CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
In response to a CEO who replaced developers with AI, developers have released OpenExecutive, an open-source virtual executive team. The system uses eight specialist Claude agents (CSO, CFO, CHRO, GC, COO, CMO, CPO, Board Director) coordinated by a single executive persona, providing consistent advice with MBA-level knowledge. It features RAG over company documents, episodic memory, proactive scheduling, and integrations with Slack, Discord, and email. Built with FastAPI and Next.js, it's deployable on Fly.io.
An AI system that acts as your company's virtual executive team — a senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge, customized for your specific business.
- midasz
The 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.
- Havoc
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
- jjcm
I'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.
- Animats
A 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.
- chrisjj
[delayed]
- socalgal2
It would be hilarious if the AI CEO also fired all the developers
- pmlnr
> The next session opens with a <past_decisions> block so the Executive remembers what it recommended last month.
This is morbidly unrealistic.
- rochak
Ultron uprising
- jameslk
I 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
- edoceo
What 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.