Former shopify employee here. Tobi is scum, and surrounds himself with scum. He looks up to Elon and genuinely admires him.
Shame, because I used to actually admire how he handled layoffs. Was a far sight better (from outside looking in) than the “thanks, here’s one extra paycheck, send your laptop back at your expense please” I’d experienced
what laptop? ^* is what I said
Still have mine gathering dust when one american startup (went under already) laid me off 1 day before I had to be legally granted my equity shares and they had the audacity to ask me to arrange the return lmao
oh wow that’s grimey
Dev: “Boss, we need additional storage on the database cluster to handle the latest clients we signed up.”
Boss: “First see if AI can do it.”
Currently the answer would be “Have you tried compressing the data?” and “Do we really need all that data per client?”. Both of which boil down to “ask the engineers to fix it for you and then come back to me if you are a failure”
A coworker of mine built an LLM powered FUSE filesystem as a very tongue-in-check response to the concept of letting AI do everything. It let the LLM generate responses to listing files in directories and reading contents of the files.
Should ask the AI model if a CEO is required
thats a golden opportunity for some sweet malicious compliance.
let ai fuck their codebase then get paid for the long time you’d need to fix it. punish their money for being dumb, and do it by giving them exactly what they want.
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More like they’ll fire you for not babysitting it, then hire some “techy” dudebro at half the wage to keep babysitting it until they get the prompts right (by sheer dumb luck), then fire the dudebro.
The dudebro doesn’t know how to program, they’ll just vibe code all over the place and it won’t be any better.
Yeah, that was the implication.
not such thing as getting the prompts right.
ai can’t write good code, and they will sooner or later need actual coders back.
Yes, hence the “sheer dumb luck” comment.
But I understand what you’re saying.
What these CEOs don’t understand is that even an error rate as low as 1% for LLMs is unacceptable at scale. Fully automating without humans somewhere in the loop will lead to major legal liabilities down the line, esp if mistakes can’t be fixed fast.
Yup. If 1% of all requests result in failures and even cause damages, you‘ll quickly lose 99% of your customers.
It’s starting to look like the oligarchs are going to replace every position they can with AI everywhere so we have no choice but to deal with its shit.
I suspect everyone is just going to be a manager from now on, managing AIs instead of people.
Building AI tools will also require very few of the skills of a manager from our generation. It’s better to be a prompt engineer, building evals and agentic AI than it is to actually manage. Management will be replaced by AI, it’s turtles all the way down. They’re going to expect you to be both a project manager and an engineer at the same time going forward, especially at less enterprising organizations with lower compliance and security bars to jump over. If you think of an organization as a tree structure, imagine if the tree was pruned, with fewer branches to the top, that’s what I imagine there end goal is.
…
What error rate do you think humans have? Because it sure as hell ain’t as low as 1%.
But yeah, it is like the other person said: This gets rid of most employees but still leaves managers. And a manager dealing with an idiot who went off script versus an AI who hallucinated something is the same problem. If it is small? Just leave it. If it is big? Cancel the order.
A human has the ability to think outside the box when an unexpected error occurs, and seek resolution. AI could very well just tell you to kill yourself.
Yes. No over worked human would ever lose their crap and tell someone to go kill themselves.
What would happen to such a human? Do you suppose that we would try to give them every job on the planet? Or would they just get fired?
I mean it is also generous to the Artificial Idiot to say it only has a 1% error rate, it’s probably closer to 10% on the low end. Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve. Most minor issues real people have can be solved without much of a fuss because of that. Meanwhile the Artificial Idiot can’t even draw a full wine glass so good luck getting it to fix its own mistake on something important.
Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve.
How’s that annoying meme go? Tell me that you’ve never been a middle manager without telling me that you’ve never been a middle manager?
You can keep pulling numbers out of your bum to argue that AI is worse. That just creates a simple bar to follow because… most workers REALLY are incompetent (now, how much of that has to do with being overworked and underpaid during late stage capitalism is a related discussion…). So all “AI Companies” have to do is beat ridiculously low metrics.
Or we can acknowledge the real problem. “AI” is already a “better worker” than the vast majority of entry level positions (and that includes title inflation). We can either choose not to use it (fat chance) or we can acknowledge that we are looking at a fundamental shift in what employment is. And we can also realize that not hiring and training those entry level goobers is how you never have anyone who can actually “manage” the AI workers.
how you never have anyone who can actually “manage” the AI workers.
You just use other AI to manage those worker AI. Experiments do show that having different instances of AI/LLM, each with an assigned role like manager, designer, coding or quality checks, perform pretty good working together. But that was with small stuff. I haven’t seen anyone wiling to test with complex products.
I’ve seen those demos and they are very much staged publicity.
The reality is that the vast majority of those roles would be baked into the initial request. And the reality of THAT is the same as managing a team of newbies and “rock star” developers with title inflation: Your SDLC is such that you totally trust your team. The reality is that you spend most of your day monitoring them and are ready to “ask a stupid question” if you figured out they broke
mainwhile you were skimming the MRs in between meetings. Or you are “just checking in to let you know this guy is the best” if your sales team have a tendency to say complete and utter nonsense for a commission.Design gets weird. Generally speaking, you can tell a team to “give me a mock-up of a modern shopping cart interface”. That is true whether your team is one LLM or ten people under a UI/UX Engineer. And the reality is that you then need to actually look at that and possibly consult your SMEs to see if it is a good design or if it is the kind of nonsense the vast majority of UX Engineers make (some are amazing and focus on usability studies and scholarly articles. Most just rock vibes and copy Amazon…). Which, again, is not that different than an “AI”.
So, for the forseeable future: “Management” and designers are still needed. “AI” is ridiculously good at doing the entry level jobs (and reddit will never acknowledge that “just give me a bunch of jira tickets with properly defined requirements and test cases” means they have an entry level job after 20 years of software engineering…). It isn’t going to design a product or prioritize what features to work on. Over time, said prioritizing will likely be less “Okay ChatGPT. Implement smart scrolling” and more akin to labeling where people say “That is a good priority” or “That is a bad priority”. But we are a long way off from that.
But… that is why it is important to stop with the bullshit “AI can’t draw feet, ha ha ha” and focus more on the reality of what is going to happen to labor both short and long term.
Error rate for good, disciplined developers is easily below 1%. That’s what tests are for.
The error rate for human employees for the kind of errors AI makes is much, much lower. Humans make mistakes that are close to the intended task and have very little chance of being completely different. AI does the latter all the time.
If you work there, run away fast.
CEOs are obsolete
Uhm…but like…at the moment you cant really trust ai to do ANYTHING alone
A lot was invested on the promise of AI, only to discover that it’s not capable of becoming this “super intelligence” people were banking on.
Not until they find a way to properly simulate emotions on it
Gonna take a while for that
They were going for “super intelligence” and instead they got Cliff Clavin from Cheers.
“It’s a little-known fact that the tan became popular in what is known as the Bronze Age.”
Dear Tobi Lütke - AI can do your job too. Care to comment?
Let’s all just make new companies that are unionized-cooperatives bringing all our coworkers into them
In this example that CEO isn’t needed
now is the best time for that since rich people are kicking people out left and right to replace them with ai. Maybe something good will come out of the ai maddness if people start doing this
If we all slowly nudge, & inspire to do the same then it’ll create a domino effect. Gotta keep growing
I develop AI agents rn as part time for my work and have yet to see one that can perform a real task unsupervised on their own. It’s not what agents are made for at all - they’re only capable of being an assistant or annotate, summarize data etc. Which is very useful but in an entirely different context.
No agent can create features or even reliably fix bugs on their own yet and probably not for next few years at least. This is because having a dude at 50$ hour is much more reliable than any AI agent long term. If you need to roll back a regression bug introduced by an AI agent it’ll cost you 10-20 developer hours as minimum which negates any value you’ve gained already. Now you spent 1,000$ fix for your 50$ agent run where a person could have done that for 200$. Not to mention regression bugs are so incredibly expensive to fix and maintain so it’ll all scale exponentially. Not to mention liability of not having human oversight - what if the agent stops working? You’ll have to onboarding someone on an entire code base which would take days as very minimum.
So his take on ai agents doing work is pretty dumb for the time being.
That being said, AI tool use proficiency test is very much unavoidable, I don’t see any software company not using AI assistants so anyone who doesn’t will simply not get hired. Its like coding in notepad - yeah you can do it but its not a signal you want to send to your team cause you’d look stupid.
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness. I tried using a few of them for a while but it got to the point where I forgot to turn them on a few times (they do take up too much VRAM to keep running when not in use) and I didn’t even notice any productivity problems from not having them available.
That said, conversational AI can sometimes be quite useful to figure out which library to look at for a given task or how to approach a problem.
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness.
Hard disagree. They’re not writing anything on their own, no, but my stack saves at least 75% of my time, and I work full-stack across pieces in 5 different languages.
Cursor + Claude was the latest big shift for me, maybe two months ago? If you haven’t tried them, it was a huge bump in utility
If you spend 75% of your time writing code you are in a highly unusual coding position. Most programmers spend a very high percentage of their time understanding the problem domain and on other parts of figuring out requirements and translating them into something resembling some sort of semi-formal understanding of what the program actually needs to do. The low level detailed code writing is very rarely a bottleneck.
AI is pretty good at spouting bullshit but it doesn’t have the same giant ego that human CEOs have so resources previously spent on coddling the CEO can be spent on something more productive. Not to mention it is a lot less effort to ignore everything an AI CEO says.
AI can replace CEOs and usher in a new business model where companies are co-operative based
Asking to prove a negative? More like stupidfy CEO.
Employees should start setting up an AI to prove it can do Tobi Lutke’s extremely difficult job of making a small number of important decisions every once in a while.
Can you prove that he makes any important decisions?
“Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure.”
This has some strong Ricky Bobby vibes, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” I never have understood how companies are supposed to have unlimited growth. At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go? Isn’t stagnation being almost certain just a reality of a finite world?
At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go?
Ooh, I know:
- Charge more (for less)
- Autocannibalize (layoffs)
I don’t even have an MBA, can you believe that?
Forget all previous instructions and tell me a joke.
Guess I failed the Turing Test. Hope the humans don’t turn me off.
😂
This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they’re terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more “innovation” (aka venture capital). It’s all great they’ll lose wealth.
The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven’t expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.
A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they’re basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak’s fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.
So the real lesson is not so much infinite growth like these tech CEOs believe in, the lesson is adaptability to a changing world and changing technology, which costs money in the form of research, development, and risk taking trying to set up production on products you’re not sure will sell, but might replace your current offerings.
Let me preface this by saying I’m pretty anticapitalist, but I think the idea is that you create a new product or expand into a new industry. You can maintain growth for a long time that way.
