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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

#571
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Thompson killed more people than Luigi.

No, he didn’t. Not by any logic that doesn’t also implicate every other executive, employee, vendor, and customer of every health insurance company, plus a huge number of other industries. To the point where the blame is so diffuse that it’s a pointless exercise. Edit since I can’t reply: if “murderer” means someone who takes actions that have nth-order effects of someone dying, with no reasonable or discernible limi…

The CEO is the leader and should be the one pointed at when companies cause harm.

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

#572
Just like working with Ai on dev projects is like working along side a really smart but drunk buddy, an Ai CEO is like being guided by a coked up business coach. In the end, with Ai where it is, I think it could maintain a company already moving along with healthy systems and a known cycle. But same as where Ai fails on larger dev projects, the same happens with a business. The timing for stepping back and diving deep is critical to seeing opportunities for growth, avoiding pitfalls, and doing the daily maintenance required to keep any project alive in the long-term.

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

#573

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like…

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…

> they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed

This actually seems completely doable for a properly configured LLM. There will probably be a platform in the future where companies can setup LLM to discuss business deals with other companies' LLMs and bring the resulting proposals to the human leadership. Every morning the CEO gets an email about the 3 most promising potential deals that were discussed, a summary of the big picture with TBD details highlighted, and a link to the transcript of the conversation. Plausibly the potential deal is with a company the CEO had never heard about or dealt with.

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

#574
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno most CEOs I have been under of seem to work really hard and try to get stuff done in a sane manner, it is usually the middle management that fs up. CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making…

I've been in a situation where I had to work directly with a good CEO (plus board, C-Levels, and a lot of middle-management) and problematic middle-management was the actual problem. It was almost like parody: - CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do". -…

I'm no MBA (insert joke here about that being good or bad), but my general opinion is that leaders should delegate and then be held responsible. Details (beyond enough for the higher leadership to be effective) should be relatively minimal. Having some cross-functional accountability (eg security/financial audits, etc) is fine, but in my experience the vast majority of corporate dysfunction comes from micromanaging. This gets compounded when middle management also has to interpret and implement said micromanagement. Obviously people need to learn and make mistakes; mistakes are fine so long as they're not repeated! There is a reason that some of the best, most effective leaders I've ever worked under shield those under them from the politics of the organization.

I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.

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

#575

One thing AI is actually good at: look at a bunch of data, make informed, unbiased, objective and quick decision, have a backup plan if that fails. This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).

Oh, not in that sense. I meant if you showed it data and business metrics, and asked for s tough decision, it is likely not going to make a decision by factoring in the race of the manager whose team isnt doing great, or get influenced because another executive is its beer buddy, or because the finance guy used to work with the AI at a previous job.

I am talking about these biased a human manager or executive will most certainly have. We have all seen it.

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

#576
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 can tell you that in my case, at least, the real areas of opportunity for something like this come from the masses of people that flood the manager up to senior VP level in a mega-corp. When I'm sitting in a meeting with 8 people and myself and 1 other person are doing most of the work while the rest are vaguely accountable for some metric being reported (we two talk about what's going on, plans, maybe present something completed while the others say "I don't have anything" and the meeting ends, repeat ad nauseum) I start dreaming of what a setup like the one posted here could do. Feels like we could cut at least 50% of our people at those higher levels and stay perfectly efficient and make progress.

Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.

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

#577
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean on the one hand it is annoying because everybody has speech patterns, I like to say "I mean" and "on the one hand" a lot. On the other hand it seems a sort of self-protective recoil, nobody wants to spend a lot of time talking to an AI. Our jobs and society already make us spend way too much time and effort doing that! On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but…

Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to. Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes. The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will b…

ah I thought I had forgotten to make the second hand, and so I went in to add it in, but then I got three hands, typical Hindu deity problem.

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

#578

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like…

The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point.

If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc

All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.

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?

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

#580
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI. I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.

Because it's only half true. Yeah we've used phrases like those before, but if you ignore certain very specific phrases or characters for a moment, a lot of the more ambiguous things people are identifying as AI-speak comes from mixing jargon from different domains in a way humans normally don't do. Like the short punchy sentences are from marketing, not comments or technical writing like they've started showing up i…

So John Nagle is an AI.

Huh. Never would have guessed it, in a million years...

To be fair, "Famous person accused of being an AI," was on my bingo card. It was inevitable for this kind of embarrassing mistake to happen.

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