CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs • Hacker News Board

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#191

Post by BLKNSLVR » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

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…

In various different projects I've been involved in where we've been implementing (not developing) software solutions I've noticed that, at management level, there is little regard given to the level of maintenance required of running the software; that people are still needed; that, yes, processes are automated, but there's a helluva lot of ongoing work required to ensure that new data won't pop the automation off the rails.

It's as if the installation part is the hard bit, and after that it'll take care of itself for ... far enough into the future that it won't be 's problem. It is solved.

... and that's just using the system, not fixing bugs and adding features.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#192

Post by kreelman » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

californical wrote: post #156

hintymad wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

> the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) Holy crap that is dark. I like learning about ML for fun, and now I have to assume that their model is intentionally misinforming me to sabotage my learning? It is absolutely bananas that somebody decided that was ok behavior.

TLDR :-)

This comment is not entirely on point with your comment, it circles around and above it looking for lift though.

If you're not doing work that requires your code to stay in home nation data centres, Claude for Deepseek, Deepclaude (https://github.com/aattaran/deepclaude) is a great way to get better at using Claude like tools for software development. It even does a pretty good job of putting together cover letters for job applications...

Using Deepclaude is very much cheaper than using claude... For hobby projects, I've found it useful. A recipe (for cooking) management app I've made took a couple of hours to put together and cost $US 0.5. Claude is far more expensive.

The downsides of Deepclaude for many are:-

- DeepSeek is a Chinese corporation so the Chinese Communist Party may ask for data if it wants it.

- DeepClaude isn't as fast as normal Claude, though it's still pretty fast and I think fast enough (YMMV).

- DeepClaude might not be as optimised for various code issues that Claude may be able to solve more quickly or effectively.

- The same safeguards are probably on DeepSeek, but you won't be "wasting" as much money as you might on using Claude.

Inference focused hardware (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPqHoVSenE, AI generated speech) may in the medium future cause a large enough cost/energy reduction for LLM tools like Claude to make local LLMs more attractive.

Inference focused hardware would make running Open Source models like DeepSeek on local machines far cheaper and control over safeguards would return to the end user.

Hopefully this leads to a localised LLM provision market where local businesses provide varieties of these "local" LLM services. Here, local could mean on premise through to state or nationally based LLM services. Eventually, government orgs outside of the US may demand this kind of LLM use, in the same way governments legally require data to be stored within national borders for many critical government functions.

A bloke can dream I guess...

...Could affordable inference focused hardware also cause the bottom to fall out of these stock market bending valuations for AI corps and their datacentre obsessions?... Not to mention the societal costs caused by the AI super corps building these data centres. At the moment, they're nearly making a profit... They seem almost like speculative companies... Is that a term?

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#193

Post by dartharva » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #35

Henchman21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc. However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops. There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all usin…

Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#194

Post by kreelman » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

techblueberry wrote: post #190

hintymad wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

I’ve been wondering if “you’re not google” when learning about googles software dev process applies to Anthropic. Anthropic is a company that A. Has cheap unlimited access to its models and B. Is probably largely insulated from the types of tradeoffs that the rest of industry has had to observe in the post-ZIRP era. Like did they break through the productivity seal? Or are they willing to spend that much more on it s…

What is post-ZIRP please :-) ?

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#195

Post by dartharva » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #100

Henchman21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

What are the concrete benefits? Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?

Generally, yes. Also the gap between the employee and executive class is a lot smaller instead of unnaturally inflated like it is in most private equity companies.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#196

Post by techblueberry » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

kreelman wrote: post #194

techblueberry wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been wondering if “you’re not google” when learning about googles software dev process applies to Anthropic. Anthropic is a company that A. Has cheap unlimited access to its models and B. Is probably largely insulated from the types of tradeoffs that the rest of industry has had to observe in the post-ZIRP era. Like did they break through the productivity seal? Or are they willing to spend that much more on it s…

What is post-ZIRP please :-) ?

Zero interest rate policy. When interest rates are Near zero you can spend money like it’s free. A lot of what we thought of as like normal engineering culture were the result of interest rates being zero.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#197

Post by gitliterally » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

bloaf wrote: post #163

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.

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

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#198

Post by fuzzfactor » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #181

munk-a wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share. I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to t…

Any data to support those claims?

Not usually the kind of data that the greediest capitalists would appreciate.

There are some case studies here, but it's only one professor in a largely non-capitalist approach overall:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richar...

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#199

Post by dartharva » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#200

Post by shimman » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:24 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #121

shimman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8... There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you l…

“We are sure it will work because it’s never been tried!” I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there.

Why does this argument never apply to neoliberalism?

That was never put to a vote but it still thrusted upon a country where the results are what you would expect: the worse income inequality ever seen in the history of the nation, life expectancy has increased, deaths of despair have reached record highs, more children go to bed hungry, healthcare is being ripped from civilians, and corporations are legally allowed to poison and kill civilians (health insurance companies with their death panels, manufacturers causing cancer valleys) with zero legal repercussions.

So yeah maybe we should actually go the extreme into the other direction, if democracy is good enough to lead nations it's good enough to run businesses. If you're a worker IDK how you would argue otherwise. Being able to keep your boss/leadership accountable by voting for them out seems like a win for every workplace metric imaginable.

Imagine how better of a company Meta would be if Zuckerberg wasn't allowed to waste billions accomplishing nothing. In a just society he would have been voted out, but in a neoliberal society he is granted an insurmountable amount of wealth.

I'm sorry but this society sucks and acting like we can't do better, be better is beyond pathetic.