About whether AI will automate founders' work as well as software engineers'.
Has this happened?
Yes 30 (29%)Not sure 23 (22%)No 52 (50%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI will automate founders' work as well as software engineers'.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
That’s very unique
That's not even close to unique. Software engineers have been doing that since they existed.
but the founder role is kinda unique in that it’s just “do everything and if you’re successful you should be constantly replacing your job with an employee”.
That's maybe the ideal of a founder, it's definitely part of the mythology, but it wasn't true for the majority of the many founders I worked with back when I was consulting for early stage startups. Based on my experience with a large sample size, the job of a founder is to convince VCs to give them money.
How do they apply to software engineers exactly?
It's one of the definitions of the singularity. When AI can write itself, it will improve so rapidly that humans won't be able to keep up.