12 ms·

CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

844 points by speckx 5mo ago

ninjahawk1 5mo ago
Wait, tech CEOs don’t understand why employees are valuable? Astronaut holding up gun to other astronaut Always have been.
ungreased0675 5mo ago
A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?
- Terr_ 5mo ago
  Robotics aren't there yet, it needs to go on golf playdates with investors and board members.
  - mmmm2 5mo ago
    Maybe a virtual / Zoom agent could allow the elderly investor to stay in the game. When you get too old to go golfing you can still stay in the game.
- grim_io 5mo ago
  You can get a lot of tokens for a CEO. I'd say it's worth a try.
- JTbane 5mo ago
  You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.
  - ottoflux 5mo ago
    100% been saying this for a while now. the main thing AI will be able to replace is a C suite.
    - pydry 5mo ago
      it's kind of like saying like you could replace a king with an AI. the position is a relationship to power more than it is a function with a productive output. a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).
    - orphea 5mo ago
      maybe this is the way forward. Imagine how many tokens one could burn given C suite salaries.
      - ihsw 5mo ago
        [dead]
    - vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
      I think it will handle communication between the C suit and the underlings.
  - mmmm2 5mo ago
    The hallucinations would be a feature in this case.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
    I still remember when I used ChatGPT the first time to write an email. I thought to myself “Oh. This sounds like 99% of the corporate communication from above”. We were joking that corporate had BossGPT for years and just didn’t tell anybody. It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.
  - m463 5mo ago
    and people actully MIND if your CEO is a liar. But AI is expected to lie^H^H^H hallucinate
  - lawn 5mo ago
    Our CEO bragged about him "just building stuff" now (vibe coding) while outsourcing his other tasks to AI. I don't think that's the flex he thinks it is.
- hoppp 5mo ago
  I am building a project now and then will create an AI to manage it and be the CEO. The code is human + AI, the management is only AI
- phyzix5761 5mo ago
  Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?
  - rrauenza 5mo ago
    Remember the printer in Office Space?
  - stvltvs 5mo ago
    It sounds like you already know the answer.
  - surgical_fire 5mo ago
    lol CEOs in jail.
  - celdon25 5mo ago
    I think Grok on x.com is a reasonable case study. There’s the stuff we heard about and then there’s a separate category of things that weren’t newsworthy, and only the newsworthy things prompted changes to be made.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    To be fair here, CEO dont take responsibility and dont go to jail. In rare case they do, they will be pardoned.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - ihsw 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- vineyardmike 5mo ago
  While I agree that AIs would do a good job… Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?
  - yoyohello13 5mo ago
    Weirdly enough, I'd take the robot. At least we can pretend the robot doesn't know any better. The human is actively choosing to be a dick and profiting off it.
  - vitally3643 5mo ago
    The flesh sack is choosing to be an insufferable twat, and the robot either doesn't have any choice or has a decent statistical justification for what it does.
  - ungreased0675 5mo ago
    A robot with access to all of the company data and mediocre decision making wouldn’t be terrible.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  https://replaceyourboss.ai https://replaceyourboss.ai (discussed 6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072002)
- ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
  AI means mediocre. Mediocre companies are pretty bad to work in. So it would guarantee a soulless and pointless company imo
  - ungreased0675 5mo ago
    My charitable word would be average. AI means average. And an average CEO isn’t that bad. It’d be a deliberate trade in exchange for less spending on salaries. (just one very large salary)
- nobodyandproud 5mo ago
  I posited that one as a question. Naive and stupid, but it was downvoted and flagged away into oblivion with zero chance for a conversation.
- manicennui 5mo ago
  It's pretty disappointing that people on this site of all places have no idea what CEOs do. Many of them are certainly overpaid, and like any other profession, many are not good at their jobs, but they aren't sitting around drafting memos and coming up with deciding who to fire all day.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    I would never accuse CEOs of sitting around drafting memos or daydreaming about who to fire They're too busy playing golf
- dartharva 5mo ago
  I reckon such AIs are already in place, but by proxy. There must be CEOs somewhere who have completely offloaded what meagre amount of thinking they needed to do to some bespoke AI setup while they LARP around convincing people they are the one running things.
misano 5mo ago
A common misconception about AI is that it is intended to fully replace humans, which is incorrect. The purpose of AI is to reduce the need for human labor, and it has already been doing so. For example—though this is not an exact figure—a task that previously required 15 people might now only need 10. In no instance has the human element been completely replaced; rather, the reliance on manual labor has simply been reduced.
- pavel_lishin 5mo ago
  > though this is not an exact figure You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.
  - sbarre 5mo ago
    So what if it is? The example still stands. A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business. For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-) So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you. This has happened before with other advancements in industrial/technological automation. It's not a new concept.
    - iLoveOncall 5mo ago
      That supposes that AI has a positive impact to efficiency. So far I see the exact contrary, at least for software engineering.
      - sbarre 5mo ago
        I see tons of evidence of positive impact, but I suppose everyone has their own perspective. I did try to account for that with this line: > For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-)
    - misano 5mo ago
      exactly
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Previously: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679 I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379
everdrive 5mo ago
There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
- willio58 5mo ago
  CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
  - Henchman21 5mo ago
    You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!
    - nemomarx 5mo ago
      The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
    - zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
      Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?
      - nathan_compton 5mo ago
        Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
seydor 5mo ago
What about employees who think AI replaces their CEO
- Fordec 5mo ago
  Upper management material written all over them.
saadn92 5mo ago
It’s hilarious to me that when you stop investing in juniors and seniors who use your AIs retire, what are they going to do then?
- glitchc 5mo ago
  Who wants to be CEO for that long? The company will be sold off to a larger conglomerate long before that happens.
- Waterluvian 5mo ago
  Get your state governor to go on tv and ask for people who know how to program Cobalt.
- moregrist 5mo ago
  You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility. Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting. Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.
- AngryData 5mo ago
  Complain how nobody wants to work and/or blame foreigners. The usual.
jmyeet 5mo ago
The primary product of AI is labor displacement and consequently wage supression. This is what OpenAI and Anthropic are really selling. It didn't start with AI but AI is accelerating it. This is what layoffs have been about since the pandemic. People in fear of losing their jobs do extra unpaid work and aren't asking for raises. The theoretical potential of AI gives companies the excuse to fire more people. The investment itself is directly used as a reason of why they need to cut back on labor. Any sufficiently sized business can only feed the insatiable hunger for ever-increasing profits ultimately by cutting costs and raising prices. And what do we have now? High inflation and a decline in real wages. CEOs are just following this playbook. And the result is that society is bouldering towards collapse. We're seeing the first hints of this with the youth unemployment crisis [1][2][3]. Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money? [1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million-unemployed-youth-spell-danger-for-future-economic-growth/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million... [2]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-youth-unemployment-crisis/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-yo... [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  > Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money? This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending. There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot. A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce. Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)
  - 5mo ago
ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work. In my experience, the same type of thing applies to products that we ship (and charge money for).
- aplomb1026 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- pknomad 5mo ago
  I like this analogy; raising children well like delivering products well pays dividends. They’re less likely to cause problems and if they do, they tend to be smaller in scope.
- socketcluster 5mo ago
  Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page. If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them. Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.
  - tauserfunnel 5mo ago
    I hate to use a throwaway, but this bit: > with a functioning user acquisition funnel How do you actually get this. I've got a product, the site is hand crafted, shows the complex product really well (and had good feedback on it) but how do I acquire the users? It seems as the cost of creating software has plummeted, it's the actual sales side of it that's going to matter even more. I'm stuck at this point.
chopete3 5mo ago
>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO. This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful. There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.
- wwweston 5mo ago
  If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement. L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix. I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff. They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).
  - alex_sf 5mo ago
    My agent is currently doing the work of ~6 senior engineers, based on ticket closures. These are not trivial tasks: all of them involve a mix of code, judgement, executing remote commands in a production environment, etc. This is at a well-known tech company operating at massive scale (and resulting complexity). L1/L2 tech support is completely dead within a couple years. The delay is only around how long it takes people to realize.
    - trolleski 5mo ago
      I've got 12 agents. They're doing the work of 120 engineers, and three CEOs. Lately, one of the agents has been laid off due to AI, and another went to see the Burning Man so another 10 work overtime. The CEO agent became an evangelical Christian, and wrote how cool Peter Thiel is on X, so we no longer need people, the future is here.
noncoml 5mo ago
The CEOs that think AI replaces their employees are the same that at the same time don't want to pay the AI costs.
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
Why can't we get AI models that replace these CEOs? I bet they're pretty good at running a company.
noncoml 5mo ago
It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI: A* search -> AI Backtracking -> AI Neural Networks -> AI Fuzzy Logic -> AI Genetic Algorithm -> AI Deep Learning -> AI Generative "AI" -> AI Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work. The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.
- gowld 5mo ago
  Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - noncoml 5mo ago
    The point isn’t whether the aviation term "autopilot" has a technically defensible meaning, but that "Autopilot" predictably made normal people think "the car drives itself", just like "AI" now makes non-technical CEOs think "AGI employee replacement machine". You are arguing the dictionary while I’m arguing the predictable, if not very well calculated and purposeful, misunderstanding.
  - themafia 5mo ago
    > the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does It's a bad analogy. Autopilot just maintains the aircraft in some state, then there's the flight director which maintains the flight path, and you can connect or disconnect the two at will. When connected the director can change the autopilot state. To use the flight director you must fully specify your flight. The weight, the fuel, the weather, expected winds, takeoff and landing runway length, runway conditions, expected brake demand, as well as every single waypoint you're going to cross and the expected state at that crossing. > what the human metaphor means We learned after high levels of cockpit automation that maintaining situational awareness was still required. Pilots are freed of some stress during high workload portions of the flight, provided they planned correctly in advance, and that zero changes to their flight plan (not likely) occur. As a result pilots are mostly told and trained to hand fly the plane during take offs and landings if the weather allows for it. You should only use high levels of automation if the situation demands it.
ReptileMan 5mo ago
A story from today - I needed a small utility to remap my logitech buttons under windows without installing their horrendous GHUB. Logitech Onboard Memory Manager still required ghub to be put into onboard mode. The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do. That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human. There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't "To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.
socketcluster 5mo ago
Wow the token leaderboard idea is nuts. It's similar to trying to measure the productivity of software engineers based on number of lines of code.
- ACCount37 5mo ago
  The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow". Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.
  - jjk166 5mo ago
    > Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows. Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.
    - ACCount37 5mo ago
      You say that as if "align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded" isn't one of the hardest, most fundamental problems in all of organization and management.
      - jjk166 5mo ago
        Because it isn't. Aligning incentives is really easy. "If you do something that causes a productivity gain worth X, I will give you some reward with a value Y where Y is less than X but greater than the cost Z of the effort you needed to put in to generate the productivity gain. If the cost Z would be equal to or greater than X then don't do it." Managers make their work immensely harder on themselves by unnecessarily adding the constraint that they can't get people to do things by paying them fair amounts to do them. Now certainly there are some highly skilled managers out there who can still succeed despite this handicap, and if that earns them a fat paycheck then good for them. But if you don't have those skills you don't get to excuse your failures with an inefficiency you created for yourself.
GreenSalem 5mo ago
There are a LOT of bad CEOs. There are also a LOT of bad software developers. When they meet, the software developer is fired. The CEO exits after a while, after exercising their stock options...
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  bad CEO + bad software developer = new CTO.
  - ing33k 5mo ago
    lol, what does it mean ?
spoonjim 5mo ago
CEOs who think that excavators replace their hand-diggers are just bad CEOs
- as1mov 5mo ago
  If the excavators only worked half the time, sometimes goes out of control bonking someone in the head and costs a billion dollars, then yeah they're pretty bad CEOs
einpoklum 5mo ago
So much of this hype feels like astroturf in preparation for the upcoming IPOs: https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/ https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/ and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.
josefritzishere 5mo ago
Most CEOs are not special. They are not especially smart, or skilled, or technical. The role self selects for sociopathy. That's not a quality that has any kind of linear relationship with intelligence. Quite the contrary.
- profdevloper 5mo ago
  Sociopathy is a valuable skill in today's competitive marketplace.
bmitc 5mo ago
CEOs are probably the most replaceable position, period, by human or AI. Everyone just gives them information. They don't know any information themselves. Problem is, a CEO can fire employees, find out it was a dumb decision, then leave with a million dollar severance package. So they don't really care when they're wrong.
claytongulick 5mo ago
This is a great article, and I agree with most of it. The problem is that the wrong eyes are seeing it. We need these kinds of articles to be published in places that executives read, and tailored to their audience. AI recovery is going to be a big wave of consulting over the next several years, maybe very publicly or maybe quietly, but it's going to be a thing. That doesn't mean "all AI is bad" or any other such nonsense, it means that there are a lot of companies out there right now that are doing it wrong and will need help. The executives that get ahead of this are going to be the winners.
mountainriver 5mo ago
If AI makes you more capable, it’s basically like having a capital injection. CEOs that look at that and think they need to reduce headcount seem to also be signaling they don’t know what to do with increased resources
StellarScience 5mo ago
CEOs understands that AI offers potential productivity increases. Using that productivity boost to cut staff is an unimaginative approach. Bolder approaches include using that boost to exceed the expectations of current customers, or to increase sales without proportional increase in staff, etc.
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
[dead]
rq1 5mo ago
I think sooner rather than later, AI will replace CEOs.
taylodl 5mo ago
Maybe the CEOs who think AI replaces their employees should be replaced by AI?
- MisterKent 5mo ago
  I keep seeing this sentiment in general and in this thread. I wrote about it here too: https://blog.nilesh.io/post/llms-and-jobs https://blog.nilesh.io/post/llms-and-jobs Just because people have a vague idea of what someone's job is and a deep understanding of their own job, it feels like AI can replace everyone but you.
habosa 5mo ago
I saw someone on Xitter say "Any CEO who wants to replace jobs with AI should first have to replace their own assistant with AI" and I think that's the perfect rule. Every AI demo is some version of a personal assistant, surely AI can do that job right? I think we'd get zero volunteers from CEOs who have assistants. (Note: this is not meant to be an insult to human assistants! I think they do a valuable job and should not be replaced by AI either).
- scubadude 5mo ago
  It's the eating your own dog food. The Open AI guy said it's now better than doctors (he said it, not me lol). He's replaced his doctor, right?
  - SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
    What he said (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/ai-may-beat-doctors-at-diagnosis-but-trust-still-wins-sam-altman/articleshow/122947295.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelli...) is that he doesn't want AI to replace his doctor even if it is better at diagnosis. He wants both and he expects most people to agree.
  - outime 5mo ago
    I don't think that's a fair comparison since LLMs can't e.g. prescribe medical tests or medication. That's not something I'd be looking for anyway, but we should at least compare apples to apples.
- zuzululu 5mo ago
  I donno CEOs get signals from multiple channels that cantbe accessed by AI or ordinary workers so that alone becomes a moat same with sales jobs theres a plane that AI cannot observe (yet)
bondolo 5mo ago
Early in my career I read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Between that book Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and Humphrey's "Managing the Software Process" it seemed that there was hope for the software industry learning some necessary lessons and growing to become a true engineering discipline. Nope. Never happened. The industry standard, despite improvements in some areas, is still a farcical shitshow with little beyond lipservice to process, predictability or proper self-evaluation. I can only describe agile, as it is practised, more of a coping mechanism than an actual methodology. Indeed the methodology is embodied mostly in the infrastructure; issue tracking, version control, code review, continuous integration with as little methodology glue between them as required to produce output. Modern first and second tier software management seems less professional, is contributing less and is generally worse than it was twenty years ago. The quality of the engineering and program managers, their training and commitment to their craft seems really low and is not generally valued. On average team level software management has gotten worse rather than better and, given what is expected and how it is valued, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It is truly disappointing that what could have been a valuable and productivity enhancing role became so useless. Things aren't going to change for the better though until the dust settles somewhat on the role of AI in software and systems development and we start again to consider how software should be developed in the 21st century. Maybe it is possible that with AI doing most of the low-level work that the focus will change to building and maintaining architecture and systems. Many programmers might become more like traditional engineers doing a lot more systems work than they do today and continuing to solve problems. Lord knows though it won't be today's software management doing this work; they have nothing in the way of skills to offer to the problem.
- rimliu 5mo ago
  I've had a urge to give that book to a couple of bosses when leaving the company (mostly because of said bosses).
woohanhan 5mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 5mo ago
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rayiner 5mo ago
The working horse population continued to grow for almost 20 years after the introduction of the Oldsmobile in 1901: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2lmdx/number_of_horses_vs_cars_in_the_united_states_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2lmdx/num.... The number of horses didn’t fall below the 1900 level until 1930, two decades after the Model T was introduced.
threethirtytwo 5mo ago
We're laughing now but the trendlines point to a future where this is true. That is the most realistic take as of right now. Cue rationalizations claiming that it isn't:
- techblueberry 5mo ago
  Future? Try present.
99954bb63ccc 5mo ago
So, a lot of the article makes several points that aren't necessarily new, but > The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” > This is a bad CEO. As described, this seems to me more like a lack of reasoning/critical thinking ability, and it's not unique to CEOs. Tracks more with a combo of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" and automation bias IMO. > This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen. "Cargo culting" as described here by the author may be happening. But, I think it's CEOs seeing other CEOs doing layoffs and claiming it's because of AI efficiency gains. They see the other CEO's stock go up/get hyped/etc, so they decide to do it. I think it's the same thing that happens inside companies IE people see how others behave and it works, so they do the same. Effectiveness aside because that's not at all what I'm arguing, AI is just the current flavor; it is a very safe thing to "cargo cult" at the moment.
bloaf 5mo ago
I'm don't know what makes a bad CEO but I've definitely worked with people who could be replaced by a current-gen AI.
- gitliterally 5mo ago
  I have unfortunately worked with people who don't understand git. I mean Post-covid, to quell some of you funny guys.
lenerdenator 5mo ago
> The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” > This is a bad CEO. There is one and only one measure of whether a CEO is good or bad: Does the CEO keep the majority of shareholders happy? Since they are more often than not kept happy with money, if the AI makes the CEO ask the question above and the result is a larger return on the shareholders' investment, then that is a good CEO. When your domain of knowledge considers Jack Welch to be a genius, there is no floor.
weare138 5mo ago
CEOs see that AI can do their job and assume it can do everyone else's too.
marketingess 5mo ago
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elzbardico 5mo ago
It is useless to preach against the wind. We're all now on this and we will go together in it till the very end, whatever it maybe. Look around: lots of places ressurected Lines of Code as a productivity metric for Software Teams. Companies that should have known better, as they are supposedly led by the Elite Human Capital, instituded token usage leaderboards. We can't stop that thing. It has too much momentum. Sooner or later we would have to pay for our culture of anti-intelectualism in business anyway. If it was not this, it would be another thing.
waterTanuki 5mo ago
> I will say that I hate the term “AI psychosis” because the term is extremely misleading, and many psychologists and psychiatrists have complained that it is inaccurate and may cause more problems itself. But the general sense that CEOs are going overboard with AI is definitely happening. It's getting exhausting how x field of experts constantly bemoan the coining of one term or another, rather than provide a decent alternative. It's not very goal-oriented thinking. Just empty complaining.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
  When people object to the coining of a term, what they're usually trying to say is that it just fails to refer to any coherent thing or group of things for which you could develop an alternate term. "AI psychosis" tries to group together the phenomenon where people fall in love with an LLM-generated character, the phenomenon where people spend too much time talking philosophy with LLMs and stop expressing coherent thoughts, and the phenomenon where tech evangelists say "AI can do all of these 5 million things" when actually it can't do all of them. But what if these are all different phenomena with different causes and solutions?
- rimliu 5mo ago
  is it inaccurate because "AI" is not really AI? ;)
sleepybrett 5mo ago
I'm not sure I've ever met a good ceo...
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tty456 5mo ago
Modern day CEOs of public companies are just more or less hedge fund operators looking to squeeze every last dollar out of their workforce. AI is a tantalizing, if ineffective, lever for that.
andrewvu0203 5mo ago
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napierzaza 5mo ago
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wolfi1 5mo ago
why shouldn't AI then replace the CEOs?
notepad0x90 5mo ago
I think it's more of a workforce reduction technique in some areas. how much is the issue, and lots of "it depends" but even at a higher up-front cost, LLMs have higher value and less liability. Instead of offshoring/outsourcing for example, you can have the same local devs that were leading/managing the offshore teams manage LLMs instead. Or if you have 10 expensive devs making 200k, just halving that is a million/year. even if that million is spent on tokens (even double or triple that) it might not be that much outside of what they would have been willing to pay for more devs anyways if there was the need, except now they have to deal with less people to manage overall. less lawyers, less hr, less lawsuits, less hiring and promption costs, less insurance premiums. Even if the quality of the work is a whole lot less, they only care about a viable product being shipped, and how much the lower quality affects profit margins. I'll say this, laws and regulation are sorely needed. all this hate against billionaires, ceos, ai-bros, whatever... might or might not be warranted, but it is fruitless. Redirect this energy to your law makers. In China for example, they made it illegal to use AI for the sole purpose of replacing human workers. The CEOs aren't bad CEOs, they aren't great either, it depends on the outcome. There are scenarios where entire job roles can be replaced by LLMs, but for complex roles like developers, you always need some human devs still, but likewise, almost always less of them than before. However, although less devs might be needed to do the same work, in some cases LLMs open up possibilities that weren't there before, so more devs babysitting LLMs or working on designing/shipping more features is also a strong possibility. I mean, companies aren't trying to simply save cost on employees, they also want to maximize profits. Less devs per feature isn't the same as less devs period. Overall, I'll say that demand creates its own supply. The internet itself killed many job roles and reduced the number of people you needed for many others, but it's not like we have the huge unemployment many were afraid of decades ago, if anything it created lots of more jobs. LLMs simply can't do everything people can, so they're not a drop-in replacement, that alone should mean a lot in terms of supply/demand economics.
notenkidev 5mo ago
The token leaderboard example was shocking. Counting token usage as a productivity metric is completely counterproductive. I believe that effectively leveraging AI means reducing wasted tokens, not increasing them. The visibility gap is serious. I create local activity logs for Claude Code, but most developers have no idea what the AI is actually doing at the file or command level until they look at the logs.
sollawen 5mo ago
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geopsist 5mo ago
I've been a founder since before any of this existed, same flavor of small team then and now. What I see now is that anyone can produce more but less due to their skills from scratch (slop?). A big company sees the headlines and a CEO reads that as "fewer people", or force use of LLMs and people seeing it as a preparation for AI processes taking over (and rightfully so). But frankly probably for smaller teams it reads "same people, wider surface". Imo bad CEOs existed before AI and will exist in the future...
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zurfer 5mo ago
I do think it's more subtle. AI can replace very few jobs end to end with the same quality, maybe none. But AI can be put to work on high ROI problems. Now when the new marginal job is not obviously as high ROI as putting another 100k of tokens to work, no human gets hired. Next, comes natural attrition in a company where a certain percentage will leave every year. Will they get replaced with a human or their budget goes into tokens? Only when these 2 angles are exhausted, a typical company will start thinking about layoffs. Now, some companies are already stressed: customer buy AI products instead of theirs, AI makes it easier to build what they offer, customers believe they can vibe code things. These companies will layoff first, because of AI. Not because AI will do the persons job but because the money gets spend differently.
amai 5mo ago
AI is the new outsourcing. It is cheap in the short term, but in the medium to long term it generates many problems, like loss of know-how and competitivness, huge maintenance cost, loss of control, and dependency on other foreign companies, with misaligned goals compared to your company. Before using AI ask yourself: Would you outsource this task, with all the risk that come with it? If yes, go for it. But if no, then don‘t use AI.
- vips7L 5mo ago
  Fits perfectly with typical capitalistic short sightedness.
KleantiX 5mo ago
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Andy_Donner 5mo ago
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bob1029 5mo ago
AI will never be able to replace a human board member. I think that's what bothers technology people the most here. It's quite asymmetric. At best, LLM agents will be granted certain non voting advisory roles, but anything the llm generates will need a human to assume responsibility. The point of a human being on the board is that they can be made to suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved. It's easy to look at the perks and not see the struggle behind them. No one in media is going to get a lot of clicks if they publish articles about how being a CEO is actually really hard and maybe some of what they're doing is actually justified once you assume all of the same context and stress they have. If we want to do to the executive staff what is being done to the technical staff, I'm afraid we will need to first figure out a way to make the AI experience human emotions as strongly as we do. It often sounds fun in first order terms to threaten to fire a CEO and replace them with a clanker, but have we considered the consequences of this? What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot? Being managed by a robot vs managing robots are wildly different things to me.
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  > What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot? Depends. Is the robot looking out for our best interests? Or is the robot looking out for the shareholders? I already ask AI to manage a lot of things, including my own activities. It all depends on whether the model can be trusted to act in our best interests.
- cableshaft 5mo ago
  > Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved. I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table. Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup). Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.
trolleski 5mo ago
But the number up, what wrong? Less word more time, me good CEO.
code51 5mo ago
Bad CEO but still CEO. That's the thing. Cost-saving is quite an easy idea to sell.
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robeym 5mo ago
AI impacts so much. So many white collar chores just get obliterated with AI. Legal & regulatory docs, production planning, sales materials, etc. Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase, and added automated .md -> html publishing so final drafts go straight to the website. This work that would've taken a contractor 1-2 weeks got done in a day, by me, someone who definitely isn't a technical writer. When the person who knows what's needed can handle the technical execution themselves, you no longer need that second person. I certainly wouldn't say you need "more humans"
- aiisjustanif 5mo ago
  > Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase For who? Will it ever be read? I’m bias on good documentation and I think AI is better at publishing documents for machines, for now.
  - robeym 5mo ago
    For PAX ERP. It'll be read by both humans and llms. "Paxy AI" will be the primary reader, which is the AI support tool in the system. When users ask it a question about how to do something, it'll answer based on the technical docs.
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AtlasBarfed 5mo ago
The interests of the shareholders is to maximize the final stages of the war on labor by capital.
glass1122 5mo ago
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jfreds 5mo ago
> The worst case of these were the few companies that set up token leaderboards, which is perhaps the dumbest way possible to encourage learning how to use LLMs well My company does something dumber now. A leaderboard of how many lines of code you shipped, weighted by how complex they were (assigned by a heuristic). You can imagine the incentive this creates. I wish we just measured tokens
brianmartin039 5mo ago
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zoetaylor00 5mo ago
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koliber 5mo ago
Over the past 9 months I've been advising one small client of mine on AI adoption, and engineering maturity in general. They have a team of 5 engineers. One very capable lead and 4 ICs. They did not use AI at all before. It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable. One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade. We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset. One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs. If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI. In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.

844 points by speckx 5mo ago

Wait, tech CEOs don’t understand why employees are valuable? Astronaut holding up gun to other astronaut Always have been.

ungreased0675 5mo ago

A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?

Terr_ 5mo ago
Robotics aren't there yet, it needs to go on golf playdates with investors and board members.
- mmmm2 5mo ago
  Maybe a virtual / Zoom agent could allow the elderly investor to stay in the game. When you get too old to go golfing you can still stay in the game.
grim_io 5mo ago
You can get a lot of tokens for a CEO. I'd say it's worth a try.
JTbane 5mo ago
You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.
- ottoflux 5mo ago
  100% been saying this for a while now. the main thing AI will be able to replace is a C suite.
  - pydry 5mo ago
    it's kind of like saying like you could replace a king with an AI. the position is a relationship to power more than it is a function with a productive output. a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).
  - orphea 5mo ago
    maybe this is the way forward. Imagine how many tokens one could burn given C suite salaries.
    - ihsw 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
    I think it will handle communication between the C suit and the underlings.
- mmmm2 5mo ago
  The hallucinations would be a feature in this case.
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
  I still remember when I used ChatGPT the first time to write an email. I thought to myself “Oh. This sounds like 99% of the corporate communication from above”. We were joking that corporate had BossGPT for years and just didn’t tell anybody. It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.
- m463 5mo ago
  and people actully MIND if your CEO is a liar. But AI is expected to lie^H^H^H hallucinate
- lawn 5mo ago
  Our CEO bragged about him "just building stuff" now (vibe coding) while outsourcing his other tasks to AI. I don't think that's the flex he thinks it is.
hoppp 5mo ago
I am building a project now and then will create an AI to manage it and be the CEO. The code is human + AI, the management is only AI
phyzix5761 5mo ago
Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?
- rrauenza 5mo ago
  Remember the printer in Office Space?
- stvltvs 5mo ago
  It sounds like you already know the answer.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  lol CEOs in jail.
- celdon25 5mo ago
  I think Grok on x.com is a reasonable case study. There’s the stuff we heard about and then there’s a separate category of things that weren’t newsworthy, and only the newsworthy things prompted changes to be made.
- watwut 5mo ago
  To be fair here, CEO dont take responsibility and dont go to jail. In rare case they do, they will be pardoned.
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- ihsw 5mo ago
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vineyardmike 5mo ago
While I agree that AIs would do a good job… Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?
- yoyohello13 5mo ago
  Weirdly enough, I'd take the robot. At least we can pretend the robot doesn't know any better. The human is actively choosing to be a dick and profiting off it.
- vitally3643 5mo ago
  The flesh sack is choosing to be an insufferable twat, and the robot either doesn't have any choice or has a decent statistical justification for what it does.
- ungreased0675 5mo ago
  A robot with access to all of the company data and mediocre decision making wouldn’t be terrible.
dijksterhuis 5mo ago
https://replaceyourboss.ai https://replaceyourboss.ai (discussed 6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072002)
ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
AI means mediocre. Mediocre companies are pretty bad to work in. So it would guarantee a soulless and pointless company imo
- ungreased0675 5mo ago
  My charitable word would be average. AI means average. And an average CEO isn’t that bad. It’d be a deliberate trade in exchange for less spending on salaries. (just one very large salary)
nobodyandproud 5mo ago
I posited that one as a question. Naive and stupid, but it was downvoted and flagged away into oblivion with zero chance for a conversation.
manicennui 5mo ago
It's pretty disappointing that people on this site of all places have no idea what CEOs do. Many of them are certainly overpaid, and like any other profession, many are not good at their jobs, but they aren't sitting around drafting memos and coming up with deciding who to fire all day.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  I would never accuse CEOs of sitting around drafting memos or daydreaming about who to fire They're too busy playing golf
dartharva 5mo ago
I reckon such AIs are already in place, but by proxy. There must be CEOs somewhere who have completely offloaded what meagre amount of thinking they needed to do to some bespoke AI setup while they LARP around convincing people they are the one running things.

misano 5mo ago

A common misconception about AI is that it is intended to fully replace humans, which is incorrect. The purpose of AI is to reduce the need for human labor, and it has already been doing so. For example—though this is not an exact figure—a task that previously required 15 people might now only need 10. In no instance has the human element been completely replaced; rather, the reliance on manual labor has simply been reduced.

pavel_lishin 5mo ago
> though this is not an exact figure You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.
- sbarre 5mo ago
  So what if it is? The example still stands. A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business. For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-) So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you. This has happened before with other advancements in industrial/technological automation. It's not a new concept.
  - iLoveOncall 5mo ago
    That supposes that AI has a positive impact to efficiency. So far I see the exact contrary, at least for software engineering.
    - sbarre 5mo ago
      I see tons of evidence of positive impact, but I suppose everyone has their own perspective. I did try to account for that with this line: > For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-)
  - misano 5mo ago
    exactly

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Previously: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679 I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

everdrive 5mo ago

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

willio58 5mo ago
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
- Henchman21 5mo ago
  You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!
  - nemomarx 5mo ago
    The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
  - zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
    Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?
    - nathan_compton 5mo ago
      Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.

seydor 5mo ago

What about employees who think AI replaces their CEO

Fordec 5mo ago
Upper management material written all over them.

saadn92 5mo ago

It’s hilarious to me that when you stop investing in juniors and seniors who use your AIs retire, what are they going to do then?

glitchc 5mo ago
Who wants to be CEO for that long? The company will be sold off to a larger conglomerate long before that happens.
Waterluvian 5mo ago
Get your state governor to go on tv and ask for people who know how to program Cobalt.
moregrist 5mo ago
You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility. Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting. Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.
AngryData 5mo ago
Complain how nobody wants to work and/or blame foreigners. The usual.

jmyeet 5mo ago

The primary product of AI is labor displacement and consequently wage supression. This is what OpenAI and Anthropic are really selling. It didn't start with AI but AI is accelerating it. This is what layoffs have been about since the pandemic. People in fear of losing their jobs do extra unpaid work and aren't asking for raises. The theoretical potential of AI gives companies the excuse to fire more people. The investment itself is directly used as a reason of why they need to cut back on labor. Any sufficiently sized business can only feed the insatiable hunger for ever-increasing profits ultimately by cutting costs and raising prices. And what do we have now? High inflation and a decline in real wages. CEOs are just following this playbook. And the result is that society is bouldering towards collapse. We're seeing the first hints of this with the youth unemployment crisis [1][2][3]. Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money? [1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million-unemployed-youth-spell-danger-for-future-economic-growth/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million... [2]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-youth-unemployment-crisis/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-yo... [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o

thewebguyd 5mo ago
> Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money? This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending. There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot. A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce. Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)
- 5mo ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work. In my experience, the same type of thing applies to products that we ship (and charge money for).

aplomb1026 5mo ago
[flagged]
pknomad 5mo ago
I like this analogy; raising children well like delivering products well pays dividends. They’re less likely to cause problems and if they do, they tend to be smaller in scope.
socketcluster 5mo ago
Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page. If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them. Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.
- tauserfunnel 5mo ago
  I hate to use a throwaway, but this bit: > with a functioning user acquisition funnel How do you actually get this. I've got a product, the site is hand crafted, shows the complex product really well (and had good feedback on it) but how do I acquire the users? It seems as the cost of creating software has plummeted, it's the actual sales side of it that's going to matter even more. I'm stuck at this point.

chopete3 5mo ago

>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO. This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful. There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.

wwweston 5mo ago
If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement. L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix. I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff. They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).
- alex_sf 5mo ago
  My agent is currently doing the work of ~6 senior engineers, based on ticket closures. These are not trivial tasks: all of them involve a mix of code, judgement, executing remote commands in a production environment, etc. This is at a well-known tech company operating at massive scale (and resulting complexity). L1/L2 tech support is completely dead within a couple years. The delay is only around how long it takes people to realize.
  - trolleski 5mo ago
    I've got 12 agents. They're doing the work of 120 engineers, and three CEOs. Lately, one of the agents has been laid off due to AI, and another went to see the Burning Man so another 10 work overtime. The CEO agent became an evangelical Christian, and wrote how cool Peter Thiel is on X, so we no longer need people, the future is here.

noncoml 5mo ago

The CEOs that think AI replaces their employees are the same that at the same time don't want to pay the AI costs.

matheusmoreira 5mo ago

Why can't we get AI models that replace these CEOs? I bet they're pretty good at running a company.

noncoml 5mo ago

It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI: A* search -> AI Backtracking -> AI Neural Networks -> AI Fuzzy Logic -> AI Genetic Algorithm -> AI Deep Learning -> AI Generative "AI" -> AI Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work. The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.

gowld 5mo ago
Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- noncoml 5mo ago
  The point isn’t whether the aviation term "autopilot" has a technically defensible meaning, but that "Autopilot" predictably made normal people think "the car drives itself", just like "AI" now makes non-technical CEOs think "AGI employee replacement machine". You are arguing the dictionary while I’m arguing the predictable, if not very well calculated and purposeful, misunderstanding.
- themafia 5mo ago
  > the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does It's a bad analogy. Autopilot just maintains the aircraft in some state, then there's the flight director which maintains the flight path, and you can connect or disconnect the two at will. When connected the director can change the autopilot state. To use the flight director you must fully specify your flight. The weight, the fuel, the weather, expected winds, takeoff and landing runway length, runway conditions, expected brake demand, as well as every single waypoint you're going to cross and the expected state at that crossing. > what the human metaphor means We learned after high levels of cockpit automation that maintaining situational awareness was still required. Pilots are freed of some stress during high workload portions of the flight, provided they planned correctly in advance, and that zero changes to their flight plan (not likely) occur. As a result pilots are mostly told and trained to hand fly the plane during take offs and landings if the weather allows for it. You should only use high levels of automation if the situation demands it.

ReptileMan 5mo ago

A story from today - I needed a small utility to remap my logitech buttons under windows without installing their horrendous GHUB. Logitech Onboard Memory Manager still required ghub to be put into onboard mode. The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do. That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human. There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't "To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.

socketcluster 5mo ago

Wow the token leaderboard idea is nuts. It's similar to trying to measure the productivity of software engineers based on number of lines of code.

ACCount37 5mo ago
The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow". Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.
- jjk166 5mo ago
  > Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows. Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.
  - ACCount37 5mo ago
    You say that as if "align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded" isn't one of the hardest, most fundamental problems in all of organization and management.
    - jjk166 5mo ago
      Because it isn't. Aligning incentives is really easy. "If you do something that causes a productivity gain worth X, I will give you some reward with a value Y where Y is less than X but greater than the cost Z of the effort you needed to put in to generate the productivity gain. If the cost Z would be equal to or greater than X then don't do it." Managers make their work immensely harder on themselves by unnecessarily adding the constraint that they can't get people to do things by paying them fair amounts to do them. Now certainly there are some highly skilled managers out there who can still succeed despite this handicap, and if that earns them a fat paycheck then good for them. But if you don't have those skills you don't get to excuse your failures with an inefficiency you created for yourself.

GreenSalem 5mo ago

There are a LOT of bad CEOs. There are also a LOT of bad software developers. When they meet, the software developer is fired. The CEO exits after a while, after exercising their stock options...

elzbardico 5mo ago
bad CEO + bad software developer = new CTO.
- ing33k 5mo ago
  lol, what does it mean ?

spoonjim 5mo ago

CEOs who think that excavators replace their hand-diggers are just bad CEOs

as1mov 5mo ago
If the excavators only worked half the time, sometimes goes out of control bonking someone in the head and costs a billion dollars, then yeah they're pretty bad CEOs

einpoklum 5mo ago

So much of this hype feels like astroturf in preparation for the upcoming IPOs: https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/ https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/ and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.

josefritzishere 5mo ago

Most CEOs are not special. They are not especially smart, or skilled, or technical. The role self selects for sociopathy. That's not a quality that has any kind of linear relationship with intelligence. Quite the contrary.

profdevloper 5mo ago
Sociopathy is a valuable skill in today's competitive marketplace.

bmitc 5mo ago

CEOs are probably the most replaceable position, period, by human or AI. Everyone just gives them information. They don't know any information themselves. Problem is, a CEO can fire employees, find out it was a dumb decision, then leave with a million dollar severance package. So they don't really care when they're wrong.

claytongulick 5mo ago

This is a great article, and I agree with most of it. The problem is that the wrong eyes are seeing it. We need these kinds of articles to be published in places that executives read, and tailored to their audience. AI recovery is going to be a big wave of consulting over the next several years, maybe very publicly or maybe quietly, but it's going to be a thing. That doesn't mean "all AI is bad" or any other such nonsense, it means that there are a lot of companies out there right now that are doing it wrong and will need help. The executives that get ahead of this are going to be the winners.

mountainriver 5mo ago

If AI makes you more capable, it’s basically like having a capital injection. CEOs that look at that and think they need to reduce headcount seem to also be signaling they don’t know what to do with increased resources

StellarScience 5mo ago

CEOs understands that AI offers potential productivity increases. Using that productivity boost to cut staff is an unimaginative approach. Bolder approaches include using that boost to exceed the expectations of current customers, or to increase sales without proportional increase in staff, etc.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago

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rq1 5mo ago

I think sooner rather than later, AI will replace CEOs.

taylodl 5mo ago

Maybe the CEOs who think AI replaces their employees should be replaced by AI?

MisterKent 5mo ago
I keep seeing this sentiment in general and in this thread. I wrote about it here too: https://blog.nilesh.io/post/llms-and-jobs https://blog.nilesh.io/post/llms-and-jobs Just because people have a vague idea of what someone's job is and a deep understanding of their own job, it feels like AI can replace everyone but you.

habosa 5mo ago

I saw someone on Xitter say "Any CEO who wants to replace jobs with AI should first have to replace their own assistant with AI" and I think that's the perfect rule. Every AI demo is some version of a personal assistant, surely AI can do that job right? I think we'd get zero volunteers from CEOs who have assistants. (Note: this is not meant to be an insult to human assistants! I think they do a valuable job and should not be replaced by AI either).

scubadude 5mo ago
It's the eating your own dog food. The Open AI guy said it's now better than doctors (he said it, not me lol). He's replaced his doctor, right?
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
  What he said (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/ai-may-beat-doctors-at-diagnosis-but-trust-still-wins-sam-altman/articleshow/122947295.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelli...) is that he doesn't want AI to replace his doctor even if it is better at diagnosis. He wants both and he expects most people to agree.
- outime 5mo ago
  I don't think that's a fair comparison since LLMs can't e.g. prescribe medical tests or medication. That's not something I'd be looking for anyway, but we should at least compare apples to apples.
zuzululu 5mo ago
I donno CEOs get signals from multiple channels that cantbe accessed by AI or ordinary workers so that alone becomes a moat same with sales jobs theres a plane that AI cannot observe (yet)

bondolo 5mo ago

Early in my career I read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Between that book Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and Humphrey's "Managing the Software Process" it seemed that there was hope for the software industry learning some necessary lessons and growing to become a true engineering discipline. Nope. Never happened. The industry standard, despite improvements in some areas, is still a farcical shitshow with little beyond lipservice to process, predictability or proper self-evaluation. I can only describe agile, as it is practised, more of a coping mechanism than an actual methodology. Indeed the methodology is embodied mostly in the infrastructure; issue tracking, version control, code review, continuous integration with as little methodology glue between them as required to produce output. Modern first and second tier software management seems less professional, is contributing less and is generally worse than it was twenty years ago. The quality of the engineering and program managers, their training and commitment to their craft seems really low and is not generally valued. On average team level software management has gotten worse rather than better and, given what is expected and how it is valued, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It is truly disappointing that what could have been a valuable and productivity enhancing role became so useless. Things aren't going to change for the better though until the dust settles somewhat on the role of AI in software and systems development and we start again to consider how software should be developed in the 21st century. Maybe it is possible that with AI doing most of the low-level work that the focus will change to building and maintaining architecture and systems. Many programmers might become more like traditional engineers doing a lot more systems work than they do today and continuing to solve problems. Lord knows though it won't be today's software management doing this work; they have nothing in the way of skills to offer to the problem.

rimliu 5mo ago
I've had a urge to give that book to a couple of bosses when leaving the company (mostly because of said bosses).

woohanhan 5mo ago

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rayiner 5mo ago

The working horse population continued to grow for almost 20 years after the introduction of the Oldsmobile in 1901: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2lmdx/number_of_horses_vs_cars_in_the_united_states_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2lmdx/num.... The number of horses didn’t fall below the 1900 level until 1930, two decades after the Model T was introduced.

threethirtytwo 5mo ago

We're laughing now but the trendlines point to a future where this is true. That is the most realistic take as of right now. Cue rationalizations claiming that it isn't:

techblueberry 5mo ago
Future? Try present.

99954bb63ccc 5mo ago

So, a lot of the article makes several points that aren't necessarily new, but > The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” > This is a bad CEO. As described, this seems to me more like a lack of reasoning/critical thinking ability, and it's not unique to CEOs. Tracks more with a combo of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" and automation bias IMO. > This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen. "Cargo culting" as described here by the author may be happening. But, I think it's CEOs seeing other CEOs doing layoffs and claiming it's because of AI efficiency gains. They see the other CEO's stock go up/get hyped/etc, so they decide to do it. I think it's the same thing that happens inside companies IE people see how others behave and it works, so they do the same. Effectiveness aside because that's not at all what I'm arguing, AI is just the current flavor; it is a very safe thing to "cargo cult" at the moment.

bloaf 5mo ago

I'm don't know what makes a bad CEO but I've definitely worked with people who could be replaced by a current-gen AI.

gitliterally 5mo ago
I have unfortunately worked with people who don't understand git. I mean Post-covid, to quell some of you funny guys.

lenerdenator 5mo ago

> The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” > This is a bad CEO. There is one and only one measure of whether a CEO is good or bad: Does the CEO keep the majority of shareholders happy? Since they are more often than not kept happy with money, if the AI makes the CEO ask the question above and the result is a larger return on the shareholders' investment, then that is a good CEO. When your domain of knowledge considers Jack Welch to be a genius, there is no floor.

weare138 5mo ago

CEOs see that AI can do their job and assume it can do everyone else's too.

marketingess 5mo ago

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elzbardico 5mo ago

It is useless to preach against the wind. We're all now on this and we will go together in it till the very end, whatever it maybe. Look around: lots of places ressurected Lines of Code as a productivity metric for Software Teams. Companies that should have known better, as they are supposedly led by the Elite Human Capital, instituded token usage leaderboards. We can't stop that thing. It has too much momentum. Sooner or later we would have to pay for our culture of anti-intelectualism in business anyway. If it was not this, it would be another thing.

waterTanuki 5mo ago

> I will say that I hate the term “AI psychosis” because the term is extremely misleading, and many psychologists and psychiatrists have complained that it is inaccurate and may cause more problems itself. But the general sense that CEOs are going overboard with AI is definitely happening. It's getting exhausting how x field of experts constantly bemoan the coining of one term or another, rather than provide a decent alternative. It's not very goal-oriented thinking. Just empty complaining.

SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
When people object to the coining of a term, what they're usually trying to say is that it just fails to refer to any coherent thing or group of things for which you could develop an alternate term. "AI psychosis" tries to group together the phenomenon where people fall in love with an LLM-generated character, the phenomenon where people spend too much time talking philosophy with LLMs and stop expressing coherent thoughts, and the phenomenon where tech evangelists say "AI can do all of these 5 million things" when actually it can't do all of them. But what if these are all different phenomena with different causes and solutions?
rimliu 5mo ago
is it inaccurate because "AI" is not really AI? ;)

sleepybrett 5mo ago

I'm not sure I've ever met a good ceo...

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tty456 5mo ago

Modern day CEOs of public companies are just more or less hedge fund operators looking to squeeze every last dollar out of their workforce. AI is a tantalizing, if ineffective, lever for that.

andrewvu0203 5mo ago

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napierzaza 5mo ago

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wolfi1 5mo ago

why shouldn't AI then replace the CEOs?

notepad0x90 5mo ago

I think it's more of a workforce reduction technique in some areas. how much is the issue, and lots of "it depends" but even at a higher up-front cost, LLMs have higher value and less liability. Instead of offshoring/outsourcing for example, you can have the same local devs that were leading/managing the offshore teams manage LLMs instead. Or if you have 10 expensive devs making 200k, just halving that is a million/year. even if that million is spent on tokens (even double or triple that) it might not be that much outside of what they would have been willing to pay for more devs anyways if there was the need, except now they have to deal with less people to manage overall. less lawyers, less hr, less lawsuits, less hiring and promption costs, less insurance premiums. Even if the quality of the work is a whole lot less, they only care about a viable product being shipped, and how much the lower quality affects profit margins. I'll say this, laws and regulation are sorely needed. all this hate against billionaires, ceos, ai-bros, whatever... might or might not be warranted, but it is fruitless. Redirect this energy to your law makers. In China for example, they made it illegal to use AI for the sole purpose of replacing human workers. The CEOs aren't bad CEOs, they aren't great either, it depends on the outcome. There are scenarios where entire job roles can be replaced by LLMs, but for complex roles like developers, you always need some human devs still, but likewise, almost always less of them than before. However, although less devs might be needed to do the same work, in some cases LLMs open up possibilities that weren't there before, so more devs babysitting LLMs or working on designing/shipping more features is also a strong possibility. I mean, companies aren't trying to simply save cost on employees, they also want to maximize profits. Less devs per feature isn't the same as less devs period. Overall, I'll say that demand creates its own supply. The internet itself killed many job roles and reduced the number of people you needed for many others, but it's not like we have the huge unemployment many were afraid of decades ago, if anything it created lots of more jobs. LLMs simply can't do everything people can, so they're not a drop-in replacement, that alone should mean a lot in terms of supply/demand economics.

notenkidev 5mo ago

The token leaderboard example was shocking. Counting token usage as a productivity metric is completely counterproductive. I believe that effectively leveraging AI means reducing wasted tokens, not increasing them. The visibility gap is serious. I create local activity logs for Claude Code, but most developers have no idea what the AI is actually doing at the file or command level until they look at the logs.

sollawen 5mo ago

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geopsist 5mo ago

I've been a founder since before any of this existed, same flavor of small team then and now. What I see now is that anyone can produce more but less due to their skills from scratch (slop?). A big company sees the headlines and a CEO reads that as "fewer people", or force use of LLMs and people seeing it as a preparation for AI processes taking over (and rightfully so). But frankly probably for smaller teams it reads "same people, wider surface". Imo bad CEOs existed before AI and will exist in the future...

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zurfer 5mo ago

I do think it's more subtle. AI can replace very few jobs end to end with the same quality, maybe none. But AI can be put to work on high ROI problems. Now when the new marginal job is not obviously as high ROI as putting another 100k of tokens to work, no human gets hired. Next, comes natural attrition in a company where a certain percentage will leave every year. Will they get replaced with a human or their budget goes into tokens? Only when these 2 angles are exhausted, a typical company will start thinking about layoffs. Now, some companies are already stressed: customer buy AI products instead of theirs, AI makes it easier to build what they offer, customers believe they can vibe code things. These companies will layoff first, because of AI. Not because AI will do the persons job but because the money gets spend differently.

amai 5mo ago

AI is the new outsourcing. It is cheap in the short term, but in the medium to long term it generates many problems, like loss of know-how and competitivness, huge maintenance cost, loss of control, and dependency on other foreign companies, with misaligned goals compared to your company. Before using AI ask yourself: Would you outsource this task, with all the risk that come with it? If yes, go for it. But if no, then don‘t use AI.

vips7L 5mo ago
Fits perfectly with typical capitalistic short sightedness.

KleantiX 5mo ago

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Andy_Donner 5mo ago

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bob1029 5mo ago

AI will never be able to replace a human board member. I think that's what bothers technology people the most here. It's quite asymmetric. At best, LLM agents will be granted certain non voting advisory roles, but anything the llm generates will need a human to assume responsibility. The point of a human being on the board is that they can be made to suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved. It's easy to look at the perks and not see the struggle behind them. No one in media is going to get a lot of clicks if they publish articles about how being a CEO is actually really hard and maybe some of what they're doing is actually justified once you assume all of the same context and stress they have. If we want to do to the executive staff what is being done to the technical staff, I'm afraid we will need to first figure out a way to make the AI experience human emotions as strongly as we do. It often sounds fun in first order terms to threaten to fire a CEO and replace them with a clanker, but have we considered the consequences of this? What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot? Being managed by a robot vs managing robots are wildly different things to me.

matheusmoreira 5mo ago
> What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot? Depends. Is the robot looking out for our best interests? Or is the robot looking out for the shareholders? I already ask AI to manage a lot of things, including my own activities. It all depends on whether the model can be trusted to act in our best interests.
cableshaft 5mo ago
> Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved. I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table. Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup). Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.

trolleski 5mo ago

But the number up, what wrong? Less word more time, me good CEO.

code51 5mo ago

Bad CEO but still CEO. That's the thing. Cost-saving is quite an easy idea to sell.

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robeym 5mo ago

AI impacts so much. So many white collar chores just get obliterated with AI. Legal & regulatory docs, production planning, sales materials, etc. Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase, and added automated .md -> html publishing so final drafts go straight to the website. This work that would've taken a contractor 1-2 weeks got done in a day, by me, someone who definitely isn't a technical writer. When the person who knows what's needed can handle the technical execution themselves, you no longer need that second person. I certainly wouldn't say you need "more humans"

aiisjustanif 5mo ago
> Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase For who? Will it ever be read? I’m bias on good documentation and I think AI is better at publishing documents for machines, for now.
- robeym 5mo ago
  For PAX ERP. It'll be read by both humans and llms. "Paxy AI" will be the primary reader, which is the AI support tool in the system. When users ask it a question about how to do something, it'll answer based on the technical docs.

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AtlasBarfed 5mo ago

The interests of the shareholders is to maximize the final stages of the war on labor by capital.

glass1122 5mo ago

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jfreds 5mo ago

> The worst case of these were the few companies that set up token leaderboards, which is perhaps the dumbest way possible to encourage learning how to use LLMs well My company does something dumber now. A leaderboard of how many lines of code you shipped, weighted by how complex they were (assigned by a heuristic). You can imagine the incentive this creates. I wish we just measured tokens

brianmartin039 5mo ago

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zoetaylor00 5mo ago

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koliber 5mo ago

Over the past 9 months I've been advising one small client of mine on AI adoption, and engineering maturity in general. They have a team of 5 engineers. One very capable lead and 4 ICs. They did not use AI at all before. It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable. One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade. We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset. One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs. If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI. In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.