Silicon Valley CEOs Find New Ethos From AI Tools: I’ll Do It Myself

When the tech elite begin tossing around words like “paradise,” “superpower” and “nuclear bomb,” it’s a pretty good indication that Silicon Valley is going through another vibe shift.

Just such a moment is happening now—with the industry’s machers obsessively pouring themselves into using the latest AI tools, including Claude Code, Google’s NotebookLM and Replit. That allows them to take an even greater hand in coding, design and other tasks their direct reports and the teams beneath would once have handled.

In turn, the proliferation and frenzied adoption of these tools is breeding a new type of management style among founders and corporate chieftains: the do-it-myself CEO. It’s an ethos embraced by leaders who covet any chance to boost their performance, expect their employees to match their intensity and worry that peers and rivals might pass them by in this go-go age of AI.

“I’m in heaven—from a productivity standpoint: absolute, total heaven,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO and co-founder of Insilico Medicine, which makes pharma software and uses AI for drug discovery. Zhavoronkov has found that Claude Code allows him to quickly prototype and rapidly fine-tune an idea rather than “wait for several weeks” to see if a team of engineers understood his initial vision, which he might have described verbally or in a hasty email.