A CEO who fired his engineering team to make room for AI has met an unexpected response from the developers he let go: they built an open source AI CEO. The project, OpenExecutive, shot to the top of Hacker News with over 900 points and 600 comments, as the community turned the layoff trend back on management.
OpenExecutive, built by SenteLabsAI, presents a single coherent executive persona backed by eight specialist Claude agents: chief strategy officer, CFO, head of people, general counsel, COO, CMO, CPO and a board communications director. Each pulls from MBA-level built-in knowledge plus the company's own documents, and the system keeps episodic memory of past decisions across sessions, with a scheduler that surfaces follow-ups.
The stack runs Anthropic's Claude models on a FastAPI backend with ChromaDB for retrieval and a Next.js web UI, all released under Apache 2.0. It is satire and a serious tool at once: a working virtual executive team that costs a fraction of a real one. As companies replace developers with AI, the developers have responded by writing the CEO out of the org chart.