AI-First Company Memos

by bobismyuncle • 5 months ago

132 208 5 months ago

nemomarx• 5 months ago

That Fiverr one seems especially cold somehow. I guess it lines up with their business model though.

It also lines up with what has to be their outlook on the market, their model is especially challenged by AI. Years ago I paid for a Ukrainian to write me some scrapers, today that would be a quick project in Cursor. Lots of people used it for cheap art, voice work, etc, now the low end is all AI.

whiplash4512• 5 months ago

It's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it.

[1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and Accenture in my ranking.

debo_3• 5 months ago

Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".

mjhay3• 5 months ago

The executives pushing AI use everywhere aren’t basing it on actual performance (which is an orthogonal concept). It’s just the latest shiny bauble.

tikhonj• 5 months ago

It's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance management" is neither necessary nor sufficient.

munk-a10• 5 months ago

If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!

It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.

goatlover3• 5 months ago

If everyone is ignoring it, it can't be that great. If it's that great, people will adopt it organically based on how it's useful for them.

jahnu• 5 months ago

If the person who wrote this is reading, many of us block tracking in our browsers and all we see for each of those X embeds is

"X trackers and content blocked

Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads."

Screenshots don't track me so they would be ok.

burkaman• 5 months ago

I'm not sure a person wrote this website, but FYI on Firefox Nightly the text of the tweet is shown below the blocked tracker in a box labeled "Content from blocked embed". It doesn't have images or longer posts, so not that useful for this specific website, but it's a nice feature. It also gives you a link to the tweet so you can easily open it in a private window or XCancel if you want to.

upupupandaway2• 5 months ago

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing.

A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. There were 9700 created in a month or so. Imagine the amount of tech debt, security holes, and business logic mistakes this orgy of agents will cause and will have to be fixed in the future.

edit: typo

coldpie8• 5 months ago

I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.

actionfromafar• 5 months ago

Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :)

Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)

ej886• 5 months ago

1. execs likely have spend commits and pressure from the board about their 'ai strategy', what better way to show we're making progress than stamping on some kpis like # of agents created?

2. most ai adoption is personal. people use whichever tools work for their role (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot)

3. there is some subset of ai detractors that refuse to use the tools for whatever reason

the metrics pushed by 1) rarely account for 2) and dont really serve 3)

i work at one of the 'hot' ai companies and there is no mandate to use ai... everyone is trusted to use whichever tools they pick responsibly which is how it should be imo

Octoth0rpe2• 5 months ago

(cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot)

I seem to be using claude (sonnet/opus/haiku, not cc though), and have the option of using codex via my copilot account. Is there some advantage to using codex/claude more directly/not through copilot?

apercu• 5 months ago

The KPI problem is systemic and bigger than just Gen-AI, it’s in everything these days. Actual governance starts by being explicit about business value.

If you can’t state what a thing is supposed to deliver (and how it will be measured) you don’t have a strategy, only a bunch of activity.

For some reason the last decade or so we have confused activity with productivity.

(and words/claims with company value - but that's another topic)

palmotea2• 5 months ago

We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing.

Enforced use means one of two things:

1. The tool sucks, so few will use it unless forced.

2. Use of the tool is against your interests as a worker, so you must be coerced to fuck yourself over (unless you're a software engineer, in which case you may excitedly agree to fuck yourself over willingly, because you're not as smart as you think you are).

SketchySeaBeast5• 5 months ago

3. They discovered it's something they can measure so they made a metric about it.

tbrownaw• 5 months ago

Or it has an annoying learning curve.

SketchySeaBeast5• 5 months ago

This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.

steveBK12310• 5 months ago

This is literally happening in non-tech finance firms where people in non-tech roles are being judged on their AI adoption.

MattGaiser• 5 months ago

Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.

munk-a10• 5 months ago

Can I modify your example to:

Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).

steveBK12310• 5 months ago

It's really cascaded down too.

Each department head needs to incorporate into their annual business plan how they are going to use a drill as part of their job in accounting/administration/mailroom.

Throughout the year, must coordinate training & enforce attendance for the people in their department with drill training mandated by the Head of Drilling.

And then they must comply with and meet drilling utilization metrics in order to meet their annual goals.

Drilling cannot be fail, it can only be failed.

steveBK12310• 5 months ago

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying.

People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc.

It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends.

I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. The closest was the early 00s offshoring boom before it peaked and was rationalized/rolled back to some degree. The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.

collingreen2• 5 months ago

FOMOing at the mouth

This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay.

I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.

hnthrow0287345• 5 months ago

At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes

ryandrake• 5 months ago

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

asa4002• 5 months ago

I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working.
The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.

I concur 100%. This is a monkey-see-monkey-do FOMO mania, and it's driven by the C-suite, not rank-and-file. I've never seen anything like it.

Other sticky "productivity movements" - or, if you're less generous like me, fads - at the level of the individual and the team, for example agile development methodologies or object oriented programming or test driven development, have generally been invented and promoted by the rank and file or by middle management. They may or may not have had some level of industry astroturfing to them (see: agile), but to me the crucial difference is that they were mostly pushed by a vanguard of practitioners who were at most one level removed from the coal face.

Now, this is not to say there aren't developers and non-developer workers out there using this stuff with great effectiveness and singing its praises. That _is_ happening. But they're not at the leading edge of it mandating company-wide adoption.

What we are seeing now is, to a first approximation, the result of herd behavior at the C-level. It should be incredibly concerning to all of us that such a small group of lemming-like people should have such an enormously outsized role in both allocating capital and running our lives.

Rover2228• 5 months ago

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.

collingreen2• 5 months ago

The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment

coldpie8• 5 months ago

I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't actually validate the retrieved value against it. If you didn't review the code, you wouldn't know that the test it wrote did literally nothing of value.

Another time I asked it to rename a struct field across a the whole codebase. It missed 2 instances. A simple sed & grep command would've taken me 15 seconds to write and do the job correctly and cost $~0.00 compute, but I was curious to see if the AI could do it. Nope.

Trillions of dollars for this? Sigh... try again next week, I guess.

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting.

I am aware of a large company that everyone in the US has heard of, planning on laying off 30% of their devs shortly because they expect a 30% improvement in "productivity" from the remaining dev team.

Exciting indeed. Imagine all the divorces that will fall out of this! Hopefully the kids will be ok, daddy just had an accident, he won't be coming home.

If you think anything that is happening with the amount of money and bullshit enveloping this LLM disaster, you should put the keyboard down for a while.

driverdan• 5 months ago

Fall behind what? Writing code is only one part of building a successful product and business. Speed of writing code is often not what bottlenecks success.

g947o2• 5 months ago

Anyone with more than 2 years of professional software engineering experience can tell this is completely nonsense.

mdavid626• 5 months ago

Reminds me of those little gadgets, which move your mouse, so that you show up online on Slack.

I’d just add a cron job to burn some tokens.

munk-a10• 5 months ago

That sounds like a lot of work - maybe you could burn some tokens asking AI to write a cron to burn some tokens for you?

ron_woods• 5 months ago

Years ago I remember talking to someone who purchased a "mouseJiggler" for that very purpose. That was literally what he called it. Problem for him was we turned it into a meme, and he immediately regretted telling us.

monkaiju2• 5 months ago

That sounds awful... Thankfully our CTO is quite supportive of our teams anti-AI policy and is even supportive of posting our LLM-ban on job postings. I honestly dont think that I could operate in an environment with any sort of AI mandate...

chung81233• 5 months ago

That seems just as bad but the opposite direction.

gtowey• 5 months ago

Leadership loves AI more than anything they have ever loved before. It's because for them, the fawning, sycophantic, ego-stroking agents who cheerfully champions every dumb idea they have and helps them realize it with spectacular averageness, is EXACTLY what they've always expected to receive from their employees.

SkyPuncher2• 5 months ago

I'm so happy I work at a sane company. We're pushing the limits of AI and everyone sees the value, but we also see the danger/risks.

I'm at the forefront of agentic tooling use, but also know that I'm working in uncharted territory. I have the skills to use it safely and securely, but not everyone does.

Tangurena2• 5 months ago

One small company I worked for had a similar mandate come from their large clients - since offshoring was fashionable in business journals, they must offshore the next project for those clients. That company spent more time reworking the offshored software than if we had done the development in-house.

This is just another business fad, but because the execs want to seem to be cool and seem to be doing what their "peers" claim to be doing, well, then by gosh, all of the workers have to do the same fad.

ej886• 5 months ago

seems to be a pattern:

[Company that's getting disrupted by AI: Fiverr, Duolingo]: rush to adopt internal AI to cut costs before they get undercut by competition

[Company that's orthogonal: Box, Ramp, HFT]: build internal tools to boost productivity, maintain 'ai-first' image to keep talent

[Company whose business model is AI]: time to go all in

gowld• 5 months ago

Why wouldn't HFT be disrupted by AI? AI-enhanced trading algo designs are likely to be competitive? AI disrupts everything on the computer from the low-end on up. The higher end requires more expensive or custom models that aren't as easy to obtain yet.

lossolo• 5 months ago

Because HFT is about adversarial play with a lot of hidden information.

Relevant article from two days ago https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning

_se• 5 months ago

HFT is about the last technical domain that could possibly be touched by LLMs. There is next to no good training data and there is zero margin for error.

ej886• 5 months ago

i mean llms

happy to be corrected but im not aware of any direct improvements llms bring to ultra low latency market making, time to first token is just too high (not including coding agents)

from talking to some friends in the space theres some meaningful improvements in tooling especially in discretionary trading that operate on longer time horizons where agents can actually help w research and sentiment analysis

entropyneur2• 5 months ago

Reading this thread suggests being "AI-first" is hardly a talent magnet.

ej886• 5 months ago

ai-first via mandate: throes of a company trying to appear cutting edge

ai-first via the actual technology being built: talent magnet despite the HN bubble appearing otherwise

palmotea2• 5 months ago

Within weeks, CEOs across industries posted their own versions. The AI-first memo became a genre. Here they all are.

That may be all the publicly-posted ones, but I'm skeptical. They have 11.

There were a lot more internal memos.

MontyCarloHall6• 5 months ago

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.

malfist• 5 months ago

Remember when companies all forced us to buy smartphones? Or switch to search engines instead of books? Or when Amazon announced it was "react native first"?

Mordisquitos• 5 months ago

I agree with the sentiment you're expressing but, to be fair, companies forcing us all to use smartphones (as consumers or as citizens) is, unfortunately, happening implicitly.

jezzamon• 5 months ago

Productive output is a lagging indicator. Using AI tools is theoretically leading???

nitwit0053• 5 months ago

I had you a power tool, and your productivity goes up immediately. Your IDE highlights problems, same story. Everyone can observe that this has happened.

Noumenon72• 5 months ago

On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.

MontyCarloHall6• 5 months ago

AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the level of the individual worker. Converting an entire factory is a top-down decision. No single worker can individually decide to start using electricity instead of steam power, but individuals can choose whether/how to use AI or any other individual-level tool.

nitwit0053• 5 months ago

That's a choice individual employees couldn't make. Or, at least, one management wouldn't let them make. It'd require a huge amount of spending.

abtinf• 5 months ago

That transition took 40-50 years. Electrical power in manufacturing was infeasible for lot of reasons for a longtime.

Any company issuing such an edict early on would have bankrupted themselves. And by the time it became practical, no such edict was needed.

nilkn4• 5 months ago

People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.

MontyCarloHall6• 5 months ago

That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.

nitwit0053• 5 months ago

You have to remember that our trade is automating things. We're all enthusiasts about automating things, and there's very clearly a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for that purpose.

If anything, the problem is that management wants to automate poorly. The employees are asked to "figure it out", and if they give feedback that it's probably not the best option, that feedback is rejected.

munificent3• 5 months ago

Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines. The latter is wildly more productive than the former. If you owned a business that employed a bunch of cobblers, then moving them all out of their little shops into one big factory where they can produce 100x as many shoes means you just got yourself 100x richer.

But for an individual cobbler, you basically got fired at one job and hired at another. This may come as a surprise to those who view work as simply an abstract concept that produces value units, but people actually have preferences about how they spend their time. If you're a cobbler, you might enjoy your little workshop, slicing off the edge of leather around the heel, hammering in the pegs, sitting at your workbench.

The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

You might not want to quit that job and get a different job running a shoe assembly line in a factory. Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer. But the boss isn't saying that. He's saying "all of the cobblers at the other companies are doing this to, so where are you gonna go?".

Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.

frizlab2• 5 months ago

Yup. It’s what I’ve come to realize. My job is probably safe, as long as I will be willing to adapt. I have still not even tried AI once, and don’t care for it, but I know at one point I probably will have to.

I don’t actually think it’ll be a productivity boost the way I work. Code has never been the difficult part, but I’ll definitely have to show I have included AI in my workflow to be left alone.

Oh well…

RyanOD• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, I would expect the boss to say, "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x the shoes to repair".

MontyCarloHall6• 5 months ago

Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines.

I wouldn't analogize the adoption of AI tools to a transition from individual craftspeople to an assembly line, which is a top-down total reorganization of the company (akin to the transition of a factory from steam power to electricity, as a sibling commenter noted [0]). As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization. Continuing your analogy, it's more akin to letting craftspeople bring whatever tools they want to work, whether those be hand tools or power tools. If the power tools are any good, most will naturally opt for them because they make the job easier.

The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.

That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive. Why else would they naturally adopt things like compilers, IDEs, and frameworks? Many workers enjoyed the respective intellectual puzzles of hand-optimizing assembly, or memorizing esoteric key combinations in their tricked-out text editors, or implementing everything from scratch, yet nonetheless jumped at the opportunity to adopt modern tooling because it increased how much they could accomplish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976955

withinboredom• 5 months ago

Blacksmiths pretty much existed until the ‘50s and ‘60s for most of the world, making bespoke tools and things. Then they just vanished, for the most part.

We are probably on a similar trajectory.

Sevii• 5 months ago

The industrial revolution was extremely hard on individual craftspeople. Jobs became lower paying and lower skilled. People were forced to move into cities. Conditions didn't improve for decades. If AI is anything comparable it's not going to get better in 5-10 years. It will be decades before the new 'jobs' come into place.

abeppu• 5 months ago

Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer.

... is now the moment to form worker cooperatives? The companies don't really have privileged access to these tools, and unlike many other things that drive increased productivity, there's not a huge up-front capital investment for the adopter. Why shouldn't ICs capture the value of their increased output?

wiseowise2• 5 months ago

Agree with every word.

Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.

This should be a disclaimer every time someone at work forces you to use AI.

Interesting how when WFH became "the norm" during COVID, there were thousands of apologists arguing that employees suddenly received perks for nothing. Where are all of you now? Why aren't you arguing against employer doing a fucking rug pull?

paodealho• 5 months ago

Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.

All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".

badc0ffee• 5 months ago

20 years ago or so, we had an exec ask us about our unit tests.

charcircuit2• 5 months ago

Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous.

This is simply not true. As a counter example consider debuggers. They are a big productivity boost, but it requires the user to change their development practice and learn a new tool. This makes adoption very hard. AI has a similar issue of being a new tool with a learning curve.

RandallBrown• 5 months ago

Did companies actually send out memos saying "We're going to be a company that uses debuggers!"

I would have just thought that people using them would quickly outpace the people that weren't and the people falling behind would adapt or die.

palijer• 5 months ago

There was an Apple memo like this though that said they were word processing first.

https://writingball.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-infamous-apple-...

SkyPuncher2• 5 months ago

That doesn't work in an environment where there are compliance and regulatory controls.

In most companies, you can't just pick up random new tools (especially ones that send data to third parties). The telling part is giving internal safety to use these tools.

SatvikBeri• 5 months ago

Bezos's API memo is the biggest example I can think of. It was not individually productive for teams but arguably it was very productive for Amazon/AWS as a whole.

MontyCarloHall6• 5 months ago

That's a top-down organizational change mandating certain capabilities for all Amazon software. Unlike these AI mandates, it's not dictating the exact tools developers use to write that software, but rather what the software itself should do. For reference, here's the API mandate [0]:

   1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

   2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

   3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

   4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.

   5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

   6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

This is very different from saying "any developer who doesn't use an IDE and a debugger will be fired," which is analogous to what the AI mandates are prescribing.

[0] https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...

rchaud• 5 months ago

Stock valuation has moved further away from Ben Graham-era emphasis on analysis of cash flow.

apimade• 5 months ago

Contract-first. API-first. Domain-driven. Platform driven. Microservice driven.

Tech loves making something a top priority (and forgetting about it several years later); AI is the first one that is applicable to the masses.

.. Well maybe not User-first. But that was even less clear than AI-first.

andrewshawcare• 5 months ago

The Klarna guy:

The misconceptions about Klarna and AI adoption baffle me sometimes.
Yes, we removed close to 1,500 micro SaaS services and some large. Not to save on licenses, but to give AI the cleanest possible context.

If you remove all your services...

pdntspa• 5 months ago

[flagged]

dang• 5 months ago

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rvz• 5 months ago

This is "AGI".

Also notice how almost all the stocks of these companies except Meta who have announced AI-first initiatives are at best flat or down but more than 20% YTD.

What does that tell you?

daniel_iversen• 5 months ago

Isn’t there tons more, like the note from Andy Jassy at Amazon and the CEO at Airwallex etc? Maybe you can use an ai agent to find all the other big examples? ;-)

stuaxo• 5 months ago

I like to think if someone can't be bothered to write something, I can't be bothered to read it.

wussboy4• 5 months ago

There was an article on here a few months ago that I agreed with. "Just give me the prompt".

thedangler• 5 months ago

Its easier to adopt AI when starting from scratch or code base is well maintained.

Mave83• 5 months ago

The software defined storage company croit.io announced it in their Workation in May 2023. AI is just another tool and people have to understand that it's not going away. As a company, you still need people to make use of this tool.

plaidfuji• 5 months ago

Fiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc.

Then concludes his email with:

I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future.

I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??

azinman2• 5 months ago

The irony is if you take this to the limit, ChatGPT replaces fiverr

yencabulator3• 5 months ago

I assume Shelly Paran is Fiverr's Chief of Staff, and a human. You already knew that rules don't apply to CEOs.

politelemon• 5 months ago

May I suggest directly hosting the images and text instead of embedding the x and linked in posts.

warkdarrior2• 5 months ago

You could use AI to summarize the website without X and LinkedIn embedding code.

wussboy4• 5 months ago

The fact they didn't is telling.

CountHackulus• 5 months ago

This reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.

munificent3• 5 months ago

CEOs want productivity. They don't want employees. Employees are a cost center.

goatlover3• 5 months ago

Employees also make for customers. Not sure how AIs and robots will be replacing human consumers once CEOs realize their dream.

throw876987696• 5 months ago

Same here in LATAM. We are also an AI-First company now. No customer-first, or product-first, or data-driven (I actually liked the idea behind being data-driven). All the code must be AI-generated by the end of Q1. All the employees must include at least one AI-adoption metric or project in their goals.

siliconc0w• 5 months ago

If you hire good people and set proper incentives they will figure out the best way to do something. If leadership has to direct employees to use AI it's a bad sign. If it were a huge boon to productivity, you won't need to force people to use it.

bigbuppo• 5 months ago

What are the AI-never companies doing? May be a useful comparison. Is the AI work actually improving the bottom line, or is it being used to assuage noisy shareholders that think AI is a hack for infinite profit?

renewiltord2• 5 months ago

People have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff.

And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.

entropyneur2• 5 months ago

Emacs is an interesting analogy. I've switched from IDEs to Emacs at some point in my career, and inertia obviously wasn't the reason. Then another 15 years later I went back to using IDEs (inspired by Carmack's interview). 2 years in I realized it destroyed my ability to generate and maintain mental maps of the codebase and generally remember things about it, although I think it's still a net gain so I stick with it. Agentic coding poses the exact same problem and the exact same tradeoff. And I think the jury is still out on whether it's worth it. At the very minimum you need to take proactive measures least you end up with a codebase no one can maintain (other than maybe future AGI).

otabdeveloper44• 5 months ago

It's Emacs. Also Emacs is an IDE.

renewiltord2• 5 months ago

Yeah, it's not clear to me why my iPhone keyboard does that but I didn't correct it. Indeed, emacs is love, emacs is life. Emacs is all things. Emacs is nothing and everything.

https://imgur.com/a/PNR99un

_slih• 5 months ago

The Klarna reversal is the most honest thing on this list. Went all in, quality dropped, hired humans back. Every other memo on here is still in the 'we declared victory' phase. Be interesting to check back in a year and see how many quietly walk it back without a blog post

lokimedes• 5 months ago

The trap for many companies is that as everyone automate with AI, their competitive advantage erodes, as they prove that a few centralized models can run the businesses.

What are the trenches in businesses in 2030, purely ownership over physical assets and energy?

themafia• 5 months ago

"Cool. I quit."

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

Reminds me a bit of the old f*ckedcompany website, where internal layoff notices and other insider gossip got posted.

halamadrid• 5 months ago

HubSpot CTO was very vocal about how AI is changing everything and how he is supporting by offering the domain chat.com to OpenAI etc. I say was because it has toned down quite a bit. I always thought HubSpot will transform into a true AI CRM given how invested the CTO was in the space from the early days.

Now the stock is down from $800+ to $200+ and the whole messaging has changed. The last one I saw on LinkedIn was "" No comment on the HubSpot stock price.

But, I strongly agree with this statement:

"...I don't see companies trusting their revenue engine to something vibe-coded over a weekend." ""

The stock dip is likely because of the true AI native CRMs being built and coming to market, but why couldn't HubSpot take that spot given the CTOs interest in the space.

lmeyerov• 5 months ago

I get ai-adjacent dev teams going all in, as they're equipped to deal with the hard edges, but this is brutal for everyone else. Like Frank in collections is just trying to make sure people get paid, not worry about whatever it means to be "prompt injected".

AI-First Company Memos

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