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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

And yet you have people here claiming to build entire apps with AI. You have CEOs saying agents are replacing devs - but even the companies building these models fail at executing on software development.

People like Jensen saying coding is dead when his main selling point is software lock-in to their ecosystem hardware.

When you evaluate hype and the artifacts things don't really line up. It's not really true that you can just ignore the hype because these things impact decision making, investments etc. Sure we might figure out this was a dead end in 5 years, meanwhile SW dev industry collectively could have been decimated in the anticipation of AI and misaligned investment.

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A CEO is just a person like you and me. Having the title "CEO" doesn't make them right or wrong. It means they may have a more informed opinion than a layperson and that if they're the CEO of a large company that they have enough money that they can hold onto a badly performing position for longer than the average person can. You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role.

In the meantime if you're a software practitioner you probably have more insight into these tools than a disconnected large company CEO. Just read their opinions and move on. Don't read them at all if you find them distracting.

What I am saying is these people are the decision makers. They chose where the money goes, what gets invested in, etc. The outcomes of their decisions might be measurable/determined as wrong years down the line - but I will be impacted immediately as someone in the industry.

It's the same shit as all the other VC funded money losing "disruptions" - they might go out of business eventually - but they destroyed a lot of value and impacted the whole industry negatively in the long run. Those companies that got destroyed don't just spring back and thing magically return to equilibrium.

Likewise developers will get screwed because of AI hype. People will leave the industry, salaries will drop because of allocations, students will avoid it. It only works out if AI actually delivers in the expected time frame.

Decision makers are wrong all the time. Have you ever worked at a startup? Startup founders get decisions wrong constantly. We can extrapolate and catastrophize anything. The reason CEOs are constantly jumping onto the bandwagon of new is because if a new legitimately disruptive technology comes around that you don't get behind, you're toast. A good example of that was the last tech boom which created companies like Meta and felled companies like Blackberry.

In my experience the "catastrophe hype", the feeling that the hype will disrupt and ruin the industry, is just as misplaced as the hype around the new. At the end of the day large corporations have a hard time changing due to huge layers of bureaucracies that arose to mitigate risk. Smaller companies and startups move quickly but are used to frequently changing direction to stay ahead of the market due to things often out of their control (like changing tariff rates.) If you write code just use the tools from time-to-time and incorporate them in your workflow as you see fit.

> A good example of that was the last tech boom which created companies like Meta and felled companies like Blackberry.

Meta (nee Facebook) were already really large before smartphones happened. And they got absolutely murdered in the press for having no mobile strategy (they tried to go all in on HTML5 far too early), so I'm not sure they're a great example here.

Also, I still miss having the Qwerty real keyboards on blackberry, they were great.

The CEO who was in the news the other day saying "Replit ai went rogue and deleted our entire database" seems to basically be the CEO of a one-person company.

Needless to say, there are hundreds of thousands of such CEOs. You're a self-employed driver contracting for Uber Eats? You can call yourself CEO if you like, you sit at the top of your one-man company's hierarchy, after all. Even if the only decision you make is when to take your lunch break.

What are you talking about - there are quotes from all top tech CEOs bar maybe Apple (who are not on the bandwagon since they failed at executing with it), I listed some above. This is an industry wide trend and people justifying hiring decisions based on this, shelling 100m signing bonuses, etc., not some random YC startup guy tweeting.

You're right, being a CEO doesn't mean someone's necessarily right or wrong. But it does mean they have a disproportionate amount of socioeconomic power. Have we all forgotten "with great power comes great responsibility"?

saying "You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role" is just like saying you too can become a billionaire if you just did something that gets you a billion dollars. Without actually explaining what you have to do get that role, the statement is meaningless to the point of being wrong.

Huh? In most developed and developing countries you can just go and start a company and become the CEO in a few weeks at most. In the US just go and make an LLC and you can call yourself a CEO. Do you not have any friends who tried to start a company? Have you never worked at a startup? I honestly find this perspective to be bizarre. I have plenty of friends who've founded failed startups. I've worked at a few failed startups. I've even worked at startups that ended up turning into middling companies.

A failed CEO is not a CEO, just as a failed mkdir command does not actually create a directory! Anyone can call themselves anything they want. You can also call yourself the queen of France! Just say or type the words.

I'm talking about the difference between filling out some government form, and the real social power of being the executive of a functioning company.

So like how big of a functioning company? Does a Series A startup CEO count? Series B? Series C? We need to be more precise about these things. Are you only looking at the CEOs of Big Tech publicly traded companies?

Big enough to peddle broken AI software to billions of people. The entire subject of this thread.

It feels unpleasant to me to respond to you because I feel that you aren't really interested in answering my questions or fielding a different point of view as much as you are just interested in stating your own point of view repeatedly with emotion. If you are not interested in responding to me in good faith I would feel better if we stopped the thread here.

To help me steelman your argument, you want to scope this discussion to CEOs that produce AI assisted products consumed by billions of users? To me that sounds like only the biggest of big techs, like Meta maybe? (Shopify for example has roughly 5M DAUs last I checked.) Again if you aren't interested in entertaining my point of view, this can absolutely be the last post in this thread.

At the end of the day, a big part of a good CEO's job is to make sure their company is well-funded and well-marketed to achieve its mid and long term goals.

No AI/tech CEO is going to achieve that by selling AI for what it is currently. What raises more capital, promotes more hype, and markets better? What they say (which incidentally we're discussing right now, which sets the narrative), or the reality, which is probably such a mundane statement that we forget its contents and don't discuss it on HN, at dinner, or in the boardroom?

A CEO's words isn't the place to look if you want a realistic opinion on where we are and where we're going.

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