CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

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?). So the top research labs seem have broken the productivity seal.

And then they talk about this recursively self-improving AI that is so powerful, so autonomous that they advocate that every company should be prepared to "pause" the effort. And their Fable/Mythos has this specific restriction as mentioned in their model card[1] that they are going to reject requests to tune and train models because, well you guess it, the models are too powerful to be used by mere mortals.

[1] We’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms. Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).

If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.

Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.

Don't think I've heard that one but certainly rings true to my experience.

Reminds me of "ninety percent of the game is half mental"

Then there's the technical debt!

Shipping is frankly the easy part. It's the operating overhead that often breaks you.

I liken it to free puppies.

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 want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.

on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.

What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.

I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.

Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.

With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt.

I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important.

The code is human + AI, the management is only AI

(discussed 6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072002)

Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?

Naive and stupid, but it was downvoted and flagged away into oblivion with zero chance for a conversation.

L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.

I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.

They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).

You know who can't do that? People who call L1 support.

Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.

Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.

Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.

Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.

This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending.

There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot.

A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce.

Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)

You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.