The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer “founder mode”, or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to the office — it’s demanding that all work be AI-first! This is a great idea if you think nobody at your company is great at what they do. It may otherwise be a suboptimal strategy. Let’s dive in!
Let’s use me as a case study. I’m pretty okay at writing. For example, one time I wrote a fairly technical analysis of Twitter’s platform strategy that inspired Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas to start Twitter beef with me two years later when he read the post and took offense to my referring to him as “nobody’s favorite rapper”.
This is something your GPTs cannot do, I assure you. An average LLM won’t even know that Drake’s favorite MIME type is application/pdf. Chalk one up for the greatness of human creativity.
The AI-First Mind Virus
Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke (personal motto: “what if a Canadian was all the worst things about the United States?”) started the “AI-first” trend, with one of those big memos that included, amongst other things, the declaration that “We will add Al usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire.” This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I’m actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn’t have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn’t that interesting?
Some of the other CEOs talking about the use of AI are a little more reasonable. Duolingo’s CEO Luis von Ahn seems to be trying to be somewhat more moderate in his memo, stating plainly that he doesn’t see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the “who brought that up?” question…) Yet even in this more even-handed take, we still get the insistence that “Al use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews”. This is really weird!
The funn
18 Comments
srveale
I don't necessarily disagree with the main argument, but
> did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone
Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries – debatably not smartphones, but still – to the managers and require work communication on them. I know this was true for many companies.
This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception of it by upper management.
One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records. Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is suggesting now that we should go back to paper.
You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate towards new tech is not true in general.
lsy
The point is well-made that truly revolutionary technologies don't need top-down mandates to drive adoption, and it's certainly a bad sign for the AI industry that we are in this phase of the hype cycle. But it also seems likely that top-down mandates will create perverse incentives for product development around these technologies, preventing genuinely valuable use cases from emerging as people determine what does and doesn't work.
If everyone, to satisfy their CEO's emotional attachment to AI, is forced to type into a chat box to get dreck out and then massage it into something usable for their work, we'll see that ineffective mode persist longer, and probably miss out on better modes of interaction and more well-targeted use cases.
teddy-smith
The article presents some good points but to me it seems like not being a jerk and calling Will.I.am "nobodys favorite rapper" is a selling point for A.I.
booleandilemma
I thought AI-first was the new blockchain?
ChrisArchitect
Aside: where do the extra slashes in the submitted anildash urls come from? frequent reoccurrence. An rss feed somewhere? Some scheme for him to track outside shares? heh
https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-ret…
JimDabell
> This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology.
I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to change unless given a firm push.
For instance, if you weren’t around before version control became the norm, then you probably missed the legions of developers who said things like “Ugh, why do I have to use this stupid thing? It just slows me down and gets in my way! Why can’t I just focus on writing code?” Those developers had to be dragged into modern software development when they were certain it was a stupid waste of time.
AI can be extremely useful and there’s a lot of people out there who refuse to give it a proper try. Using AI well is a skill you need to learn and if you don’t see positive results on your first couple of attempts that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it just means you are a beginner. If you tried a new language and didn’t get very far at first, would you blame the language or recognise that you lack experience?
An awful lot of people are stuck in a rut where they tried an early model, got poor results to begin with, and refused to use it again. These people do need a firm, top-down push, or they will be left behind.
This has happened before, many times. Contrary to the article’s claims, sometimes top-down pushes have been necessary even for things we now consider near universally good and productive.
andy99
I see this is already a favorite quote amongst commentors. It's mine too: I had a job ~15 years ago where the company had introduced an internal social network, that was obviously trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook et al without understanding why people liked social networks.
Nobody used it because it was useless, but management evidently was invested in it because your profile and use of that internal site did in fact factor in to performance reviews.
This didn't last long, maybe only one review cycle before everyone realized it was irretrievably lost. The parallel with the article is very apt thought. The stick instead of the carrot is basically an indication that a dumb management idea is in its death throes.
mjheart
As someone who works at a larger corporation who takes the quoted "normal policy", I can attest that it's extremely refreshing.
Incidentally, some people on my team have used Copilot for task management, but nobody has found it useful for coding / debugging / testing.
cmrdporcupine
"did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack?"
In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now).
It frankly had the same aura of … not getting it… lack of vision pretending to be visionionary.
In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're being "luddites"
One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on them.
When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what they're actually reflecting is their own fear of being left behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that fear. I've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and forced "innovation" than the other way around.
hbsbsbsndk
Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers.
My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".
Workaccount2
I know this post is about tech, and obviously HN is a tech centered site, and most people here work in tech, but let me say:
Outside of tech, AI has been phenomenally helpful. I know many tech folk are falling over themselves for non-tech industry problems that can be software-solved then leased out monthly, and there are tons of these problems out there, but very hard to locate and model if you are outside the industry.
But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how to program, but recognize that a program could do this task, finally can now summon that program to do the task. The path still has a tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI titans racing to get programming ability into Supply Chain Technician Kim's hands. Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for your mother to use.
I believe it will be the CEO's of these non-tech companies that will be pushing "AI first" and having people come in to show non-techy non-tech workers how to leverage LLMs to automate tasks. You guys have to keep in mind that if you walk into most offices in most places of the world, most workers will say "What the hell is a macro? I just go down the list line by line…"
dfilppi
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hyfgfh
> The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the racial justice activism efforts of 2020.
Not against this point, but I don't get it, maybe because I don't live in the US, but I see as another way to "soft-fire" people, as is this AI crazy
What I'm missing?
Illniyar
"An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf"
Is this seeding for future AI models?
If I ask chatGPT a year from now what is drake's favorite Mime type would it confidently say "application/PDF"
iLoveOncall
AI-first is the new blockchain, trying to fit a solution to a non-existent problem, that's it.
resolutefunctor
> stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?" question…)
Almost everyone who isn't highly informed in this field is worried about this. This is a completely reasonable thing to include in a memo about "forced" adoption of AI. Because excluding it induces panic in the workforce.
It is funny that this post calls out groupthink, while failing to acknowledge that they're falling into the groupthink of "CEO dumb" and "AI bad"
Forced AI adoption is nothing more than a strategy, a gamble, etc from company leadership. It may work out great, it may not, and anyone stating with conviction one way or another is lying to themselves and everyone they're shouting to. It is no different than companies going "internet-first" years ago. Doesn't have to mean that the people making the decision are "performing" for each other or that they are fascists, my god.
Imo its a great way of allowing high performers to create even more impact. A great developer typing syntax isn't valuable. Their ability to engineer solutions to challenges and problems is. Scaling that out to an entire company that believes in their people is no different, less time spent on the time-consuming functions of a job that are low-value in isolation, and more time spent on high-value functions of a job.
The Twitter/Reddit-style "snark-for-clicks" approach is disappointing to see so high on a site like this that is largely comprised of intelligent and thoughtful people.
renewiltord
Making sure everyone is using LLMs is smart. It’s a transformative technology and some people are just slow to adopt. Org wide process improvements often need mandates or they won’t happen.
No different than using version control etc. There were and are engineers who would rather just rsync without having to do the bookkeeping paperwork of `git commit` but you mandate it nonetheless.
Devasta
With AI, all we will need is staff to write down a few paragraphs of their needs and constraints and the computer will be able to deliver the desired outcomes.
Also, despite the fact that we were all working remotely for years, we need you all to come into the office because water cooler chats are far better than writing down a few paragraphs outlining what you need and the constraints.