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…
CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
241–250 of 337 posts
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true. I have always prided myself on writing concise, high-Quality code, because it tends to be quite debt-free. So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt.
> So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt. Maybe a couple of years ago, but these days, Opus 4.8 is frankly writing better software than what I've seen over the previous decades in non-tech enterprise. These previous two months, we've replaced so much technical debt we've been dragging along for the previous 5 years as our team went from 25 to 3 people. This is in non-tech ent…
No. Opus 4.8 still writes bad code, just like every other time AI boosters have claimed "but the newest models are really good".
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#243Counting 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.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is very short sighted. You or anyone close to you might not be replaced but it should be clear that you don't want to live in a society with 20% unemployment.
I think Spain had unemployment in that range for many years.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#245Early 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 w…
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#246Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#247> 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…
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#248A 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?
You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.
I don't think that's the flex he thinks it is.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#249There 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.
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 wan…
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#250I 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 shoul…
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)