OpenExecutive, an open-source project built around AI executives, has climbed onto the Hacker News front page with 563 points. The submission was posted under the headline: “CEO laid off engineers and replaced them with AI, engineers built an open-source AI CEO.”
The project centers on eight AI agents designed to handle executive roles, from strategy and finance to board communications. As of Aug. 27, the GitHub repository had 795 stars and 45 forks.
Uploader said the team had been laid off
The repository was uploaded by an account named GrumpySciGuy. In the comment thread under the Hacker News post, the user said the laid-off group was their own engineering team. He wrote that after the team was let go, they decided to start a company: “We think Copilot and Claude Code are changing development. We want to change management.”
That backstory does not appear in the project’s GitHub README. The report also noted that the repo was created on June 11, indicating the project had already been in development for roughly two and a half months. When asked which company had cut the team, the uploader did not answer.
Eight AI executives with multiple interfaces
Sente Labs lists OpenExecutive as a flagship product on its website. According to the company’s description, the system can organize signals accumulated overnight into decisions, coordinate specialists across departments, monitor outside events and produce board presentations.
The eight agents map to a chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, chief human resources officer, chief legal officer, chief operating officer, chief marketing officer, chief product officer and director of board communications. Before responding, each one retrieves relevant context from a vector database. Decision records are stored in SQLite, and the system can be accessed through Slack, Telegram, Discord, email or the command line.
Ten built-in “tone” files, nine based on living CEOs
One of the more unusual parts of the repo is the personas/builtin directory. It contains 10 built-in tone files, nine of which are drawn from real, living executives. The list includes NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
These files are written as behavioral instructions. The Dario Amodei profile tells the AI to use probabilistic language naturally and to be “willing to seriously discuss scenarios that most business leaders consider too speculative to address.” The Jensen Huang profile tells it to explain complex ideas through concrete imagery tied to manufacturing processes, physics and the geometry of markets. The files also specify words to avoid, including “ecosystem effects” and “platform leverage.”
The public demo runs on fictional companies
The repo’s test material also shows where the project’s limits are. It includes three sample companies, all fictional: Halcyon Motors, Meridian Petroleum and Tandem Robotics.
Each company comes with a memory.json file containing preset decision records. In the oil company example, a decision dated April 8, 2026 says the company would hedge its third-quarter crude position with Brent. The reason given is: “A refinery without hedging is just betting on a war we can’t predict.” In the robotics example, the company shifts to a Robots-as-a-Service model, charging by robot work hours instead of selling the full machine outright.
The report said the public demo runs on that scripted setup and is not actually managing a real company.
Community testing is still underway
The project currently has 12 open issues, and the community is still testing how far it can really go. The comment section quickly turned playful. One user wrote, “This CEO just laid off the entire C-suite, thanks,” while another said layoffs could finally start from management.
OpenExecutive is an open-source project developed by Sente Labs. The biggest unanswered question remains the same: which company laid off the team behind it. So far, that detail has not been disclosed.