According to Hacker News, tech CEOs are misunderstanding how AI can improve their businesses. An essay argues that executives, seduced by generative AI, believe they can replace their entire teams—product managers, designers, engineers—with clever prompts and automation. But the author invokes Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity: every product has an irreducible amount of effort that must be distributed between the system and the user. Understanding what to build, why, and for whom cannot be automated. Complexity can only be conserved, never eliminated. Outsourcing intellectual work to an LLM doesn't solve the problem; it just pushes the complexity around. The takeaway: you can't cut humans on the inside and meaningfully serve humans on the outside.

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