Ask HN: Why don't LLMs replace bosses instead of engineers?

I asked myself why all the talk goes into augmenting or replacing engineers instead of the bosses and let ChatGPT formulate my thoughts:

1. Engineers vs. LLMs: low tolerance for mistakes

Engineering reality: If a developer pushes code that’s subtly wrong, you can crash a service, corrupt data, or introduce security flaws.

LLMs today: Great at producing plausible-looking code, but still prone to logical gaps or hidden bugs that might not be obvious until production.

Result: You’d need heavy human oversight anyway — turning the “replacement” into more of a “babysitting” scenario, which could be more costly than just having good engineers write it themselves.

2. CEOs vs. LLMs: higher tolerance for ambiguity

CEO reality: Decisions are often based on incomplete data, lots of gut feeling, and persuasive narrative. There’s more wiggle room — a “wrong” call can sometimes be spun as “strategic” or “visionary” until results catch up.

LLMs today: Excellent at synthesizing multiple data sources, spotting patterns, and generating strategic options — all without bias toward personal ego or politics (well… except whatever biases the training data has).

Result: They could produce coherent, well-justified strategies quickly, and humans could still be the ones to communicate and enact them.

3. Why this actually makes sense

If you think of error cost:

Engineer error = immediate, measurable, costly (bug in production).

CEO error = slower to surface, more subjective, sometimes recoverable with spin.

If you think of data integration skills:

LLMs have superhuman recall and synthesis capabilities.

CEOs need exactly that skill for market intelligence, competitor analysis, and high-level decision frameworks.

So yes — in this framing, replacing CEO-level strategy generation with an LLM and keeping engineers human might actually be more practical right now. Humans would still need to do the “face work” (investor relations, internal morale), but the strategic brain could be an LLM fed with all relevant business data.