Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources
Former shopify employee here. Tobi is scum, and surrounds himself with scum. He looks up to Elon and genuinely admires him.
Can we prove AI can do the job of the CEO?
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.
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.
Why do I get the feeling that the hot new thing for CEOs to do is ask AI whenever they need to make a decision. Would explain a lot.
Hey Tobi, why do need to pay you any bonus moving forward? What did you do the AI couldn't?
I know for certain the CEO at my company is like that. Not even how or why to do something, but what we should do. Fucking mental
We hit rock bottom a long time ago: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit It takes power tools to make progress in the bedrock.
Dear Tobi Lütke - AI can do your job too. Care to comment?
Should ask the AI model if a CEO is required
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.
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.
Error rate for good, disciplined developers is easily below 1%. That's what tests are for.
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.
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.
CEOs are obsolete
I cannot wait for Shopify to go away. Yet another company that feels like an infestation.
Right?
"Oh you typed in a phone number/email address in a required field? Here's some spam you never asked for that we want you to confirm so we can continue spamming you, please bro just confirm it bro, just type in the code we sent you bro"
Dystopian.
Also:
ask why there is a need for CEO, a job that can be done by AI.
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
I like AI, but we are still in the biplane era of development. It will take a long time before it can handle most things, let alone unsupervised.
If Shopify goes follows through with imitating Musk's stupidity, I expect the company to end up as a case study.
Well, first the CEO is asking for proof of a negative, so anyone with a logical brain cell just has to shake their head and repeat "it's for the paycheck."
We can assume CEO means "show me you tried to use AI and it's not working well enough," which isn't all that bad of a directive but it's got the huge gaps of "do your people really know how to use AI?" and "are they using the correct, latest versions of AI for the task they are attempting?" But, it may stand up a few use cases for AI that would have otherwise used expensive meat sacks to do what must be fairly boring rote recitation work if they can be adequately replaced by AI.
The problem comes when senseless metrics get pushed down that amount to: a certain number of AI projects must be greenlighted, regardless of how dreadful they are in practice.
AI is a tool, it can save labor, it can relieve human employees of tedious work, it can't do everything. All this "big personality" top level management of large and very large organizations with broad stroke metrics leads to mass stupidity when the underlings blindly follow orders, and I suspect - within its limitations - AI will always follow orders, so getting AI into middle management will only magnify the idiocrazy.
Id tell them I can get AI to do anything they want. They're the ones who will be paying for me to spend not hours but days tweaking prompts to get whatever shit they want done that could've been done faster cheaper and better with appropriate resources so fuck it I'm in.
You know what happens when you use too much AI? Some important skills atrophy, and when you need to do the more complex job that the AI can't do, it will be even harder to do the more complex thing, because you've lost some base skills you rely on.
This doesn't apply only to coding: https://lucianonooijen.com/blog/why-i-stopped-using-ai-code-editors/
If you work there, run away fast.
Hard to imagine a CEO doing something that would make me less likely to apply or use their service.
Dear CEOs: I will never accept 0.5% hallucinations as “A.I.” and if you don’t even know that, I want an A.I. machine cooking all your meals. If you aren’t ok with 1/200 of your meals containing poison, you’re expendable.
Humans or even regular ass algorithms are fine. A.I. can predict protein folding. It should do a lot else unless there’s a generational leap from “making shitty images” to “as close to perfect as it gets.”
Cooking meals seems like a good first step towards teaching AI programming. After all the recipe analogy is ubiquitous in programming intro courses. /s
Are you a business owner?
Not currently. I used to be.
“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?
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.
I love AI and use it everyday, but right now it absolutely lacks logic, even the reasoning models and thus it really cannot replace a whole person outside of what 1 prompt can give you which is not a career.
So basically a CEO
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
Just reminding everyone that Lutke is a right-wing shitheel, and that he and Shopify explicitly platform, support and make money from Nazism.
Carry on.
So it Latke going to fund the resources needed to validate whether AI will work or not?
should just be a matter of saying “AI can’t do this job because it can’t properly do any job”. could even make that your email signature.
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
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.
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."
Not until they find a way to properly simulate emotions on it
Gonna take a while for that
Jesus fucking Christ.
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?
These weird, creepy attempts at upboarding onto AI, sound like they are projecting FOMO onto people, for profit, of course.
Asking to prove a negative? More like stupidfy CEO.
Ah yes more paperwork is certainly going to make your employees more productive. Why don't you also require them to prototype if kicking a rock against the wall 10 times does the job, instead of actually letting them do the job?
Everyone stop doing your jobs
My company just did the same thing. I wonder if it's the VC's dictating that down through the board of directors, or if this is just a viral leadership trend.
Shopify is a stupid fucking name. I can only assume the company and service is equally as stupid.
Are you trolling or have you really never heard of shopify? Prolly every ecommerce website you've ever visited was built by either wix, big commerce or shopify with shopify (iirc) holding the largest market share of the 3. That may have changed since I last looked at adding e-commerce builders to my investment portfolio but theyre definitely top 3.
Define stupid: https://www.google.com/search?q=shopify+financials
This guy just gives off never nude vibes
There are dozens of us. Dozens!!!
ShopIffy
Every CEO should do that. There's so much bureaucracy and unnecessary bloat in companies that can be reduced if the leadership is a little more riguous. This is especially important in the current market.
🤮
