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Posted by GrumpySciGuy 8 hours ago

CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO(github.com)
584 points | 363 commentspage 7
cactusplant7374 7 hours ago|
What company fired them? I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it.
Brajeshwar 7 hours ago||
I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs.

A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.

The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”

“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.

A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)

ryandrake 7 hours ago||
I think a lot of this kind of talk treats the C-Suite as special, mystical "visionary" people who Know Things We Can't Know, and by virtue of this otherworldly magical power, are uniquely qualified to do their jobs. Like the average person with basic knowledge of his business and industry can't possibly choose one service provider out of 10 bids, or set business priorities, or drive and enforce culture. We're not talking about wizardry here.

People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.

I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.

Omniusaspirer 5 hours ago|||
CEOs are probably by and large less technically competent than the average technical line employee, but what companies are actually paying for is personal connections to power structures that can be leveraged for profit. Look at someone like Condoleezza Rice- almost certainly her political science doctorate imparted her with no real technical knowledge, yet she's served on the boards of C3.ai, Chevron, HP, Dropbox, Transamerica, Charles Schwab and a million other vague leadership positions for other entities in fields she almost certainly lacks any competence in.
cosmodisk 5 hours ago||||
There are some exceptional executives out there with strong vision, ability to execute and build. Those are rare. The rest are just a bunch of people who had risen to the position because of whatever. They often don't have any special knowledge or skills and succeed mostly because of how the system works. For instance, I can't imagine what one would need to do to fuck up in a company like Coca-Cola. It's super well established, supply chains are golden, everything works,etc. So does success in such a company really mean the executive is some sort of visionary genius? Absolutely no.
thelastgallon 7 hours ago|||
This is absolutely spot on. CEO/C-Suite/VPs are surrounded by gatekeepers (usually something like the PMO org, program management) who feed them with garbage info. Even if a top level leader is genuinely interested in making things better, they would never know because the gatekeepers firewall any competent person.

The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.

sapphicsnail 7 hours ago|||
> Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”

This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.

pdhborges 7 hours ago||
> A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.

What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.

fedeb95 2 hours ago||
Now we just need to add x402 and we have a startup.
holoduke 5 hours ago||
I really want to see a proper ai team that successfully replaced a bunch of people. I have not seen it yet. Only thing I hear is gold plated stories about the potential of agents running fully automated workflows without people touching a single lever. In the meantime I am using AI almost the entire day. I have to discuss these topics with managers that only use chatgpt and watch youtube videos from people disguised to promote their own crap AI products. All I can say is that AI is not good enough to replace entire teams. It can do some cool stuff. But automate entire workflows. Nah. It's just not gonna work.
thewhitetulip 6 hours ago||
Remember that guy who applied for CEO OpenAI and said that he will replace the CEO and the board with a chatbot

I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs

arthurcolle 6 hours ago||
what's the backstory here?
GrumpySciGuy 6 hours ago|
Op here. Team was let go. Decided to do a startup. We thought that tools like co-pilot and Claude code were transforming development. We wanted to transform management (not just CEOs). We open sourced this knowing that if people find this useful (and we hope they do) we can get a support work out of it (similar to the Redhat model and other open source tech).
0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago||
But can it avoid answering direct questions by telling you about past challenges and what it's doing to address those next year?
OutOfHere 6 hours ago||
The difference is that the CEO controls the capital and has the ear of the investors, whereas the developers generally don't. It's the investors that control whether the CEO is a bot or not.
lsofzz 4 hours ago||
Awesome. Fuck these CEOs and their `yatchs`!

Let's replace these motherfuckers.

matchbok3 7 hours ago|
Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.
icehawk 6 hours ago||
What are your qualifications to say that?
s1artibartfast 3 hours ago|||
Interesting point, but CEO is not necessarily the same as owner.

For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?

I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .

esseph 7 hours ago||
> Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.

Prove it.

> be a leader

There are a lot of bad "leaders" out there running Fortune 500s, fwiw.

If you just want a sociopath with faux accountability that's not very difficult, dime a dozen.

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