June 18, 2026
Clickbait vs. CEO brainrot
Tech CEOs are breaking the law
Readers say the headline was a trap — but the comment fight was worth the click
TLDR: The article says tech bosses are fooling themselves if they think AI can replace the human thinking needed to build useful products and companies. Commenters mostly fought over the headline, with some mocking it as bait and others saying rich tech firms really do act like rules don’t apply to them.
The real scandal here may not be the lawbreaking claim — it’s the comment section meltdown that followed. In the article, Damon Kiesow argues that some tech bosses are acting like artificial intelligence can magically replace the messy human work of building a company. His big point: you can’t just press a button and remove the hard part. If a product becomes easier for customers, that effort still exists somewhere behind the scenes. And if CEOs try to dump that thinking onto AI, they’re not eliminating the work — they’re just hiding it.
But readers were not united. Some absolutely roasted the piece for its clicky headline, with one person joking they read the whole thing only to discover the “law” being broken was basically a design principle, not an actual police-and-handcuffs law. Others called the article “inane” and accused it of making a weak leap from idea to conclusion. Still, a few commenters pulled the conversation back to real-world rule-breaking, bringing up Uber, labor fights, and the feeling that rich companies can bulldoze regulations anyway. That’s where the mood turned darker: less “gotcha headline,” more late-stage capitalism rage spiral.
The funniest reactions came fast. There was a Trump joke, an Elon joke, and plenty of “great headline, questionable article” energy. Bottom line: the article tried to warn that bosses can’t automate away human judgment, but the crowd mostly turned it into a drama about bait headlines, billionaire impunity, and who’s really above the law.
Key Points
- •The article centers on Tesler’s Law, which says products contain a non-reducible amount of complexity that must be handled by either the system or the user.
- •It argues that smartphone apps reduce user friction by shifting work upstream into algorithms, logistics networks, and large-scale computing infrastructure.
- •The article says some tech CEOs believe generative AI can similarly reduce internal company friction by replacing roles such as product managers, UX designers, and developers.
- •It states that this view confuses a socio-technical system with the software outputs that system produces.
- •The article argues that defining user needs and product goals requires human deliberation and that using large language models does not eliminate complexity.