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...
CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
251–260 of 337 posts
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#252Reminds 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…
> 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/…
> 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/B test, and revert the code. Boris alone merged nearly 300 PRs in the past week (or two?).
Apart from many other issues with this, heavily subsidized subscription plans won't last forever, and if you start burning your own money on tokens in this way, you'll soon realize it's terribly inefficient.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"How do I acquire users" is the entire function of sales and marketing. A single HN comment explaining how to do sales and marketing, which is highly dependent on your product and market (and much more difficult than technical people tend to believe), is a bit unrealistic. And a great opportunity to use Claude/ChatGPT for something other than code. There's no silver bullet but as a springboard you can think about: Wh…
I really appreciate you writing this down. Thank you. This has helped a lot more than you probably think.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the cost of creating software has not, bloatware definitely has.
Whilst I understand your sentiment and don't get me wrong, there's _a lot_ of bloatware out there now, the game has fundamentally changed.
The sooner you realise this the better you will be moving forward. I won't debate you here, only returned to thank the other user that helped. Reflect on what is possible now compared to 3 years ago.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#255[deleted]
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#256Reminds 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…
Honestly I am burned out on public discussion of AI. There are so many hot, low info takes on both sides. All the dumb stuff revolves around this imbecilic notion that AI will take your job. In that sense Altman and Dario et. al. were extremely successful in their cringeworthy campaign to establish themselves as priests of a new machine god religion. Even the people who don't want it believed them. The good news is a…
I think this is the most level-headed take I've read in a while, sums up perfectly the HN discourse on "AI taking our jobs", thanks!
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#257I 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.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#258AI 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.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#259[flagged]
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#260[flagged]