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CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
- newsomix9xl 21d agoAwesome!!! This is the best project ever. I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)
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- GrumpySciGuy 21d agoA team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.
- VohuMana 21d agoThis is hilarious, I feel like we are going to see AI companies add something to the system prompt or terms of service that explicitly forbids having an LLM act as CEO. Honestly though I do hope this gives pause to the C suite when it comes to replacing people with AI
- ThrowawayR2 21d agoCorporate officers, including CEOs, have to be "natural persons" (legal jargon for flesh-and-blood humans) either directly by law or indirectly as a practical matter so the attempted turnabout falls flat on its face. Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
- forgetfreeman 21d agoNeat. Hire an intern to prompt the "CEO" as needed. Problem solved.
- cwillu 21d agoIf the paperwork says the intern is the CEO, then the intern is the CEO, regardless of how much the intern's agent's github says otherwise.
- forgetfreeman 21d agoYep. You're starting to catch on. Same functionality, significant cost savings for the organization.
- cwillu 21d agoThe intern might be convinced to do something other than what the bot says.
- forgetfreeman 21d agoMaybe, maybe not. A lot of folks would gleefully avoid rocking the boat if handed a job this cushy. If they do flake out you could ask if anyone in facilities would like to take a break from emptying trashcans...
- ithkuil 20d agoThen the board can fire that CEO?
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- ThrowawayR2 21d agoThis is one of those rejoinders that tries to be clever but really, really isn't. The "intern as fake CEO" is left holding the bag because it's their signature on contracts and other legal documents. The idea of puppet CEOs to fraudulently dodge accountability existed well before LLMs became a thing. Courts see right through that kind of scheme plus the "intern" is likely to turn coat against the mastermind to save their own skin at the first sign of trouble.
- Animats 21d agoIs this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?
- GrumpySciGuy 21d agoHighly configurable. Looks like it is targeted at any level of management. The key features seems that it can generate its own vision of how to move something forward and that it can be set with degrees of freedom depending on the use case. Video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_g97xxVTMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_g97xxVTMk
- shermantanktop 21d agoThe speech model for the voiceover should be named “Max Vocalfry.”
- georgemcbay 21d ago> Is this automated CEO any good? Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
- jayroh 21d agoPeak comment right here
- edoceo 21d agoWhat does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right? Making resources available to the team? AI. Coordinating between teams? AI. Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals? More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory. One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
- baalimago 21d agoThey ensure the company is funded.
- gib444 21d agoThis! They sell the company and vision to potential investors
- nullorempty 21d agoWell, as soon as they start being replaced is there a network to bring.
- andsoitis 21d ago> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
- Freedom2 21d agoLike RTO mandates which were definitely made with wisdom.
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- nullorempty 21d agoHonestly, this is hilarious! Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!
- GrumpySciGuy 21d agoIt can be configured to replace any mangagment role. The goal is to do for management what co-pilot, cursor and Claude did for development.
- cactusplant7374 21d agoWhat company fired them? I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it.
- Brajeshwar 21d agoI’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.)
- pdhborges 21d 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.
- sapphicsnail 21d 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.
- yunnpp 21d agoAn auditable executive would certainly be a first.
- walrus01 21d agolooks like a good way to run up a really large anthropic token bill.
- bwhiting2356 21d agoMany CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.
- jameslk 21d agoI get it’s a joke, and often a frequent cynical joke made here, but I actually think it’s a good thought experiment. Almost like a new Turing test The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer
- binary132 21d agoYou’re presuming here that CEOs cause companies to make profit instead of serving as a scapegoat for their often unavoidable market dynamics (at best).
- jameslk 21d agoIn a 1-person company, who or what generates a profit?
- root_axis 21d agoOne person isn't a company. Legally maybe, but there's no point in a company if you can profitably do all the labor yourself.
- jameslk 21d agoAt what point does a company become a company if one person doesn’t make a company? What’s the threshold for non-labor where a company becomes a company?
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- jmyeet 21d agoThis has likely been the case as long as jobs have existed. Some CEOs spend their entire time tweeting, apparently. The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people. The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building. Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat. Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens. Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy. The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
- maerF0x0 21d ago> manager's manager's manager These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing. No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
- janalsncm 21d agoTo the extent this is tongue in cheek it is funny, but I could imagine if I was building a startup I’d like something like this if it was good. That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already. https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk
- thelastgallon 21d agoThe best use of AI is to replace CEOs, C-Suite, politicians and bureaucrats. Let them feel the heat for the first time in their life. Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?
- fassssst 21d agoSo we work for the AI? AI should work for us.
- kelseyfrog 21d agoServant leadership
- cindyllm 21d ago[dead]
- SpicyLemonZest 21d agoServant leadership is a management cliche that works well as a counterbalance to the dominance hierarchy that's implicit in a human org chart. I'm not going to listen to a Claude instance telling me to do something I'd prefer not to do.
- kelseyfrog 21d agoI wonder if the instance would send you a termination letter for that level of insubordination.
- matchbok3 21d agoFeel the heat? As in, be punished? For what, exactly?
- NegativeLatency 21d agoWage theft
- IronWolve 21d agoFinally a use for Grok Bots!
- matchbok3 21d agoNumber 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.
- esseph 21d 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.
- matchbok3 21d agoThe world is a whole lot more complicated than the simplistic "CEOs are evil" nonsense. I suggest you talk to an entrepreneur sometime. Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly. Or is it too hard for you?
- esseph 21d ago> I suggest you talk to an entrepreneur sometime. Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly. I've been a founder, CEO, and combat leader under fire in Iraq. > Or is it too hard for you? I guess, clearly, it wasn't. Have you ever lead men in combat when death is real and you are right there as the tip of the spear, with some of the smartest and most high level athletes in the world? A lot of fortune 500 CEOs are nepo or network hires to grease wheels and laws, but even then, it's not necessary merit or performance based. There are some good ones, but there are more bad ones than good. All will write books on "leadership"! A lot of you calling things "leadership" in large companies can be done with fairly basic calculations and you don't even need a high functioning sociopath to take the blame. That doesn't mean you don't have a board judging performance. Also a lot of you are taking things very personal, thinking most of these comments and complaints are talking about some CEO of a 5 or 500 person company, but what many of us are talking about are companies with 50k-100k employees or more (then there's Amazon with over a million). But yeah... > "Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly” Take your own advice. I'll see you on the front lines.
- theodorewiles 21d agoI think AI CEOs are dumb but AI 'enterprise decision-makers' could be very very interesting. Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
- euio757 21d agoCEO here, thanks just fired all my C suite team, https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packages/core/openexecutive/knowledge/builtin/legal/commercial_contracts.md https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa... “Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure” such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights Other gem from my new CFO: “The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.” And my new C(3-)PO just told me “If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
- cwillu 21d agoSearching for PLG, I found: “In short, companies that use PLG models gain another revenue-generating channel: the company’s product itself.” What a world we live in, that a company's products being a revenue-generating channel is an innovation worthy of note!
- estetlinus 21d agoThe product is becoming load-bearing. That’s not new. That a word salad factory, and you just punched in.
- altmanaltman 21d agoThe only thing worse than a human CEO is an AI CEO with power to fire you. People just don't think it will do stupid things, have nonsensicle orders which they have to follow, and likely fire people left right and center. But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
- psd1 20d agoThe joy in this thread is not anticipation of a better workplace - it's schadenfreude.
- respectattentio 21d agoAfter firing all, when CEO can fire themselves to be just founders? This will be epic.
- cmiles8 21d agoHonestly the best use of AI at the moment is to replace non-technical middle management layers. Many of those yelling the loudest for “more AI now” are quite ironically holding the jobs best replaced by the current creation of AI.
- nullorempty 21d agoLet's also replace politicians and other officials. AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere". Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.
- hypfer 21d agoIf people would unironically start pushing for this, I genuinely do not know what to do. I guess that would be at least a nice bang to let democracy finally die. Let's hope that we never see that happening. ___ To expand on that: I believe that these thoughts are so incredibly harmful to humanity itself, (and, more importantly, I believe that the people in power believe that too,) that we'd be seeing pushback against this. Maximum pushback, because what the pushback would be defending would be - as said - humanity itself. Said pushback would be bypassing democracy, because there is no way of arguing with these crazy thoughts. Which would said a precedent, because why stop there. Which, again, makes me believe that this is some sort of psyop, because I refuse to think that the people on here would really be as blind to the systemic implications of their brainfarts. ___ FWIW, a ruling class worth their net worth would go for the less draconian thing of simply taking away your internet access and forcing you to touch grass. One that is.. uh.. less signed up on the whole "all people are equal and worth saving" would line up.. idk.. 100 people with these horribly bad-for-humanity ideas and shoot them in the head live on stream or something. The interesting twist here is that LLM rulers might be more biased towards doing option B, as the statistical probabilities of words cannot _feel_ the chemical hormone cocktail invoked by the mental image of that. Be careful what you wish for.
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- alansaber 21d agoWe're all joking around here. But 5 decades down the line, with increasing cognitive offload to AI, is a slow erosion leading to this end state so crazy?
- hypfer 21d agoYes
- bashtoni 21d agoBased on my observations, the most important characteristics of a CEO is to be over 6ft, and to walk about looking important. CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
- totetsu 21d agoThis is one thing I appreciate about Japan. There is so many short nerdy looking CEOs
- kijin 21d agoOh the other hand, Japanese businesspeople are exceptionally good at the "walk about looking important" part.
- Bendy 21d agoIt’s called the Gemba walk but it does more than just to look important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba
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- Waterluvian 21d agoYou’d think culture and personality fit with a board of directors would be an easier feat for a robot.
- kijin 21d agoDepends on the board. The premium CEO robot will be powered by a bio-ethanol fuel cell so that it can play golf with the board of directors for as long as drinks are available.
- rl3 21d agoPremium? Just go to a local dive bar and find an alcoholic robot with a penchant for burping loudly and bending things (e.g. golf clubs). Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
- matheusmoreira 21d agoAwesome. There's no reason why AI can't replace all these highly paid CEOs along with the rest of us. Looking forward to the Delamain future.
- bigstrat2003 21d agoDo you think that they will offer the Excelsior package for sale?
- arthurcolle 21d agowhat's the backstory here?
- GrumpySciGuy 21d agoOp 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).
- OutOfHere 21d agoThe 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.
- HomeDeLaPot 21d agoWhen will we see the world's first fully autonomous company?
- __MatrixMan__ 21d agoIf you want to see that idea extrapolated to an impressive extent, check out Accelerando by Charles Stross. If Stross was right we're in for a bumpy ride.
- lc9er 21d agoIt was definitely not a hopeful glimpse into the future.
- maerF0x0 21d agohttps://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-market-launch https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-market-launch
- hypfer 21d agoI'm really not sure why people are cheering for this. We've been rightfully pissed at companies doing unethical things and getting away with it, as there is simply nothing you can hurt them with. Why is HN fantasizing about making the companies even less hurtable? Are people here insane? Otoh, a lot of those accounts are just a few months old, so.. welp. Nice psyop we got here.
- reillyse 21d agoEveryone seems to be missing the point of the role of the CEO. The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them. No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.
- glouwbug 21d ago> should be able to disappear for a year But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off
- cosmodisk 21d agoIf a ceo can disappear for months and still return into a company that isn't on fire,it means they have a functional company. It means there are processes and people in right places to run things in a continuous manner. This isn't as common as people might think. I've seen many companies where people can't survive for a few days without ceo because the position is tied to a million things( often unnecessarily). There's an old saying about owning a business: if you leave and it still runs it means you have a business, otherwise it's just a job
- 0xbadcafebee 21d agoBut can it avoid answering direct questions by telling you about past challenges and what it's doing to address those next year?
- firefoxd 21d agoWe've replaced our CEO for the better part of 6 weeks now. He has been on a media tour promoting a product we no longer sell, but it keeps him busy while we continue to grow. While Proxy AI [0] is not open source, it is free, it is built from pure garage energy, and we are having our summer sale right now. 20% off for HN users. [0]: https://getproxyai.com/ https://getproxyai.com/
- PrimeAli 21d ago[flagged]
- rdudek 21d agoI've been slowly developing my hermes agent to do something similar but is very customized towards my needs. I should spin up another agent and give this one a shot and see what it's capable of. This is hilarious.
- arjie 21d agoI think it's pretty fun. Worker cooperatives no longer need different ranks of executive officers. They can all be peers with different functions. So if worker cooperatives are going to succeed in the US, they have pretty good conditions right now.
- Animats 21d agoA serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters. People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems. Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here. Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization. A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone. Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146
- holoduke 21d agoWhy are you using AI for your account to write responses. It's mega annoying. A reason to leave this place. Please. No ai
- lukeify 21d ago> This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. So the responses will be even more incoherent than Opus 5?
- vintermann 21d agoWe have some interesting evidence from AI agents. People used to make the plan with a stronger and more expensive model, and then use a cheaper model to do the "grunt work" of implementing it. But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
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- thewhitetulip 21d agoRemember 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
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- Grosvenor 21d agoThis reminds me of William Gibson's "Burning Chrome", where the head of a syndicate is a Russian AI (Chrome) running things behind a smuggling front. Gibson basically predicted the AI CEO forty years early! A warning: Don't burn Chrome.
- mdp2021 21d agoTime to read Mona Lisa Overdrive and see what we are still waiting from the future then. BTW: not all predictions from Neuromancer are there yet...
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- __MatrixMan__ 21d agoIf human-led companies started consistently losing to AI led companies... would it say more about the intelligence of AI, or about how thoroughly power corrupts humans?
- chanux 21d agoGood thought experiment but the flip side works just as well. Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.
- shrubby 21d agoThis is brilliant! Immediately forwarded to the boss.
- skirge 21d agothere's unemployment due too lack of CEOs (companies). AI CEO solves this problem. Full employment can be achieved.
- baalimago 21d agoGood luck finding investments by going to events in socal
- holoduke 21d agoI 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.
- cineticdaffodil 21d ago[dead]
- drTobiasFunke 21d agoOne 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 :).
- thewhitetulip 21d ago> unbiased How? If the bias is in the dataset itself, then it'll be in the LLM decision also, right?
- Retro_Dev 21d ago> unbiased Asking models about politically sensitive events differ WILDLY based on the country that produced that AI.
- drTobiasFunke 21d agoOh, 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.
- socalgal2 21d agoIt would be hilarious if the AI CEO also fired all the developers
- tgv 21d agoSince LLMs tend to paraphrase what others have published about similar circumstances, chances are pretty high it will.
- hypfer 21d agoI dislike performative business people as much as the next guy, but you can't tell me that you people really think that this is anything other than a petty and equally performative PR stunt. Revenge of the nerds.
- HexPhantom 21d ago[dead]
- dchftcs 21d agoThis is good for satire, but the real solution is to use AI to become the CEO, or take over the scope of of product or decision-making roles. There are many business-savvy technical workers that get pigeonholed because they spend most of their cognitive effort on low-level technical details. This is an opportunity for these people to rise up and prove they work better than people who manage or direct them. CEO is really not a role to automate, unless it's a fully autonomous business that has zero humans.
- sinpif 21d agoI know it's a joke but... Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy. If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
- hypfer 21d ago> Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy. No. Oh my god no. This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed. Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but the jump to "all are like this" is crazy, and, more importantly, anti-intellectual.
- sinpif 20d agoWait a minute, so you (and your colleagues) deploy this thing, it tells you half the staff should go so the company can stay afloat. You GO?
- sinpif 20d agoBecause what I meant by that of course was power over money. You turn it on, put in the credit card info and let it rip, eh?
- ThrowawayR2 20d agoRelax and enjoy the circus, dude. This is the reality of the tech profession as it is today and all we can do is laugh and tighten our hiring practices.
- hart_russell 21d agoThis makes me happy. There’s nothing I hate more than non technical people who don’t put in the work then reap most of the reward.
- funlang 21d ago[flagged]
- lsofzz 21d agoAwesome. Fuck these CEOs and their `yatchs`! Let's replace these motherfuckers.
- pmlnr 21d ago> The next session opens with a <past_decisions> block so the Executive remembers what it recommended last month. This is morbidly unrealistic.
- VSerge 21d agoGotta love that they picked sonnet as default for the CEO and most execs..
- exe34 21d agoI had this hypothesis back in 2014 that all the communications from higher level managers could be replaced by a markov chain, because it was just variations on the same themes ("improve conditions", "make it easier to do....", "<generic positive words that don't translate to actual actions or measurable improvements>". I never saw LLMs coming.
- torginus 21d agoI have a friend who works a high-level management position, who told me that as long as results are delivered, management is doing their jobs 'by definition'. So if a manager is either horribly abusive or totally incompetent and his subordinates make up for it in some way, that the result is at least acceptable, nothing bad can happen to said manager, at least officially. Only failure is actionable, in which case said managers will make a good effort to shift blame. So if your boss is an idiot and an a-hole, and you have to work twice as hard because of it, you are enabling the bad working conditions he's subjecting you to.
- jgilias 21d agoWould be cool to get this thing try and run the vending machine experiment.
- s1artibartfast 21d agoNot every company needs a CEO, and that is ok. Companies do however need a decision making process and clear authorizations. Creating an AI executive suite can bring some skills to the table, but it doesn't solve the authority question. I'm curious how this would work in practice... What happens if the AI decides it wants to commit funds - does it have authority? What if it wants to change direction? What if it wants to fire a developer?
- petesergeant 21d agoAs much as I love Claude/Fable, I have recently found Sol to be dramatically better at this kind of task
- avodonosov 21d agoA country government next
- nullbio 21d agoChatGPT (or something from OpenRouter) should be the default model. Stop promoting Anthropic's business when they're so hostile to the developer community.
- fodkodrasz 21d agoAll AI vendors are hostile to the developer community. This is by definition: they are creating replacements of developers.
- zx8080 21d agoDo they have human CEO currently? Just curious.
- zombot 21d agoIf a company embraces AI at all, this should be the first step. Replace the MBA bots with actual bots. Imagine the amounts of budget becoming available for sensible purposes.
- veasmkii 21d agoWho's to say having a CEO/AI or not is even a good idea. Whilst the practice is common.... I do wonder if there are better ways of organising?
- FuturisticLover 21d agoCan I use this tool without the Anthropic API? I'm thinking of hosting it locally and running it through the CLI instead of connecting to the API. I have a Claude Pro account.
- NietTim 21d agoPro tip: you can ask claude this
- FuturisticLover 21d agoCool
- ottoflux 21d agoI’ve been saying people need to do this for over a year. I’ve known (personally) quite a few executive leaders and while I don’t think AI is a good replacement for any _good_ person at a job, the executive team is the low hanging fruit. We glamorize execs but at the end of the day if you watch their careers they have plenty of failures (usually) and generally fail upwards. I’ve known some amazing CTOs and VPs of engineering and they’ve brought more to the table but a lot of what the executive team does is looking at the currents in the industry and trying to make educated guesses about where things are going. Yes more than that but this is a news.y comment.
- Havoc 21d agoNeither 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
- dgellow 21d agoI mean, here the submission is about a CEO who fired the company to replace them with LLMs. That would have been a an HBO‘s Silicon Valley joke a few years ago
- afavour 21d agoBoth exist. I’d imagine most HN commenters do not work for startup headed up by a founder. The majority work for larger companies where the CEO isn’t as hands on as a startup founder and is never seen in the workplace. I promise you there’s a reason the stereotype exists!
- Havoc 21d agoThat is true but “is never seen in the workplace” to doesn’t add value is still one hell of a leap. At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day. Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great. But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe
- senordevnyc 21d agoIn reality the leap for a significant portion of HN goes more like “is not seen in the workplace” -> “is a sociopathic monster who is waging class warfare against me and my friends and all that is good and true in the world, and deserves to be shot in the back on a public street” People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.
- Retr0id 21d ago> with Harvard MBA-level knowledge I always cringe when I read this kind of thing, even if it might be true on some level.
- stuaxo 21d agoWould like to see the opposite of this, since most agree MBAs are awful.
- fedeb95 21d agoNow we just need to add x402 and we have a startup.
- jjcm 21d agoI've actually had a lot of success with something similar for my startup. I'm a first time founder, and there are so many unknowns when you're getting started. I've been using a Hermes agent to act as my "boss", giving me three tasks to do each day / creating a memory of everything with the business. It's really, really helpful. So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this. I don't think you need this synthetic org setup to get exec help at a small level. It really helped me with fundraising, incorporation, compliance, and just keeping me on track.
- huurtehoog 21d agoExecutive assistant to intellectual labor seems to be the killer app for LLMs.
- bhairoxx 21d agoThat's awesome! In a similar boat, starting something new. Would you mind sharing what customizations you added to Hermes?
- whstl 21d agoThat's more useful than a lot of actual bosses.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 21d agoWould love to see how do you setup the agents, I'm not at the level of director but I think it would be good too for staff engineer to manage the office politics
- gruturo 21d agoThis is a fantastic idea and I'd like to add my voice to the choir asking you for more information :) Don't let us rebuild everything from scratch if we don't have to
- embedding-shape 21d ago> giving me three tasks to do each day Based on what? How do you judge if those are the right things to work on? As a founder, your number 1 priority is essentially to manage that the company works towards the right thing, but it sounds like to me you're outsourcing that part to a LLM? How do you know what the "right track" is when the track is just what the LLM outlined for you?
- midasz 21d agoThe crux of this entire issue surrounding replacing people with agents, is that agents should pay taxes. If we're losing people that pay taxes our social safety nets will crumble. Maybe that makes the math more in favor of actually using humans too.
- PUSH_AX 21d agoDoesn't this assume those people don't just find other jobs and continue to pay taxes?
- midasz 21d agoWhere does it end though? The most optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your viewpoint) say that AI will be able to replace or displace lots of professions. Is there enough work for everyone? Is there enough meaningful work for everyone? A software engineer or accountant making ~150k a year will find another job that pays less, so he will also pay less taxes. What's going to happen in the short term, inbetween this shift? A bunch of unhappy unemployed people leaning on social systems. That seems pretty devastating. Who is going to come out as winners?
- hdgvhicv 21d agoProbably best to read dickens to see the future. Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.
- hdgvhicv 21d agoOwning, not penning.
- tonyedgecombe 21d agoExpect more populist politicians promising things they can’t deliver and blaming whatever out group they dislike.
- groestl 21d ago
- rochak 21d agoUltron uprising
- chrisjj 21d agoHilarious! Thanks.
- Gerard22Aug 21d ago"CEO-abliterated" Model got uploaded to HF. Nvidia bought HF. U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications. Developers went back home. CEO received bonus. 2.5x larger than last year.
- warpech 21d ago[dead]
- brettermeier 21d agoI love it! Go after the CEOs!
- beeforpork 21d agoYeah, this is actually one of the best uses for AI, I think. Boring decisions that you have to take, but without all necessary knowledge, based on history that can be learned and summarised. And it's all a lot of luck, and nothing is 100% a good or a bad decision. Algorithms won't help. It makes total sense to me to make it openly heuristic and based on propabilities and therefore use AI. Just like in Iain Banks's scifi (although those AIs are actually intelligent -- I don't think you need that for a CEO).
- thih9 21d agoAI providers and NVIDIA profit either way. Which is not bad in itself, but I wish there was a way to balance this out.
- Steve16384 21d agoI'm surprised this hsn't happened sooner. Surely making decisions as a CEO would be easier for an AI then complex software development.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 21d agoNOW we're talking. The ceo is the lowest paid position.
- slifin 21d agoI think this is an interesting idea but the non tech parts need fleshing out a bit if only to fire the imagination The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 21d ago[dead]
- gla67890543 21d agoLol!! Don't forget. This is a modern day class war. This current LLM based so called AI, could have easily used for automating simple tasks and employees could have easily provided with 3 day work week. The goal is to monopolize human knowledge with all the stolen data and make profits from it.
- philipallstar 21d ago[flagged]
- Peaches4Rent 21d agoMulti-million found
- gosub100 21d agohe didn't say "everything" he said one thing.
- senordevnyc 21d agoIn my experience, these class warfare conspiracists see class warfare in everything. Everything in human society gets reduced down to one side is the oppressor and one side is the victim. And they’re always the victim. EDIT since I can’t reply: It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc. So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent. I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
- crnkofe 21d agoTo 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 exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.
- watercolorblind 21d agoThe scifi story Manna starts with management being automated: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.
- bayindirh 21d agoSorry, the site doesn't seem to resolve. Are you sure that the URL is correct?
- bsenftner 21d agoMust use the Internet Archive now: https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallb... The author died.
- watercolorblind 21d agoThank you for the backup link! I hadn't known he had passed, and I didn't expect the link to fail. I first read the story back in 2008 or so, and it's been one of those works that lodged itself in my mind so it's sad to hear he died.
- pythonRon 21d agoLOL! Hiarious! Take that, management!
- library8848 21d ago[dead]
- pythonRon 21d agoPerhaps this AI CEO will bring an end of all this over-paying of top management. Running a corporation isn't rocket science; it's just a matter of putting profit above everything else. Any idiot can do that.
- busyant 21d agoI'm waiting for the press release where both organizations merge.
- frank00001 21d agoThis was fun and it will probably produce some nice output, but developers in particular, have a tendency to don´t see the value in being able to inspire and lead people. Being a leader is mainly people work, and AI cannot replace that.
- misiek08 21d agoSo.... is it overpaid.lol[1], but this time real implementation? :) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260728013424/https://overpaid.lol/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260728013424/https://overpaid....
- noxss 21d agoAt some point someone will make a big company from zero managed completely by AI and the owner will just do investing. We just need an open source IA that get the IA hiring stuff.
- andy_ppp 21d agoSo did they train the AI to be superior to everyone and make bad decisions and never ask for clarification?
- rmah 21d agoI'm sure their AI can simulate bad executives very effectively. Good ones, not so much. Humorously, the set of agents don't include an AI CEO, just the execs underneath the CEO. Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency (yet... thank the gods). Finally, the tasks their LLM agents can supposedly do are more the tasks that the executive's staff handles, not the executive themselves. Unless it's a smaller company, I guess.
- wuschel 21d agoI have no experience with data on bad and good CEOs depending on their working context. At this stage, this seems to be a demo, albeit an interesting one. I find the concept still very intriguing, as it is exactly the thing that attacks white collar functions in administrative and executive tasks sets. I need to give it a spin.
- mr_toad 21d ago> Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency The board might have to take on a more active role in instructing the CEO, just as someone managing an LLM now has to be careful how they prompt it. God forbid the board should make to do more than show up for a few general meetings and collect a fat cheque.
- hughw 21d agoWhy should this be an installed program that uses agent SDK API calls instead of a prose skill to be used with existing agents? It builds "eight specialist AI agents". I'm just wondering what kinds of requirements might cause you to decide to build your own agent architecture rather than use existing ones?
- mr_toad 21d agoAs a shareholder I’m optimistic about the possibility of using LLMs for senior management positions, and on down. C level executives are rare, expensive and often unpredictable quantities. LLMs, if proven to work, could be easily cloned, relatively cheap to run and as a bonus they’re unlikely to get involved in improprieties with their subordinates.
- willmadden 21d agoBetter headline: Developers prove they have no idea or appreciation for what a CEO does.
- number6 21d agoSo with developers automated and CEO automated, can we now start with the first fully automated companies?
- rrrx3 21d agoNeeds dumber, less capable models for the exec roles.
- _pdp_ 21d agoLol. Is anyone actually taking this seriously?
- bentt 21d agoSurrendering our strategic decision making to AI is definitely how we speedrun to Skynet.
- EGreg 21d agoGreat, now this open source CEO can fire people automatically, and replace them with open source agents. The whole organization finally gets replaced with AI. Time to invest and become a shareholder!
- RIMR 21d agoI like pushing the idea that an executive's job is both expensive and automatable. It's true, and they don't want people to figure that out. But I do not like the idea that an AI like this could end up ranking higher than human beings in an org chart. That is still pretty dystopian.
- ynac 21d agoJust 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 21d agoIs the HN title editoriallized
- setgree 21d agoJeremy Irons's CEO character in _Margin Call_ explains his job like this: > Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks?... I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence. I'm sure many CEOs are bozos who can be replaced by a statistical averaging and guessing machine. But this skill of saying "it's time for us to dramatically change course because the music has stopped" seems to me very contrary to the current LLM paradigm. RL makes the chatbot agreeable ('aligned'). But changing course is inherently disagreeable. It makes enemies and people are going to try to talk you out of it at every turn. I think we'll need a new idea of what LLMs are for, and how to train them, before they can do that. (Much easier to mimic and therefore replace a Ballmer than a Nadella, in other words.)
- miljanm 17d agoi'm pretty sure that john tuld is not a bozo. maybe jared cohen, but he's a killer.
- Jderenne 21d agowww.brainterms.ai the real stuff
- jroseattle 21d agoWatching the demo video, they haven't created open executives. They've created open managers. It looks like most of the work of the package is reactive -- monitoring external things and responding. It's not proactive just because a person didn't dial it up. But, here's the thing -- this can likely replace many executives right now, at least those who are reactive managers. I'm in full support -- automate those things if you can. AI is coming for judgment jobs. It seems it's turtles all the way down.
- josefritzishere 21d agoAI CEOs are the way of the future. If you want to reduce overhead costs, the maximum save will be produced replacing the bloated salaries of the C-suite. This is the most inevitable ROI play presented by AI.
- iugtmkbdfil834 21d agoNow, lets build some synergy!
- rektomatic 21d agoThat repo is so thin, probably just took one prompt.
- yipinwong 21d agoThis won't work for everyone or every field. Organizations/Biz requirements (be it scope, money, HR, etc) changes depending on the size thereof. This assumes that whatever your biz is, it's at Google level. It's too much. Sometimes you need just few employees (few agents) to get the things done. This app will overcomplicate flows just like in real life. The only lesson I will take from app is how SenteLab created the service, and why (<- so you know when to use this or not)
- gnunez 21d agoAs 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/researchers-asked-llms-for-strategic-advice-they-got-trendslop-in-return https://archive.is/OPObK/again?url=https://hbr.org/2026/03/r...
- martythemaniak 21d agoI'm having a hard time seeing the recent AI layoff mania as anything different.
- mandevil 21d agoCounterpoint: 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.
- senordevnyc 20d agoSurprise, surprise: everyone thinks other people’s jobs are easier to automate away than their own.
- 20d ago
- pcblues 21d agoA CE0 is only as good as their investors.
- bwest87 20d agoMany comments are missing the point or just totally backwards. I have been both an IC eng and a founder / CTO (though me and my cofounder ran it more like co-CEOs). AI's will not be replacing CEOs (or other great execs) because being CEO (especially of a startup) is all about a few things, and all of those things are almost structurally what AI can not do. It's all about... * Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default. * Having courage to do the correct, obvious thing even when your team or investors don't think it's the right call. (This might be firing someone everyone likes but who's role is no longer needed, it might be changing strategies away from the product everyone just spent 6 months on, etc. etc. the list goes on). -> Ben Horowitz has called this kind of decision basically the entire value of a CEO. This is also EXACTLY where today's LLMs keep getting worse and worse. They are utterly spineless. * Having unique skills and credibility to build a team -> This can come from many sources (track record, vision, charisma, specific achievements, network, etc.) , but people need to want to join YOUR team, not someone else's. They have to believe that YOU are going to win against the market. There is no way you're going to have an edge by using a commercially available AI API with an open source harness at the helm. That is just so utterly uncompelling to top candidates. * Fundraising -> On the surface, very ammenable to AI, but again, as an investor, would you seriously invest in a CEO that is literally replicatable by any other company? The value I can see for something like this is a human to get a "2nd pair of eyes". But humans have tons of advisors already and generally speaking, getting takes on what you should do as CEO is not the hard part. It's seeing through the fog of war, finding clarity, and then implementing that clarity across the org, which is surprisingly hard.
- nitwit005 20d ago> Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default. Most human CEOs are disqualified then. Whenever I join a company these days, they stress how important the company's values are, and they are somehow basically the same as every other company.
- brazukadev 20d agoEverything you described can be replaced by someone + AI. With a much better quality than replacing devs with someone + AI.
- insane_dreamer 20d agothe main job of a tech CEO these days is to 1) raise money, 2) keep the board happy. I don't see either of those being able to be done by an AI agent.
- pojzon 20d agoSo when we can fire C suite? Not like they do any meaningful work beside paying themselves tens of millions of bonuses. Ah - never ? Because corpo ladder is rigged? Ok, thats what I thought.
- peter_d_sherman 20d ago"Meet the new boss... same as the old boss..." -The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again" :-) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Won%27t_Get_Fooled_Again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Won%27t_Get_Fooled_Again)
- WorseIsBetter 20d ago[flagged]
- ouraf 19d agoAnd who will the shareholders blame when the business go under?
- deepamt31 19d agoeight specialist agents behind one executive voice is the open source CEO they shipped. the CHRO agent still owns hiring and performance.
- techsage 17d ago[dead]