goods or services. Then who will these companies that replaced all jobs with AI sell to? The AIs?
- chung8123 8mo agoThe CEOs are concerned about their company. They are not worried about employing every consumer of their product.
- throw876987696 8mo agoSame here in LATAM. We are also an AI-First company now. No customer-first, or product-first, or data-driven (I actually liked the idea behind being data-driven). All the code must be AI-generated by the end of Q1. All the employees must include at least one AI-adoption metric or project in their goals.
- siliconc0w 8mo agoIf you hire good people and set proper incentives they will figure out the best way to do something. If leadership has to direct employees to use AI it's a bad sign. If it were a huge boon to productivity, you won't need to force people to use it.
- bigbuppo 8mo agoWhat are the AI-never companies doing? May be a useful comparison. Is the AI work actually improving the bottom line, or is it being used to assuage noisy shareholders that think AI is a hack for infinite profit?
- renewiltord 8mo agoPeople have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff. And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.
- entropyneur 8mo agoEmacs is an interesting analogy. I've switched from IDEs to Emacs at some point in my career, and inertia obviously wasn't the reason. Then another 15 years later I went back to using IDEs (inspired by Carmack's interview). 2 years in I realized it destroyed my ability to generate and maintain mental maps of the codebase and generally remember things about it, although I think it's still a net gain so I stick with it. Agentic coding poses the exact same problem and the exact same tradeoff. And I think the jury is still out on whether it's worth it. At the very minimum you need to take proactive measures least you end up with a codebase no one can maintain (other than maybe future AGI).
- otabdeveloper4 8mo agoIt's Emacs. Also Emacs is an IDE.
- renewiltord 8mo agoYeah, it's not clear to me why my iPhone keyboard does that but I didn't correct it. Indeed, emacs is love, emacs is life. Emacs is all things. Emacs is nothing and everything. https://imgur.com/a/PNR99un https://imgur.com/a/PNR99un
- yencabulator 8mo agoYour Apple product does that because its dictionary contains historic Apple products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac
- _slih 8mo agoThe Klarna reversal is the most honest thing on this list. Went all in, quality dropped, hired humans back. Every other memo on here is still in the 'we declared victory' phase. Be interesting to check back in a year and see how many quietly walk it back without a blog post
- lokimedes 8mo agoThe trap for many companies is that as everyone automate with AI, their competitive advantage erodes, as they prove that a few centralized models can run the businesses. What are the trenches in businesses in 2030, purely ownership over physical assets and energy?
- themafia 8mo ago"Cool. I quit."
- halamadrid 8mo agoHubSpot CTO was very vocal about how AI is changing everything and how he is supporting by offering the domain chat.com to OpenAI etc. I say was because it has toned down quite a bit. I always thought HubSpot will transform into a true AI CRM given how invested the CTO was in the space from the early days. Now the stock is down from $800+ to $200+ and the whole messaging has changed. The last one I saw on LinkedIn was "" No comment on the HubSpot stock price. But, I strongly agree with this statement: "...I don't see companies trusting their revenue engine to something vibe-coded over a weekend." "" The stock dip is likely because of the true AI native CRMs being built and coming to market, but why couldn't HubSpot take that spot given the CTOs interest in the space.
- lmeyerov 8mo agoI get ai-adjacent dev teams going all in, as they're equipped to deal with the hard edges, but this is brutal for everyone else. Like Frank in collections is just trying to make sure people get paid, not worry about whatever it means to be "prompt injected".
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