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CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

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Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#621

Post by willmadden »

danesparza wrote: post #602
deltarholamda wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big ne…

"But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed" Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API. And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.

The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#622

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

rideontime wrote: post #579
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people observe a limited subset of reality. It's highly visible when a company hits a crisis and people lose their jobs; it's much more common, but much less visible, for a CEO to get an after-hours call about a brewing problem which they must immediately work to smooth over.

You truly don't see the difference between those two examples?

I'm not quite sure why you ask that? I'm not arguing that these two very different examples are the same, I'm explaining more concretely what it means to say that a CEO's job is to "to be responsible to the business".

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#623

Post by gnunez »

As an engineer, I love the idea of flipping the problem on its head. Don't get rid of the engineers; get rid of the CEO. That's brilliant.

But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune?

There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for strategic business advice, they tend to converge toward what is popular and trendy rather than necessarily what is best for the particular situation. They called this "trendslop," and described the response as,

"On strategy, LLMs might be more akin to a freshly minted MBA or junior consultant, parroting what's popular rather than what's right for a particular situation."

I really hope this idea works but just thought I'd share some of the research out there. https://archive.is/OPObK/again?url=https://hbr.org/2026/03/r...

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#624

Post by martythemaniak »

gnunez wrote: post #623

As an engineer, I love the idea of flipping the problem on its head. Don't get rid of the engineers; get rid of the CEO. That's brilliant. But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune? There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for st…

I'm having a hard time seeing the recent AI layoff mania as anything different.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#625

Post by mandevil »

gnunez wrote: post #623

As an engineer, I love the idea of flipping the problem on its head. Don't get rid of the engineers; get rid of the CEO. That's brilliant. But if we are seeing problems with agents replacing knowledge workers at the coding layer, why assume the executive layer is uniquely immune? There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about this exact problem. Researchers found that when LLMs are asked for st…

Counterpoint: most human CEO's are doing trendslop as well. At least in the worlds I live in (US technology industry, so either megacap public companies or SV-funded startups). It often seems like all of the VCs, CEOs, and large investors in public software companies are all on the same group-chats and sharing the same ideas with each other, driving lots of this trendslop.

From observation of having worked at 7-8 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#626

Post by beepbooptheory »

Gormo wrote: post #595
beepbooptheory wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. Do you think the same thing about the concept of social/economic class as well? Or is it just rejecting that there is typically a struggle between them?

Basically, yeah. Classification in general is a subjective, value-laden activity. At the most granular resolution, everything is fundamentally sui generis -- putting things into classes requires making subjective judgments about what qualities and characteristics you're going to ignore in order to focus on the ones you care about. Put simply, when you come up with a class/category taxonomy, you're drawing your own bo…

If the categories here are truly a priori, then it seems strange to mistrust them? Maybe you mean a posteriori?

I think I get the angle here, but the whole thing about a single category/classification/abstraction against a continuum is that it doesn't need to speak to or predict the entire continuum, or to every quality and aspiration of one of its members. One set of things, "those items which have X", need not exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?

I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#627

Post by rurp »

Havoc wrote: post #304

Neither CEO nor dev here but must say hn comments on CEOs are always wild. It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about

I'm not going to vouch for every single HN comment, but running a large established company is fundamentally different from founding a startup, and I think most people recognize that. Getting a big company CEO job has way way more to do with networking and reputation than any sort of technical competence.

When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#629

Post by malux85 »

t43562 wrote: post #619
malux85 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement. Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are…

Who needs people skills if all the employees are agents?

Because in that situation you still have to interact with humans in customers, governments, other companies, investors and all the other places?

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#630

Post by Henchman21 »

willmadden wrote: post #621
danesparza wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed" Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API. And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.

The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.

I would argue the world is already dystopian and that human ambition has more or less doomed the species to extinction. So anything different seems great to me! :)
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