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Comments (281)

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  ChrisMarshallNY
  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).
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  everdrive
  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.
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  habosa
  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).
• amai
  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.
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  ungreased0675
  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?
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  robeym
  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"
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  GreenSalem
  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...
• StellarScience
  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.
• notenkidev
  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.
• anon
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• mountainriver
  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
• zurfer
  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.
• matheusmoreira
  Why can't we get AI models that replace these CEOs? I bet they're pretty good at running a company.
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  bob1029
  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.
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  seydor
  What about employees who think AI replaces their CEO
• jfreds
  > 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 wellMy 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
• code51
  Bad CEO but still CEO. That's the thing.Cost-saving is quite an easy idea to sell.
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  taylodl
  Maybe the CEOs who think AI replaces their employees should be replaced by AI?
• ninjahawk1
  Wait, tech CEOs don’t understand why employees are valuable?Astronaut holding up gun to other astronautAlways have been.
• rayiner
  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/num.... The number of horses didn’t fall below the 1900 level until 1930, two decades after the Model T was introduced.
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  chopete3
  >> 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.
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  bloaf
  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.
• AtlasBarfed
  The interests of the shareholders is to maximize the final stages of the war on labor by capital.
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  socketcluster
  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.
• tty456
  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.
• trolleski
  But the number up, what wrong? Less word more time, me good CEO.
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  saadn92
  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?
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  bondolo
  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.
• rq1
  I think sooner rather than later, AI will replace CEOs.
• anon
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• noncoml
  The CEOs that think AI replaces their employees are the same that at the same time don't want to pay the AI costs.
• anon
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• wolfi1
  why shouldn't AI then replace the CEOs?
• bmitc
  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.
• ReptileMan
  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.
• geopsist
  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...
• sleepybrett
  I'm not sure I've ever met a good ceo...
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  waterTanuki
  > 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.
• elzbardico
  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.
• weare138
  CEOs see that AI can do their job and assume it can do everyone else's too.
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  jmyeet
  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...[2]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-yo...[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o
• claytongulick
  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.
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  noncoml
  It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI:A* search -> AIBacktracking -> AINeural Networks -> AIFuzzy Logic -> AIGenetic Algorithm -> AIDeep Learning -> AIGenerative "AI" -> AISimilar 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.
• ChrisArchitect
  Previously:Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosishttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosishttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379
• 99954bb63ccc
  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.
• einpoklum
  So much of this hype feels like astroturf in preparation for the upcoming IPOs: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.
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  threethirtytwo
  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:
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  spoonjim
  CEOs who think that excavators replace their hand-diggers are just bad CEOs
• lenerdenator
  > 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.
• notepad0x90
  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.
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  josefritzishere
  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.
• glass1122
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  misano
  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.
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