Replace your boss before they replace you
42 comments
·November 27, 2025chasing0entropy
georgehotz
Who's giving you that paycheck? Why don't they just hire that AI agent themselves and cut out the middle man?
Mtinie
In this scenario the person who wants to be paid owns the output of the agent. So it’s closer to a contractor and subcontractor arrangement than employment.
danenania
This begs the question of which side agents will achieve human-level skill at first. It wouldn’t surprise me if doing the work itself end-to-end (to a market-ready standard) remains in the uncanny valley for quite some time, while “fuzzier” roles like management can be more readily replaced.
It’s like how we all once thought blue collar work would be first, but it turned out that knowledge work is much easier. Right now everyone imagines managers replacing their employees with AI, but we might have the order reversed.
zwnow
How are businesses going to get money if there are no humans that are able to pay for goods?
Lots of us are not cut out for blue collar work.
fijiaarone
Can you explain why we pay Sam Altman & Elon Musk? Or Jeff Bezos & Bill Gates? They’re just middlemen collecting money for other people’s labor.
georgehotz
You are welcome to try to cut them out and start your own business. But I suspect you might find it a bit harder than your employer signing up for a SaaS AI agent.
crackalamoo
Isn't this kind of the same as an AI copilot, just with higher autonomy?
I think the limiting factor is that the AI still isn't good enough to be fully autonomous, so it needs your input. That's why it's still in copilot form
IshKebab
Why would the market want that? Don't be stupid.
-_-
That's the premise behind Workshop Labs! https://workshoplabs.ai
candiddevmike
Really this is the only 10x part of GenAI that I see: increasing the number of reports exponentially by removing managers/directors, and using GenAI (search/summarization, e.g. "how is X progressing" etc) to understand what's going on underneath you. Get rid of the political game of telephone and get leaders closer to the ground floor (and the real problems/blockers).
jondwillis
I love that they’re all called David except for Simon
didibus
Joke aside, I do think think someone should work on a legitimate agent for financial and business decision, management, and so on.
Especially "decision making". I find it's one of the things that are tricky, making the AI agent optimize for actually good decisions and not just give you info or options, but create real opinion and take real decisions.
coffeecoders
How hard would it be to run a simulator with multiple LLMs. Say, one as the boss and a few as employees. Just let them talk, coordinate, and "work"? Could be the fastest way to test what actually happens when you try to automate management.
PhilippGille
Multiple projects for autonomous multi agent teams already exist.
ai-christianson
This is quite literally what we've built @ Gobii, but it's prod ready and scalable.
The idea is you spin up a team of agents, they're always on, they can talk to one another, and you and your team can interact with them via email, sms, slack, discord, etc.
Disclaimer: founder
krater23
And they simulate a externalized team where the enterprize that pays the team doesn't knows that it's just AI and just thinks that these chinese/indian/african people of this external team are really bad at what they are doing.
fragmede
Not exceedingly so: https://news.ysimulator.run/faq
IshKebab
I dunno the comments here perfectly capture HN-ackshewelly!
pygy_
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20059894
Called it, six years ago :-)
I can see boards of directors drooling at the potential savings.
belter
Tesla can immediately make a saving of $1 Trillion
auggierose
Love this one.
tylerflick
Musk isn’t getting a trillion. Tesla sales would have to skyrocket.
koliber
Imagine that they do skyrocket but the RoboCEO is in charge trillion gets distributed to shareholders.
jvanderbot
My boss is a pretty awesome technologist, too, but has a lot of time sunk into business stuff.
I sent this along as a joke but I doubt any of us are enthused about working for an AI.
It would be cool to automate more of that business stuff but I suspect it's too "soft" to actually automate.
tt24
The UI looks good! Is there a reason this is being shared here? Feels like a collection of tired, trite oneliners that I’d expect to see on Twitter rather than here.
dijksterhuis
> We don't have meetings, we have collaborative ideation experiences
yep, checks out.
keiferski
This looks like the perfect counterpart to Boss as a Service:
zkmon
Funny. Infact, the blockchain smart contract (DAPPs) tried this before, by fully automating (they call it democratizing) the decisions. Not sure how it went.
vanschelven
in the same vein as http://developerexcuses.com/ (and presumably many others)
Can you design an AI agent that I own, to replace me? This is what the market really wants and is probably one of the ONLY things that doesn't exist.
Just let me subscribe to an agent to do my work while I keep getting a paycheck.