10 ms·

Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

338 points by allenb 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
perfectlyFine 1mo ago
[flagged]
cyanydeez 1mo ago
If I were a stronger man, I would make a comment about dealing with people vs dealing with code and having to route around bugs that are both fundamental to the problem and a POV, along with some inherent in how I setup the program and simply someone else problem I've inherited to simply being burned into the hardware and will never be neatly papered over.
simonw 1mo ago
I think this comparison holds up. I've noticed that a lot of people I know who get really good results from LLMs and agents are people with significant people management experience. Companies like Anthropic seem to understand that too. It's impressive how many CTOs and CEOs Anthropic have hired for individual contributor positions, which I think is because those leadership skills transfer surprisingly well to working with agents. Of course, managing agents is massively easier than managing humans! You don't have to consider the agent's own desires, goals, opinions, or emotional state when telling them what to do. Humans have agency; agents (despite the name) do not.
- qwqah 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - danielbln 1mo ago
    Maybe speak for yourself, or if you insist on that tone, don't even do that.
- nx77 1mo ago
  Give some examples of the good results these kind of people are getting out of it...
  - ceejayoz 1mo ago
    https://status.claude.com/ https://status.claude.com/
- RobertasTa 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- GPerson 1mo ago
  The people I’m seeing getting really good results are the opposite. Strange.
  - simonw 1mo ago
    You mean they have zero management experience at all?
- slopinthebag 1mo ago
  If you consider Anthropic’s software as “good results” than I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite.
- sidharthkmenon 1mo ago
  but managing humans is simpler in many ways, too: there's accountability for one. and it's much easier to reason about the capability boundary of a human.
wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago
Not for me. My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
- dotancohen 1mo ago
  I agree completely. Maybe binge vibe coding is "management" or "leadership" but for actually building production applications all the classic low-level concerns still apply. VIM keybindings didn't change that, autocomplete and syntax highlighting didn't change that, and having an LLM write the actual lines of code doesn't change that.
- peder 1mo ago
  Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.
  - pdsOne 1mo ago
    Sounds dubious. Every software architect that I encountered who did not code at the same time was a bit of an embarrassment. But everyone pretended that they know what they are doing either because they (usually management) could not evaluate usefulness or expertise of these so called "architects" or because we simply needed to keep our jobs to pay the bills.
    - Jare 1mo ago
      I have bad stories about classic corporate architects too, but that's far from all there is. The job of a typical Staff / Principal in a modern organization is most often to lead, shepherd and conduct technical decisions and people to execute a project, very different from managing them as personnel. Having some hand in execution helps a lot, but the value of their contribution is typically not in the hands-on execution part.
- worldthruword 1mo ago
  > deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built. /wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o The /wayfinder Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM
miyoji 1mo ago
The word is "management", not "leadership". This comes across as a LinkedIn post filled with vague notions and weak writing. The conclusion also completely contradicts a previous point, which is that managing an LLM is not like managing a human. So the skills are, in contradiction to that LLM-ism of a conclusion, new. The author isn't using their people management skills, they're using new LLM-management skills. They think the two are similar, but didn't bother breaking down how they're the same vs where they contrast. It's just a lazy observation expanded out to a short essay that says nothing interesting.
- jnovek 1mo ago
  “Leadership”, whether you like the LinkedIn-ism or not (I also think it’s stupid), generally refers to upper management, not people management. At my startup, my team reached a headcount of ~30 and I had to design process to keep things moving. Getting a bunch of disparate parts in even a 100 person company to produce the artifacts needed to create software is a massive undertaking that doesn’t involve people management at all. The two responsibilities can be completely divorced from each other if you want. I never thought I’d be dusting off those skills again because I do strictly IC work now, but I’m now using them every day. It feels (a subjective term, which the author used as well) like when I was in “leadership”.
  - AuthorizedCust 1mo ago
    Leadership is a mutual influence process that happens outside formal authority. It’s not a corporate title or rung on a ladder. If one is a leader, that’s a status informally conveyed by the leader’s voluntary followers.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - spacechild1 1mo ago
      Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.
    - 1mo ago
iamwil 1mo ago
Not for me. By asking it to interview me, and then working through the options and their consequences, it feels more like the whiteboarding-with-a-colleague part of engineering. I don't have to remember to specify everything. The agent asks me things that it's unsure about, still ambiguous, or open questions. I have it write down all the decisions we made. The resulting decisions are fed into the coding loop with guardrails derived from those decisions. The agent one-shots features once it goes into the coding loop.
phil1276 1mo ago
Careful with the Hegelian master and servant dialectic. It does not always turn out the way the parasites want it to.
toprerules 1mo ago
So software engineers weren’t already dealing with requirements gathering and contextualizing a problem from real humans or describing work to be done to other people on their team? This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.
- bicepjai 1mo ago
  I don’t agree with the leadership argument; it’s definitely management. But one of the most important aspects of leadership is communication.
onlyrealcuzzo 1mo ago
It feels like managing an egregious liar who speaks exclusively in corporate pyschobabble, is completely unpredictable, makes you want to blow your head off in most interactions, but yet is regularly good enough and cheap enough that you can't justify not working with this person - despite wanting desperately not to.
- KronisLV 1mo ago
  What model are you using and in what harness? So I know how to avoid it.
ModernMech 1mo ago
Working with AI feels like dealing with a bureaucracy. There seems to be rules but they're negotiable and illogical. Rules change constantly for no reason. Decisions are capricious and unappealable. But you can sometimes get your way if you carry on enough. It works better depending on the time of day, or some days it doesn't work at all, and when it's not working you're entirely blocked without a workaround. Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.
mpalmer 1mo ago
Maybe if you weren't really coding to begin with, or didn't enjoy it. There's a ton of "temporarily embarrassed CEOs" who seem to be unable to think about LLMs as anything but their employees, which is an incredibly limiting perspective in my view. Anyone who's fallen in love with programming itself and doesn't see software production as a means to an end is not really likely to see things like this. I see AI as an accelerator of implementing my own choices. I'm generally opposed to metaphors, designs or strategies which excessively anthropomorphize it; it seems completely wrong-headed and counterproductive.
- GPerson 1mo ago
  For every choice I make it makes a dozen choices though.
jdw64 1mo ago
I agree with the OP's point. But if you've worked in a corporate environment, isn't that just how it is? Like how programming work and getting promoted to a manager are essentially different careers—they feel like fundamentally different things. They're different kinds of work, and both are interesting in their own way. But in the freelance market, LLMs have already become the baseline, so I have to use them whether I like it or not. There are both pros and cons. It's good to be able to read code and understand its structure, but writing code and reading it to transform it into a different structure are different skills. There's definitely some decay in raw coding ability, though. So I use LLMs for professional coding and for tasks that I couldn't do before, while I keep hand-coding smaller things that feel manageable. Honestly, I think most people who hate LLM coding actually hate being forced to use it under workplace pressure. And when LLM output looks bad, it's often because managers tend to be strict about their subordinates' work but lenient about their own. Once an LLM generates something, people tend to get attached to it and become more forgiving—since it feels like they made it. It's tough that LLMs have made deadlines tighter. But these days, compared to the old days when I had to go through interviews and conversations to build a proposal, I actually find it more convenient that clients send me proposals written by LLMs. There are pros and cons to everything.
conartist6 1mo ago
Why are LLM users such poor leaders then? To go anywhere serious you have to lead people, but even the ones who should be leading people are heads down talking to the LLM
- woadwarrior01 1mo ago
  Perhaps some of the people who got into traditional leadership roles got there due to factors besides their raw leadership abilities. LLMs are an equalizer, and with them, the inability to lead them simply becomes a "skill issue", for the lack of a better term.
  - conartist6 1mo ago
    An equalizer, yes. They lift up those with little skill, and they drag down the top talent. This is a practical effect by which top talent is neutralized. Where they should lead people, they talk to models instead. ...now you have a generation of leaders that don't deal well with any real emotion or disagreement. They can steer but not lead -- many no longer believe in the value or efficacy of leading people. Of course you are also right to point out that many people in "traditional leadership roles" have been content to sit back and steer rather than heading of the charge. I still wish to command both talents: steering and leadership. I refuse to flatten myself out to fit in better, and I always have.
cautiouscat 1mo ago
This hasn't been my experience whatsoever. Maybe I just don't vibecode, but it still feels like coding, I'm just not typing the letters. I'm still thinking about the domain, the separation of concerns, all that software architecture jazz.
- pydry 1mo ago
  every week theres a new vibe coding manifesto, more detached from reality than the last. it'll pass, but until then we'll be subjected to a litany of dumb hot takes.
copemaxxxing 1mo ago
I don't have good leadership or good management or good people skills. I can use AI just fine as run of the mill software engineers. Pointless, stupid article. Digital garbage, as garbage as LLM slop. So many words to say nothing.
lagrange77 1mo ago
I actively do it in a way, where i steer and understand the important bits. Because otherwise the cognitive and technical debt would annoy me to a point, where i would want to do software at all.
rootsudo 1mo ago
Yes, i was thinking what was this feeling as im doing my MBA and this is it. Its really interesting especially having different agents with different prompts and then having each one based on their reasoning, etc
4lx87 1mo ago
[dead]
7nolikov 1mo ago
For me, it's more like natural language coding, or maybe technical management of envs, states and tools. Leadership is about humans, feelings, personal differences or soft skills
- Gareth321 1mo ago
  Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.
  - jplusequalt 1mo ago
    >Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy. It sounds like you were more interested in the finished product, or "delivering value", than you were in solving problems.
    - Gareth321 1mo ago
      It sounds like you don't understand that solving problems for people is valuable to them. Or that you are interested in solving problems which nobody cares about solving.
      - jplusequalt 1mo ago
        Even it that we're true, I don't care. I'll gladly accept a paycheck to do something that inherently interests me. Great comeback, dumbass.
josejux 1mo ago
Built a production API almost entirely AI-assisted recently. Didn't feel like leadership to me, felt more like code review at a much higher volume. I wasn't delegating decisions, just constantly checking the generated code actually did what I needed lol.
VladVladikoff 1mo ago
I was already in a management position when this started. But I also have 20 years of development experience. So for me it has been a super power. I do feel bad for all the devs trying to break into the industry right now though, it must be hard. I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company. I haven’t fired anyone but I have no plans to expand the team, even as our workload increases as the companies keep growing.
- gedy 1mo ago
  > I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company So you were just hiring devs to tell them what to do? I honestly like having the self organizing and problem solving that comes from hiring good people, and that I could trust people without dictating. Companies always benefited from that from what I saw. I guess this is why I never liked shops that outsourced to external contractors, and why I don't like "agentic" ai dev.
  - VladVladikoff 1mo ago
    I run/own the companies. I have a curated list of ideas and features that I would like to implement that I know can make our products the best in the industry. I don’t need a senior developer to spitball ideas for me. As much as I cringe at the term, I play the role of the “visionary” here, not my developers. I have instead put the excess money towards hiring top producers in my sales and support teams.
    - gedy 1mo ago
      Best of luck, I guess I've personally had little success at companies with "I have an idea" types in leadership.
      - VladVladikoff 1mo ago
        Thanks. It’s been a slow long burn. One company is now 14 years old, and the #2 player it it’s industry. We grew very slowly over those years but we did it with a really small team and will be the dominate player in the long run. The other company is still a fresh startup, also a small team, but I have the finances to keep it afloat from the first. All of this is funded by our own profits, we do not have outside investors. It’s part of the reason we grew so slowly, at the start it was really just me, doing everything.
boron1006 1mo ago
My Eng lead has no coding experience, 25 years of management experience, yet has driven 3 separate projects into technical bankruptcy to date. He just accepts anything that Claude says as truth. He vibecoded over 60,000 lines of code in 3 weeks, but couldn’t get it to do what he want and made a project overrun for 3 extra months. When the pissed off stakeholders called a meeting to ask what was going on he didn’t show up and sent his junior engineer to answer questions and take the blame. Now thats leadership.
- butterknife 1mo ago
  Future president in the making.
  - N_Lens 1mo ago
    I don't think we should expect such unreasonable standards from future presidents.
    - rsoto2 1mo ago
      bro the president suggested we nuke a hurricane and raped someone and is dismantling our natural resources, the bar is substantially worse than a couple months technical debt.
      - tomjakubowski 1mo ago
        Yeah, I think N_Lens was saying the manager's behavior in that anecdote was too high a bar.
      - NamlchakKhandro 1mo ago
        Fellow Apple product user. Join me in jeering at people who drink instant coffee.
        N_Lens 1mo ago
        I use Apple and drink instant coffee, though!
velcrovan 1mo ago
I first saw this point made by Venkat Rao more than a year ago in "Prompting is Managing" [1]. It was written in response to the "Your brain on ChatGPT" paper that was then making the rounds, about how LLM use is supposedly making people stupid. Venkat argued that the study subjects did poorly not because LLMs were dulling their minds, but because the study subjects were freshman students with no management skills being tested on tasks that required delegation, quality gating and exception handling. The study put people in a situation that created role confusion and concluded that the poor outcomes were due to "cognitive debt" induced by LLM use. [1]: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managing https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managin...
- qw1276 1mo ago
  Point made by an LLM and not Rao. This article is purely generated garbage and does not refute "Your brain on ChatGPT" at all.
  - velcrovan 1mo ago
    Yes, ‘Sloptraptions’ advertises itself as an AI-assisted newletter. Whatever your feelings about AI writing (I make a point of not using AI for writing, myself), it's silly to claim Rao is not the one making the point here. The piece links to the transcript of the chat session that generated it, where after having the LLM ingest the paper, he prompts it: > ‘I want to make the following critical argument: “Have you met the median manager with a few reports or median faculty with a few grad students? Not your work, not your cognitive debt. Otoh, this sort of framing entirely misses the new kinds of work you are doing, which is often illegible or even invisible. A curious factor affecting AI discourse is that most people researching and commenting about the second-order effects have “individual contributor” mindset. Even a modest amount of supervisory experience demonstrates the difference between thinking vs monitoring/supervising, and between being responsible for getting thinking done versus accountable for it. I use AI a lot and it feels indistinguishable from supervisory work to me, with similar cognitive effects. If you manage too much versus doing your own hands on work, you become… a manager. How good you are depends on your aptitude for management work.’
tyleo 1mo ago
In my view, it has aspects of both leadership and development. You need to direct agents to do work worth doing and then you need to understand the output. Some of the emotional parts of management are gone since agents don't care if you tell them to throw everything away and take a different approach. Some of the therapeutic parts of development are gone since you don't need to hand craft a clever code structure. I wouldn't say it's more like one or the other though. One of the most important jobs of a leader is finding work worth doing for their team. One of the most important jobs of a developer is ensuring system cohesion. Both of these are hard jobs. To me, AI failure cases look like doing either of these jobs poorly: 1. Writing a big pile of tools that really provides no user value 2. Not reading the code and ending up with broken systems
qw1276 1mo ago
Yes, the Führerprinzip. Slop coders will meet their Stalingrad soon due to technical debt and so will AI corporations due to financial debt.
- alertchecker 1mo ago
  I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years and it's only really in the last few months I've started to "trust" AI to do a better job than I can within given time constraints - but with a big caveat - as the article points out, the AI needs to be kept on track and questioned about its approach, told about inconsistencies etc. To aid with that it helps to have a lot of Cursor rules that guide the approach - built up over time, mostly based on seeing what AI didn't get right. Well that's at work - but I've actually taken a different approach for my own personal project and generally now allow AI to do things in its own way - I put my effort into checking the functionality rather than the code itself. This does result in some fairly sprawling code and some bits that are practically now only really maintainable/"understandable" by AI. Functionality is still fine though, which is what really matters there when there's no other team members and understanding every part of the code isn't critical. Guess in future it may just self-refactor it without even being prompted.
cronin101 1mo ago
To me, working with AI feels a lot like the previous experiences of “working in a sprawling enterprise codebase spanning multiple systems each with emergent behavior”, except now I can outsource the introspection and validation loops to something that never gets bored instead of spending 2h hyping myself up to concentrate for a 3h stint.
gexla 1mo ago
I have found in my own experimentation, I create way more trash than I did before. If I'm 10X creating trash, then I'm WAY less productive creating the stuff that I actually use. I found a funny thing before. I'm in the 2100 block of Github IDs, meaning I was OLD SCHOOL. This got me thinking about how I was probably one of the first users of the first GPT model to be in a major product, Copilot. According to Grok, Copilot was GPT 3. I figured it as earlier because it SUCKED at generation other than auto-complete. I'm now thinking the best way is to use these models to create the scaffolding and keep my brain in the architecture with strict reviews and small PRs. Slower, but less slop. Basically, just using AI for a bump or two above what I used Copilot for back in the day. Less running agents all day creating slop that I'll never look at. More with serious focus on what I bring my full attention to. Increased productivity, less BS. Maybe that's just rearranging chairs on the deck on the Titanic. But it's what I'm thinking. And hitting send! ;) That's probably not the win, but I think that path could reveal it.
Frost1x 1mo ago
It’s a management of management position I’d say. You’re not just managing AI, if you were already in a management or lead type role then now you’re managing people, the LLMs they manage, and any LLM you’re managing.
orsenthil 1mo ago
This has been my case. I feel like I am ordering them to do task and verifying that they do exactly what I tell them to do. Rinse and repeat. My empty mind wanders off into thinking what task can I ask them to do.
clickety_clack 1mo ago
Whoever thinks this is the case might have managed people but has never led them.
rolandog 1mo ago
I agree with this piece and, also,... I suspect that's why people end with "management brain" (brain rot): it operates by having you bark orders at it, like a micro-managing boss; you're not doing the work, but telling others what to do and how to do it.
seba_dos1 1mo ago
...and browsing HN these days feels more like cringing than informing oneself. This is a LinkedIn-level "insight", upvoted presumably because it's about "AI"?
kukkeliskuu 1mo ago
The words "management" and "leadership" are used to convey many kinds of meaning, so I think it is important to elaborate carefully what we mean when we say that "working with LLMs is more like <x>". For me, one of the most important aspects of leadership is having a long-term vision, and being able to communicate it. In other words, it answers the question of WHAT. One of the most important aspects of management is being able to organize resources to materialize that vision. In other words, it answers the questions of WHO and WHEN. We still need to answer the question of HOW -- which require the expertise -- architecture and implementation. All of these elements are necessary when doing anything -- even by myself -- but become even more important when using many external resources to do it -- be it a team of people or a team of LLMs.
reindeer2 1mo ago
[flagged]
chrisjj 1mo ago
"Not predictable" is cope for the true failing. "AI" is not reliable. As for the purported upside of the random variability in output... seriously? Who would want an RNG in a C compiler's code generator. Or worse, its parser?
flemhans 1mo ago
The task is very simple: Thousands of super fast fairly good contractors show up at your company's front door. You can't really trust them with data, they do occasionally make mistakes, they have to learn everything about your organization and product from scratch, and btw they leave in 10 minutes again. If you can design your organization to handle this, you gain superpowers. And of course this is a management problem rather than coding exercise.
- BenzeneDream 1mo ago
  Interesting analogy but inaccurate. The time AI can spend on tasks these days is much, much longer than 10 minutes.
  - sscaryterry 1mo ago
    I think you missed the point. No analogy is perfect.
- sscaryterry 1mo ago
  The art is to try and rape your contractors, give them prep work to do on their own time, then treat them like employees. I don't fall for that anymore though.
  - deadlast2 1mo ago
    Because there are so many different jobs all over the place. Job boards are full of people crying out for help. Every morning I wake up to a literal sea of emails from hiring managers looking for my aid. I only choose those jobs that look interesting and only work with the people who pay and treat me well. /s
agentultra 1mo ago
It’s designed to “feel” that way. It’s a computer program, not a person. People made it. Don’t get fooled into treating these systems like they’re people or intelligent collaborators. At the best of times these chat/agent/loop systems are gambling machines. Very expensive and heavily subsidized machines. Don’t forget to keep building your own skills. You never know when the bubble is going to pop and you don’t want to be left unable to do you job just because some big tech corp goes under.
jwsteigerwalt 1mo ago
How about “Orchestration”?
bewareofscams 1mo ago
Except nothing is at stakes, there are no failure modes beside shitty vibecode output, and noone is responsible for nothing.
jp57 1mo ago
Leaving aside the quibbling over the meaning of the word leadership, I'll say I personally agree with this sentiment. I returned to a senior IC role after six years managing a small team just as agentic coding was starting to happen. The timing was perfect, I got about 8 months to get my chops back up by hand (I had never really fully stepped away from coding) before the good agentic tools became available at my company. It was interesting to observe the other engineers around me, none of whom had ever managed people. They tended to try to "program" the agent to produce exactly the code that they envisioned, and were very cautious, seemingly quite afraid that the agent would do something unexpected. Having managed engineers, I was much more comfortable with asking someone to do something and having them do something more-or-less different from what I was expecting or had envisioned. Sometimes that was worse, sometimes better, than what I'd had in mind, but it was very rare that I would ask an engineer to do something and they would produce exactly the thing I'd imagined. Having had that experience, I was quite comfortable giving a task to an agent and saying to myself, "Okay, let's see what you come up with," and then evaluating the result. And as with people I knew I had to learn the right way to talk to the agent in order to make myself understood, just as I'd had to learn the right way to talk to each person on my team. The big differences were that (a) I didn't have to wait days or weeks to see what the agent came up with so the cost of being misunderstdood was much lower, and (b) the agents generally had much, much better reading comprehension than they typical engineer, so in fact I was misunderstood less often.
- QuercusMax 1mo ago
  I've had the experience with junior engineers where I would describe in detail what I wanted, and then they'd produce something very different in most aspects. And then I'd keep telling them what was wrong until I got something that looked like what I wanted, or at least got the job done.
deandi007 1mo ago
I listened to a podcast comparing coding with AI to ‘directing,’ in the sense of directing a film. But I guess it depends on the level of technical involvement vibe coders have with the project. For me, it’s still very close to coding, even though I don’t write most of the code.
boobsbr 1mo ago
No, it feels like bossing people around.
RenSoft 1mo ago
[flagged]
fitsumbelay 1mo ago
Finally a post about agentic-coding that's aligned with my thinking. I treat the experience like I'm managing adolescent Kal-El in a junior dev role. The kid's strong, fast and smart and does best when I do best by providing clear instructions and guidance in prompts and reference docs. I also say hello, please/thank you and ttys
PeterStuer 1mo ago
Unfortunatly average 'leadership' never had the required skills to lead technically critical 'stuff', and, maybe counterintuitively, because, code is cheap now, right, AI amplified the incompetence.
Wpnx330 1mo ago
If only leadership were so easy as telling AI agents what to do. With an AI agent, I can literally brain dump to a prompt and say turn this into a great prompt that includes a goal, implementation details, and an acceptable quality target. Then just say, okay now execute. Try that with a person and you'll quickly find, you've got no leadership skills.
Frannky 1mo ago
I love the level of empowerment they unlock for super cheap. I have a personal assistant that's a Slack bot talking to ohmypy on an old Mac M1 turned into a server. It has access to my calendar, remembers the things I need to remember, and pulls data from a gym tracker—an app I vibecoded just for myself—to pull books and papers and create audio, and easy to digest introductions that help me understand a paper before reading it. Plus, the system leverages the Getting Things Done method to help me stay on top of things. I can save ideas and ask a CLI terminal to work on them. If I want to do something advanced, I can use Zed, but even from my phone via remote control, I can talk to agents. I always approve the plan before handing off the task. It's crazy, it's like having a personal assistant and an army of junior engineers. And you can just use a ZDR provider and an open-source harness to stay private and not share your data. And the models keep getting better and better!!
- bah9 1mo ago
  "I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    Rat race is the perfect term. In most of my contract job, I got laid off because product couldn’t come with an idea for a feature. Current prod was running well, a bug every once in a while when we hit an edge case, bug that is resolved within the hour. Never once I felt rushed to complete something.
qwertyuiop_ 1mo ago
Bro finds out AI is not deterministic.
skeledrew 1mo ago
Well yeah, I thought this was pretty obvious. You're guiding the model from a desire to it's realization, helping to remove blockers along the way and facilitating improvement over time. That's leadership.
dayvid 1mo ago
It puts a premium on your concurrency skills. I'm constantly setting up agents and moving from agent to agent; answering questions, evaluating work, providing feedback, finishing up items. Builds a different muscle and there's still more ways to improve workflow
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
It mostly feels like manual testing. It's already ok at describing tasks. Not great yet, but it wasn't great at coding a year ago. I can see, in 2 or 3 years, AI taking over management tasks fully. At this point, I don't think we're far from it being able to look at some non-technical descriptions of a problem and come up with its own plan to execute.
newsomix9xl 1mo ago
Maybe we need an LLM interface that is less chatty and unpredictable and focuses instead on boring, predictable execution of commands. I know, weird idea: what if an LLM just shut up and did what we asked in as predictable a way possible? Working with an LLM often feels like herding cats.
bah9 1mo ago
Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it
- doubleorseven 1mo ago
  yes coding is dead but i like having less rounds with QA and more "nice to have" juice in my projects . i feel that what i miss the most is not the coding it self but the effort i used to put in to it. no effort no dopamine no happy. since i got into the coding because it's a tool to solve problems, and now i have a better tool to solve the same problems, this is what im working on reclaiming, the effort part.
  - bah9 1mo ago
    As i said, most of the devs never enjoyed coding. But even on their place I wouldn't be happy. Now way less qualified people can do their work.
- shepherdjerred 1mo ago
  I love(d) coding. I also love leveraging LLMs to create so many projects that I otherwise would not have done.
  - bah9 1mo ago
    Idk. I don't feel that "projects" have any value nowadays. Firstly, you don't get any respect, people just thinking "I could prompt that too". Secondly, if anyone can do that, what's the point? We have so much stuff coming nowdays that no one care
js8 1mo ago
Leadership is same as coding. Leadership: Given task to produce something someone wants (B), get an expert (A->B) who knows how get it from something you have (A). If such expert doesn't exist, build a team of experts A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate product C. Coding: Given task to calculate something user wants (B), find a function (A->B) that calculates it from user input (A). If that function doesn't exist, build it from functions A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate result C.
- customguy 1mo ago
  Given a spot you want to be in B, you get a teleporter A->B that can get you there. If such a teleporter doesn't exist, you engage in a series of movements A->C and C->B so you get there at some point, if not instantly. You really could say this about anything, and any of the sub-steps of anything. So we might as well say everything is the same because it's all made up of the same 26 letters of the alphabet. Same nonsensical result but less effort. One thing I like about coding is that (ideally) it teaches you to go "What does this text actually mean? What would it compile to?" and that can be helpful for other things, too.
vcryan 1mo ago
The feeling of "leadership" is probably a hallucination unless your actions are being followed by other humans. Generally speaking, leadership is quite unlike issueing others that others follow unquestionably.
slopinthebag 1mo ago
I don’t agree, sorry. The LLM is a code generation machine, it’s nice because it can generate code much faster than my hands can. But it’s not management or leadership because there is no human element there. And the workflow is still code generation, as much as people want to make agents the thing.
nissa-seru 1mo ago
Sol is, indeed, insightful: https://www.pangram.com/history/d08a0026-b19d-4e44-9ffb-f4cdb2d51ca0?ucc=pf9AYmtzNtk https://www.pangram.com/history/d08a0026-b19d-4e44-9ffb-f4cd...
cryptographical 1mo ago
It feels like controlling an infinite genie. if you control it well, it is extremely powerful, but it will take anything literally in many cases. But if you master it, and treat it as a compiler of intent, using Plan mode appropriately, you can accelerate and punch far above your weight class.
cush 1mo ago
Because it is
wwolfson97 1mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 1mo ago
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query_ilands 1mo ago
[flagged]
pjio 1mo ago
> As a leader, I can explain a task and get exactly what I asked for. Doubt. This sentence reads strange and disconnected. The scan of the article results in 100% ai generated.
amelius 1mo ago
It's hardly "leadership" when you can yell at your serfs all you want and get away with it.
deleted 1mo ago
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shevy-java 1mo ago
Skynet makes you think that. Foolish human.
maximinus_thrax 1mo ago
[flagged]
jknoepfler 1mo ago
Yeah, if you offload work to someone else and provide direction, it's called management. You know who I wouldn't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? Me, the person managing multiple teams. I wouldn't know what I was doing and I'd make a mess of things. You know who I definitely don't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? the coding agents my teams use. As a manager I require my employees to understand what they are building and maintaining as engineers, not as managers. There is no viable alternative to that today.
tizerluo 1mo ago
[flagged]
mannanj 1mo ago
The word I use a lot is "training". You are training an eager intern. Sometimes the AI actually gives you value, many times it does not though. And you are training an intern that simultaneously works for another company and is gunning to replace you next year.
Grokify 1mo ago
Working with LLMs feels more like management when I'm working with multiple LLM coding sessions on the same code base, either multiple LLMs making commits to the same repo, or LLMs doing code review on another LLM's work. Leadership is more about setting vision and goals. The more agents are given agency to achieve goals, the more it feels like leadership.
jatins 1mo ago
100% AI generated https://www.pangram.com/history/5b339a07-6a25-451f-b707-7d454f0dedac?ucc=PQCmbwNZf1k https://www.pangram.com/history/5b339a07-6a25-451f-b707-7d45... flagged since AI generated content is against HN guidelines
- codazoda 1mo ago
  I don’t want to read AI slop either, but it only seems to be a rule for comments.
frdev1786855380 1mo ago
[flagged]
nativeit 1mo ago
This sentiment has been all over recently, or so it seems; Which makes me question whether I am reading propaganda, a genuine memetic idea, or a bit of both?
nektro 1mo ago
being good at "agentic engineering" is directly correlated with being a good eng manager. when you can treat code like cattle that builds features and passes test and not care about the lines. but what's lost is the knowing that someone knows the lines.

338 points by allenb 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago

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perfectlyFine 1mo ago

[flagged]

cyanydeez 1mo ago

If I were a stronger man, I would make a comment about dealing with people vs dealing with code and having to route around bugs that are both fundamental to the problem and a POV, along with some inherent in how I setup the program and simply someone else problem I've inherited to simply being burned into the hardware and will never be neatly papered over.

simonw 1mo ago

I think this comparison holds up. I've noticed that a lot of people I know who get really good results from LLMs and agents are people with significant people management experience. Companies like Anthropic seem to understand that too. It's impressive how many CTOs and CEOs Anthropic have hired for individual contributor positions, which I think is because those leadership skills transfer surprisingly well to working with agents. Of course, managing agents is massively easier than managing humans! You don't have to consider the agent's own desires, goals, opinions, or emotional state when telling them what to do. Humans have agency; agents (despite the name) do not.

qwqah 1mo ago
[flagged]
- danielbln 1mo ago
  Maybe speak for yourself, or if you insist on that tone, don't even do that.
nx77 1mo ago
Give some examples of the good results these kind of people are getting out of it...
- ceejayoz 1mo ago
  https://status.claude.com/ https://status.claude.com/
RobertasTa 1mo ago
[flagged]
GPerson 1mo ago
The people I’m seeing getting really good results are the opposite. Strange.
- simonw 1mo ago
  You mean they have zero management experience at all?
slopinthebag 1mo ago
If you consider Anthropic’s software as “good results” than I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite.
sidharthkmenon 1mo ago
but managing humans is simpler in many ways, too: there's accountability for one. and it's much easier to reason about the capability boundary of a human.

wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago

Not for me. My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.

dotancohen 1mo ago
I agree completely. Maybe binge vibe coding is "management" or "leadership" but for actually building production applications all the classic low-level concerns still apply. VIM keybindings didn't change that, autocomplete and syntax highlighting didn't change that, and having an LLM write the actual lines of code doesn't change that.
peder 1mo ago
Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.
- pdsOne 1mo ago
  Sounds dubious. Every software architect that I encountered who did not code at the same time was a bit of an embarrassment. But everyone pretended that they know what they are doing either because they (usually management) could not evaluate usefulness or expertise of these so called "architects" or because we simply needed to keep our jobs to pay the bills.
  - Jare 1mo ago
    I have bad stories about classic corporate architects too, but that's far from all there is. The job of a typical Staff / Principal in a modern organization is most often to lead, shepherd and conduct technical decisions and people to execute a project, very different from managing them as personnel. Having some hand in execution helps a lot, but the value of their contribution is typically not in the hands-on execution part.
worldthruword 1mo ago
> deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built. /wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o The /wayfinder Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM

miyoji 1mo ago

The word is "management", not "leadership". This comes across as a LinkedIn post filled with vague notions and weak writing. The conclusion also completely contradicts a previous point, which is that managing an LLM is not like managing a human. So the skills are, in contradiction to that LLM-ism of a conclusion, new. The author isn't using their people management skills, they're using new LLM-management skills. They think the two are similar, but didn't bother breaking down how they're the same vs where they contrast. It's just a lazy observation expanded out to a short essay that says nothing interesting.

jnovek 1mo ago
“Leadership”, whether you like the LinkedIn-ism or not (I also think it’s stupid), generally refers to upper management, not people management. At my startup, my team reached a headcount of ~30 and I had to design process to keep things moving. Getting a bunch of disparate parts in even a 100 person company to produce the artifacts needed to create software is a massive undertaking that doesn’t involve people management at all. The two responsibilities can be completely divorced from each other if you want. I never thought I’d be dusting off those skills again because I do strictly IC work now, but I’m now using them every day. It feels (a subjective term, which the author used as well) like when I was in “leadership”.
- AuthorizedCust 1mo ago
  Leadership is a mutual influence process that happens outside formal authority. It’s not a corporate title or rung on a ladder. If one is a leader, that’s a status informally conveyed by the leader’s voluntary followers.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - spacechild1 1mo ago
    Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.
  - 1mo ago

iamwil 1mo ago

Not for me. By asking it to interview me, and then working through the options and their consequences, it feels more like the whiteboarding-with-a-colleague part of engineering. I don't have to remember to specify everything. The agent asks me things that it's unsure about, still ambiguous, or open questions. I have it write down all the decisions we made. The resulting decisions are fed into the coding loop with guardrails derived from those decisions. The agent one-shots features once it goes into the coding loop.

phil1276 1mo ago

Careful with the Hegelian master and servant dialectic. It does not always turn out the way the parasites want it to.

toprerules 1mo ago

So software engineers weren’t already dealing with requirements gathering and contextualizing a problem from real humans or describing work to be done to other people on their team? This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.

bicepjai 1mo ago
I don’t agree with the leadership argument; it’s definitely management. But one of the most important aspects of leadership is communication.

onlyrealcuzzo 1mo ago

It feels like managing an egregious liar who speaks exclusively in corporate pyschobabble, is completely unpredictable, makes you want to blow your head off in most interactions, but yet is regularly good enough and cheap enough that you can't justify not working with this person - despite wanting desperately not to.

KronisLV 1mo ago
What model are you using and in what harness? So I know how to avoid it.

ModernMech 1mo ago

Working with AI feels like dealing with a bureaucracy. There seems to be rules but they're negotiable and illogical. Rules change constantly for no reason. Decisions are capricious and unappealable. But you can sometimes get your way if you carry on enough. It works better depending on the time of day, or some days it doesn't work at all, and when it's not working you're entirely blocked without a workaround. Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.

mpalmer 1mo ago

Maybe if you weren't really coding to begin with, or didn't enjoy it. There's a ton of "temporarily embarrassed CEOs" who seem to be unable to think about LLMs as anything but their employees, which is an incredibly limiting perspective in my view. Anyone who's fallen in love with programming itself and doesn't see software production as a means to an end is not really likely to see things like this. I see AI as an accelerator of implementing my own choices. I'm generally opposed to metaphors, designs or strategies which excessively anthropomorphize it; it seems completely wrong-headed and counterproductive.

GPerson 1mo ago
For every choice I make it makes a dozen choices though.

jdw64 1mo ago

I agree with the OP's point. But if you've worked in a corporate environment, isn't that just how it is? Like how programming work and getting promoted to a manager are essentially different careers—they feel like fundamentally different things. They're different kinds of work, and both are interesting in their own way. But in the freelance market, LLMs have already become the baseline, so I have to use them whether I like it or not. There are both pros and cons. It's good to be able to read code and understand its structure, but writing code and reading it to transform it into a different structure are different skills. There's definitely some decay in raw coding ability, though. So I use LLMs for professional coding and for tasks that I couldn't do before, while I keep hand-coding smaller things that feel manageable. Honestly, I think most people who hate LLM coding actually hate being forced to use it under workplace pressure. And when LLM output looks bad, it's often because managers tend to be strict about their subordinates' work but lenient about their own. Once an LLM generates something, people tend to get attached to it and become more forgiving—since it feels like they made it. It's tough that LLMs have made deadlines tighter. But these days, compared to the old days when I had to go through interviews and conversations to build a proposal, I actually find it more convenient that clients send me proposals written by LLMs. There are pros and cons to everything.

conartist6 1mo ago

Why are LLM users such poor leaders then? To go anywhere serious you have to lead people, but even the ones who should be leading people are heads down talking to the LLM

woadwarrior01 1mo ago
Perhaps some of the people who got into traditional leadership roles got there due to factors besides their raw leadership abilities. LLMs are an equalizer, and with them, the inability to lead them simply becomes a "skill issue", for the lack of a better term.
- conartist6 1mo ago
  An equalizer, yes. They lift up those with little skill, and they drag down the top talent. This is a practical effect by which top talent is neutralized. Where they should lead people, they talk to models instead. ...now you have a generation of leaders that don't deal well with any real emotion or disagreement. They can steer but not lead -- many no longer believe in the value or efficacy of leading people. Of course you are also right to point out that many people in "traditional leadership roles" have been content to sit back and steer rather than heading of the charge. I still wish to command both talents: steering and leadership. I refuse to flatten myself out to fit in better, and I always have.

cautiouscat 1mo ago

This hasn't been my experience whatsoever. Maybe I just don't vibecode, but it still feels like coding, I'm just not typing the letters. I'm still thinking about the domain, the separation of concerns, all that software architecture jazz.

pydry 1mo ago
every week theres a new vibe coding manifesto, more detached from reality than the last. it'll pass, but until then we'll be subjected to a litany of dumb hot takes.

copemaxxxing 1mo ago

I don't have good leadership or good management or good people skills. I can use AI just fine as run of the mill software engineers. Pointless, stupid article. Digital garbage, as garbage as LLM slop. So many words to say nothing.

lagrange77 1mo ago

I actively do it in a way, where i steer and understand the important bits. Because otherwise the cognitive and technical debt would annoy me to a point, where i would want to do software at all.

rootsudo 1mo ago

Yes, i was thinking what was this feeling as im doing my MBA and this is it. Its really interesting especially having different agents with different prompts and then having each one based on their reasoning, etc

4lx87 1mo ago

[dead]

7nolikov 1mo ago

For me, it's more like natural language coding, or maybe technical management of envs, states and tools. Leadership is about humans, feelings, personal differences or soft skills

Gareth321 1mo ago
Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.
- jplusequalt 1mo ago
  >Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy. It sounds like you were more interested in the finished product, or "delivering value", than you were in solving problems.
  - Gareth321 1mo ago
    It sounds like you don't understand that solving problems for people is valuable to them. Or that you are interested in solving problems which nobody cares about solving.
    - jplusequalt 1mo ago
      Even it that we're true, I don't care. I'll gladly accept a paycheck to do something that inherently interests me. Great comeback, dumbass.

josejux 1mo ago

Built a production API almost entirely AI-assisted recently. Didn't feel like leadership to me, felt more like code review at a much higher volume. I wasn't delegating decisions, just constantly checking the generated code actually did what I needed lol.

VladVladikoff 1mo ago

I was already in a management position when this started. But I also have 20 years of development experience. So for me it has been a super power. I do feel bad for all the devs trying to break into the industry right now though, it must be hard. I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company. I haven’t fired anyone but I have no plans to expand the team, even as our workload increases as the companies keep growing.

gedy 1mo ago
> I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company So you were just hiring devs to tell them what to do? I honestly like having the self organizing and problem solving that comes from hiring good people, and that I could trust people without dictating. Companies always benefited from that from what I saw. I guess this is why I never liked shops that outsourced to external contractors, and why I don't like "agentic" ai dev.
- VladVladikoff 1mo ago
  I run/own the companies. I have a curated list of ideas and features that I would like to implement that I know can make our products the best in the industry. I don’t need a senior developer to spitball ideas for me. As much as I cringe at the term, I play the role of the “visionary” here, not my developers. I have instead put the excess money towards hiring top producers in my sales and support teams.
  - gedy 1mo ago
    Best of luck, I guess I've personally had little success at companies with "I have an idea" types in leadership.
    - VladVladikoff 1mo ago
      Thanks. It’s been a slow long burn. One company is now 14 years old, and the #2 player it it’s industry. We grew very slowly over those years but we did it with a really small team and will be the dominate player in the long run. The other company is still a fresh startup, also a small team, but I have the finances to keep it afloat from the first. All of this is funded by our own profits, we do not have outside investors. It’s part of the reason we grew so slowly, at the start it was really just me, doing everything.

boron1006 1mo ago

My Eng lead has no coding experience, 25 years of management experience, yet has driven 3 separate projects into technical bankruptcy to date. He just accepts anything that Claude says as truth. He vibecoded over 60,000 lines of code in 3 weeks, but couldn’t get it to do what he want and made a project overrun for 3 extra months. When the pissed off stakeholders called a meeting to ask what was going on he didn’t show up and sent his junior engineer to answer questions and take the blame. Now thats leadership.

butterknife 1mo ago
Future president in the making.
- N_Lens 1mo ago
  I don't think we should expect such unreasonable standards from future presidents.
  - rsoto2 1mo ago
    bro the president suggested we nuke a hurricane and raped someone and is dismantling our natural resources, the bar is substantially worse than a couple months technical debt.
    - tomjakubowski 1mo ago
      Yeah, I think N_Lens was saying the manager's behavior in that anecdote was too high a bar.
    - NamlchakKhandro 1mo ago
      Fellow Apple product user. Join me in jeering at people who drink instant coffee.
      - N_Lens 1mo ago
        I use Apple and drink instant coffee, though!

velcrovan 1mo ago

I first saw this point made by Venkat Rao more than a year ago in "Prompting is Managing" [1]. It was written in response to the "Your brain on ChatGPT" paper that was then making the rounds, about how LLM use is supposedly making people stupid. Venkat argued that the study subjects did poorly not because LLMs were dulling their minds, but because the study subjects were freshman students with no management skills being tested on tasks that required delegation, quality gating and exception handling. The study put people in a situation that created role confusion and concluded that the poor outcomes were due to "cognitive debt" induced by LLM use. [1]: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managing https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managin...

qw1276 1mo ago
Point made by an LLM and not Rao. This article is purely generated garbage and does not refute "Your brain on ChatGPT" at all.
- velcrovan 1mo ago
  Yes, ‘Sloptraptions’ advertises itself as an AI-assisted newletter. Whatever your feelings about AI writing (I make a point of not using AI for writing, myself), it's silly to claim Rao is not the one making the point here. The piece links to the transcript of the chat session that generated it, where after having the LLM ingest the paper, he prompts it: > ‘I want to make the following critical argument: “Have you met the median manager with a few reports or median faculty with a few grad students? Not your work, not your cognitive debt. Otoh, this sort of framing entirely misses the new kinds of work you are doing, which is often illegible or even invisible. A curious factor affecting AI discourse is that most people researching and commenting about the second-order effects have “individual contributor” mindset. Even a modest amount of supervisory experience demonstrates the difference between thinking vs monitoring/supervising, and between being responsible for getting thinking done versus accountable for it. I use AI a lot and it feels indistinguishable from supervisory work to me, with similar cognitive effects. If you manage too much versus doing your own hands on work, you become… a manager. How good you are depends on your aptitude for management work.’

tyleo 1mo ago

In my view, it has aspects of both leadership and development. You need to direct agents to do work worth doing and then you need to understand the output. Some of the emotional parts of management are gone since agents don't care if you tell them to throw everything away and take a different approach. Some of the therapeutic parts of development are gone since you don't need to hand craft a clever code structure. I wouldn't say it's more like one or the other though. One of the most important jobs of a leader is finding work worth doing for their team. One of the most important jobs of a developer is ensuring system cohesion. Both of these are hard jobs. To me, AI failure cases look like doing either of these jobs poorly: 1. Writing a big pile of tools that really provides no user value 2. Not reading the code and ending up with broken systems

qw1276 1mo ago

Yes, the Führerprinzip. Slop coders will meet their Stalingrad soon due to technical debt and so will AI corporations due to financial debt.

alertchecker 1mo ago
I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years and it's only really in the last few months I've started to "trust" AI to do a better job than I can within given time constraints - but with a big caveat - as the article points out, the AI needs to be kept on track and questioned about its approach, told about inconsistencies etc. To aid with that it helps to have a lot of Cursor rules that guide the approach - built up over time, mostly based on seeing what AI didn't get right. Well that's at work - but I've actually taken a different approach for my own personal project and generally now allow AI to do things in its own way - I put my effort into checking the functionality rather than the code itself. This does result in some fairly sprawling code and some bits that are practically now only really maintainable/"understandable" by AI. Functionality is still fine though, which is what really matters there when there's no other team members and understanding every part of the code isn't critical. Guess in future it may just self-refactor it without even being prompted.

cronin101 1mo ago

To me, working with AI feels a lot like the previous experiences of “working in a sprawling enterprise codebase spanning multiple systems each with emergent behavior”, except now I can outsource the introspection and validation loops to something that never gets bored instead of spending 2h hyping myself up to concentrate for a 3h stint.

gexla 1mo ago

I have found in my own experimentation, I create way more trash than I did before. If I'm 10X creating trash, then I'm WAY less productive creating the stuff that I actually use. I found a funny thing before. I'm in the 2100 block of Github IDs, meaning I was OLD SCHOOL. This got me thinking about how I was probably one of the first users of the first GPT model to be in a major product, Copilot. According to Grok, Copilot was GPT 3. I figured it as earlier because it SUCKED at generation other than auto-complete. I'm now thinking the best way is to use these models to create the scaffolding and keep my brain in the architecture with strict reviews and small PRs. Slower, but less slop. Basically, just using AI for a bump or two above what I used Copilot for back in the day. Less running agents all day creating slop that I'll never look at. More with serious focus on what I bring my full attention to. Increased productivity, less BS. Maybe that's just rearranging chairs on the deck on the Titanic. But it's what I'm thinking. And hitting send! ;) That's probably not the win, but I think that path could reveal it.

Frost1x 1mo ago

It’s a management of management position I’d say. You’re not just managing AI, if you were already in a management or lead type role then now you’re managing people, the LLMs they manage, and any LLM you’re managing.

orsenthil 1mo ago

This has been my case. I feel like I am ordering them to do task and verifying that they do exactly what I tell them to do. Rinse and repeat. My empty mind wanders off into thinking what task can I ask them to do.

clickety_clack 1mo ago

Whoever thinks this is the case might have managed people but has never led them.

rolandog 1mo ago

I agree with this piece and, also,... I suspect that's why people end with "management brain" (brain rot): it operates by having you bark orders at it, like a micro-managing boss; you're not doing the work, but telling others what to do and how to do it.

seba_dos1 1mo ago

...and browsing HN these days feels more like cringing than informing oneself. This is a LinkedIn-level "insight", upvoted presumably because it's about "AI"?

kukkeliskuu 1mo ago

The words "management" and "leadership" are used to convey many kinds of meaning, so I think it is important to elaborate carefully what we mean when we say that "working with LLMs is more like <x>". For me, one of the most important aspects of leadership is having a long-term vision, and being able to communicate it. In other words, it answers the question of WHAT. One of the most important aspects of management is being able to organize resources to materialize that vision. In other words, it answers the questions of WHO and WHEN. We still need to answer the question of HOW -- which require the expertise -- architecture and implementation. All of these elements are necessary when doing anything -- even by myself -- but become even more important when using many external resources to do it -- be it a team of people or a team of LLMs.

reindeer2 1mo ago

[flagged]

chrisjj 1mo ago

"Not predictable" is cope for the true failing. "AI" is not reliable. As for the purported upside of the random variability in output... seriously? Who would want an RNG in a C compiler's code generator. Or worse, its parser?

flemhans 1mo ago

The task is very simple: Thousands of super fast fairly good contractors show up at your company's front door. You can't really trust them with data, they do occasionally make mistakes, they have to learn everything about your organization and product from scratch, and btw they leave in 10 minutes again. If you can design your organization to handle this, you gain superpowers. And of course this is a management problem rather than coding exercise.

BenzeneDream 1mo ago
Interesting analogy but inaccurate. The time AI can spend on tasks these days is much, much longer than 10 minutes.
- sscaryterry 1mo ago
  I think you missed the point. No analogy is perfect.
sscaryterry 1mo ago
The art is to try and rape your contractors, give them prep work to do on their own time, then treat them like employees. I don't fall for that anymore though.
- deadlast2 1mo ago
  Because there are so many different jobs all over the place. Job boards are full of people crying out for help. Every morning I wake up to a literal sea of emails from hiring managers looking for my aid. I only choose those jobs that look interesting and only work with the people who pay and treat me well. /s

agentultra 1mo ago

It’s designed to “feel” that way. It’s a computer program, not a person. People made it. Don’t get fooled into treating these systems like they’re people or intelligent collaborators. At the best of times these chat/agent/loop systems are gambling machines. Very expensive and heavily subsidized machines. Don’t forget to keep building your own skills. You never know when the bubble is going to pop and you don’t want to be left unable to do you job just because some big tech corp goes under.

jwsteigerwalt 1mo ago

How about “Orchestration”?

bewareofscams 1mo ago

Except nothing is at stakes, there are no failure modes beside shitty vibecode output, and noone is responsible for nothing.

jp57 1mo ago

Leaving aside the quibbling over the meaning of the word leadership, I'll say I personally agree with this sentiment. I returned to a senior IC role after six years managing a small team just as agentic coding was starting to happen. The timing was perfect, I got about 8 months to get my chops back up by hand (I had never really fully stepped away from coding) before the good agentic tools became available at my company. It was interesting to observe the other engineers around me, none of whom had ever managed people. They tended to try to "program" the agent to produce exactly the code that they envisioned, and were very cautious, seemingly quite afraid that the agent would do something unexpected. Having managed engineers, I was much more comfortable with asking someone to do something and having them do something more-or-less different from what I was expecting or had envisioned. Sometimes that was worse, sometimes better, than what I'd had in mind, but it was very rare that I would ask an engineer to do something and they would produce exactly the thing I'd imagined. Having had that experience, I was quite comfortable giving a task to an agent and saying to myself, "Okay, let's see what you come up with," and then evaluating the result. And as with people I knew I had to learn the right way to talk to the agent in order to make myself understood, just as I'd had to learn the right way to talk to each person on my team. The big differences were that (a) I didn't have to wait days or weeks to see what the agent came up with so the cost of being misunderstdood was much lower, and (b) the agents generally had much, much better reading comprehension than they typical engineer, so in fact I was misunderstood less often.

QuercusMax 1mo ago
I've had the experience with junior engineers where I would describe in detail what I wanted, and then they'd produce something very different in most aspects. And then I'd keep telling them what was wrong until I got something that looked like what I wanted, or at least got the job done.

deandi007 1mo ago

I listened to a podcast comparing coding with AI to ‘directing,’ in the sense of directing a film. But I guess it depends on the level of technical involvement vibe coders have with the project. For me, it’s still very close to coding, even though I don’t write most of the code.

boobsbr 1mo ago

No, it feels like bossing people around.

RenSoft 1mo ago

[flagged]

fitsumbelay 1mo ago

Finally a post about agentic-coding that's aligned with my thinking. I treat the experience like I'm managing adolescent Kal-El in a junior dev role. The kid's strong, fast and smart and does best when I do best by providing clear instructions and guidance in prompts and reference docs. I also say hello, please/thank you and ttys

PeterStuer 1mo ago

Unfortunatly average 'leadership' never had the required skills to lead technically critical 'stuff', and, maybe counterintuitively, because, code is cheap now, right, AI amplified the incompetence.

Wpnx330 1mo ago

If only leadership were so easy as telling AI agents what to do. With an AI agent, I can literally brain dump to a prompt and say turn this into a great prompt that includes a goal, implementation details, and an acceptable quality target. Then just say, okay now execute. Try that with a person and you'll quickly find, you've got no leadership skills.

Frannky 1mo ago

I love the level of empowerment they unlock for super cheap. I have a personal assistant that's a Slack bot talking to ohmypy on an old Mac M1 turned into a server. It has access to my calendar, remembers the things I need to remember, and pulls data from a gym tracker—an app I vibecoded just for myself—to pull books and papers and create audio, and easy to digest introductions that help me understand a paper before reading it. Plus, the system leverages the Getting Things Done method to help me stay on top of things. I can save ideas and ask a CLI terminal to work on them. If I want to do something advanced, I can use Zed, but even from my phone via remote control, I can talk to agents. I always approve the plan before handing off the task. It's crazy, it's like having a personal assistant and an army of junior engineers. And you can just use a ZDR provider and an open-source harness to stay private and not share your data. And the models keep getting better and better!!

bah9 1mo ago
"I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?
- skydhash 1mo ago
  Rat race is the perfect term. In most of my contract job, I got laid off because product couldn’t come with an idea for a feature. Current prod was running well, a bug every once in a while when we hit an edge case, bug that is resolved within the hour. Never once I felt rushed to complete something.

qwertyuiop_ 1mo ago

Bro finds out AI is not deterministic.

skeledrew 1mo ago

Well yeah, I thought this was pretty obvious. You're guiding the model from a desire to it's realization, helping to remove blockers along the way and facilitating improvement over time. That's leadership.

dayvid 1mo ago

It puts a premium on your concurrency skills. I'm constantly setting up agents and moving from agent to agent; answering questions, evaluating work, providing feedback, finishing up items. Builds a different muscle and there's still more ways to improve workflow

a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago

It mostly feels like manual testing. It's already ok at describing tasks. Not great yet, but it wasn't great at coding a year ago. I can see, in 2 or 3 years, AI taking over management tasks fully. At this point, I don't think we're far from it being able to look at some non-technical descriptions of a problem and come up with its own plan to execute.

newsomix9xl 1mo ago

Maybe we need an LLM interface that is less chatty and unpredictable and focuses instead on boring, predictable execution of commands. I know, weird idea: what if an LLM just shut up and did what we asked in as predictable a way possible? Working with an LLM often feels like herding cats.

bah9 1mo ago

Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it

doubleorseven 1mo ago
yes coding is dead but i like having less rounds with QA and more "nice to have" juice in my projects . i feel that what i miss the most is not the coding it self but the effort i used to put in to it. no effort no dopamine no happy. since i got into the coding because it's a tool to solve problems, and now i have a better tool to solve the same problems, this is what im working on reclaiming, the effort part.
- bah9 1mo ago
  As i said, most of the devs never enjoyed coding. But even on their place I wouldn't be happy. Now way less qualified people can do their work.
shepherdjerred 1mo ago
I love(d) coding. I also love leveraging LLMs to create so many projects that I otherwise would not have done.
- bah9 1mo ago
  Idk. I don't feel that "projects" have any value nowadays. Firstly, you don't get any respect, people just thinking "I could prompt that too". Secondly, if anyone can do that, what's the point? We have so much stuff coming nowdays that no one care

js8 1mo ago

Leadership is same as coding. Leadership: Given task to produce something someone wants (B), get an expert (A->B) who knows how get it from something you have (A). If such expert doesn't exist, build a team of experts A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate product C. Coding: Given task to calculate something user wants (B), find a function (A->B) that calculates it from user input (A). If that function doesn't exist, build it from functions A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate result C.

customguy 1mo ago
Given a spot you want to be in B, you get a teleporter A->B that can get you there. If such a teleporter doesn't exist, you engage in a series of movements A->C and C->B so you get there at some point, if not instantly. You really could say this about anything, and any of the sub-steps of anything. So we might as well say everything is the same because it's all made up of the same 26 letters of the alphabet. Same nonsensical result but less effort. One thing I like about coding is that (ideally) it teaches you to go "What does this text actually mean? What would it compile to?" and that can be helpful for other things, too.

vcryan 1mo ago

The feeling of "leadership" is probably a hallucination unless your actions are being followed by other humans. Generally speaking, leadership is quite unlike issueing others that others follow unquestionably.

slopinthebag 1mo ago

I don’t agree, sorry. The LLM is a code generation machine, it’s nice because it can generate code much faster than my hands can. But it’s not management or leadership because there is no human element there. And the workflow is still code generation, as much as people want to make agents the thing.

nissa-seru 1mo ago

Sol is, indeed, insightful: https://www.pangram.com/history/d08a0026-b19d-4e44-9ffb-f4cdb2d51ca0?ucc=pf9AYmtzNtk https://www.pangram.com/history/d08a0026-b19d-4e44-9ffb-f4cd...

cryptographical 1mo ago

It feels like controlling an infinite genie. if you control it well, it is extremely powerful, but it will take anything literally in many cases. But if you master it, and treat it as a compiler of intent, using Plan mode appropriately, you can accelerate and punch far above your weight class.

cush 1mo ago

Because it is

wwolfson97 1mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

query_ilands 1mo ago

[flagged]

pjio 1mo ago

> As a leader, I can explain a task and get exactly what I asked for. Doubt. This sentence reads strange and disconnected. The scan of the article results in 100% ai generated.

amelius 1mo ago

It's hardly "leadership" when you can yell at your serfs all you want and get away with it.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

shevy-java 1mo ago

Skynet makes you think that. Foolish human.

maximinus_thrax 1mo ago

[flagged]

jknoepfler 1mo ago

Yeah, if you offload work to someone else and provide direction, it's called management. You know who I wouldn't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? Me, the person managing multiple teams. I wouldn't know what I was doing and I'd make a mess of things. You know who I definitely don't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? the coding agents my teams use. As a manager I require my employees to understand what they are building and maintaining as engineers, not as managers. There is no viable alternative to that today.

tizerluo 1mo ago

[flagged]

mannanj 1mo ago

The word I use a lot is "training". You are training an eager intern. Sometimes the AI actually gives you value, many times it does not though. And you are training an intern that simultaneously works for another company and is gunning to replace you next year.

Grokify 1mo ago

Working with LLMs feels more like management when I'm working with multiple LLM coding sessions on the same code base, either multiple LLMs making commits to the same repo, or LLMs doing code review on another LLM's work. Leadership is more about setting vision and goals. The more agents are given agency to achieve goals, the more it feels like leadership.

jatins 1mo ago

100% AI generated https://www.pangram.com/history/5b339a07-6a25-451f-b707-7d454f0dedac?ucc=PQCmbwNZf1k https://www.pangram.com/history/5b339a07-6a25-451f-b707-7d45... flagged since AI generated content is against HN guidelines

codazoda 1mo ago
I don’t want to read AI slop either, but it only seems to be a rule for comments.

frdev1786855380 1mo ago

[flagged]

nativeit 1mo ago

This sentiment has been all over recently, or so it seems; Which makes me question whether I am reading propaganda, a genuine memetic idea, or a bit of both?

nektro 1mo ago

being good at "agentic engineering" is directly correlated with being a good eng manager. when you can treat code like cattle that builds features and passes test and not care about the lines. but what's lost is the knowing that someone knows the lines.