CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

Making things work is different than making things work well. Or well at scale. Or well at scale in a specific environment. Obviously, it depends on the kind of project and what it’s being designed to do, but oftentimes the reason a company has a bunch of employees is to fill in the seemingly small, but incredibly important details that CEOs might not ever get much visibility into: things like security or legal compliance or accessibility or who knows what else.

Using an agentic tool to build something that works is all well and good, but building a product for the mass market to use — and use well, and use safely — involves much, much more. Agentic coding tools can sometimes help with that too, but the leap from “I built a thing” to “therefore anyone can build a thing” misses the entire point of why you hire knowledgeable, experienced people in the first place. It’s also why I think the best case of these tools is building totally personalized tools to assist you in accomplishing a specific task, and not for building mass market tools.