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miyoji 3 hours 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.
mikeocool 47 minutes ago [-]
If it is like management, it’s like the most low effort version of management.
You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale. If it does something wrong, you just delete it and slightly rephrase your instructions and have it try again.
khuey 39 minutes ago [-]
Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.
Eddy_Viscosity2 29 minutes ago [-]
Isn't that just regular management?
otekengineering 27 minutes ago [-]
> You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale
You're holding it wrong. Claude, like all direct reports, is a better worker when he has clear motivations and high morale.
knollimar 7 minutes ago [-]
I find it's mkrale is inversely correlated with direction following.
I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen
rayiner 58 minutes ago [-]
> The conclusion also completely contradicts a previous point, which is that managing an LLM is not like managing a human.
For small scale stuff, it seems very much like managing a human. I've been using Grok and Claude for some small GUI apps, and it's incredible how accurate Claude in particular is for handling vague instructions.[1] I can take a screenshot of some part of the UI and drop it into the chat and say ("The spacing here looks weird, give me a few recommendations on how to fix it."). You can also say stuff like "make this look more modern and conform to modern AppKit guidelines." You don't have to micromanage it, at least when you break things down into small features. (But that's true of humans too.)
[1] Claude is significantly better than Grok at doing Mac UI app development. Interestingly, Grok is significantly better than Claude at legal research and summarizing/analyzing non-code documents.
LogicFailsMe 1 hours ago [-]
Sure sure, but it is surprisingly like managing an intern, or a fresh engineer where there is a pre-existing language barrier. At least in my experience it is. There might be a dash of carefully negotiating with the devil himself in the mix to make sure you ask for precisely what you wish to have built or you get something that meets the spec of what you told it but it isn't what you wanted.
netsharc 1 hours ago [-]
And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.
rayiner 54 minutes ago [-]
> And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
You're just describing junior employees lol.
netsharc 45 minutes ago [-]
Juniors turn to seniors. You can never trust AI won't glitch...
lol
LogicFailsMe 58 minutes ago [-]
Babylon 5 Crusade had a device called The Apocalypse Box. It knew everything and you could ask it questions. Unfortunately, it lied strategically so as to both give you an edge here and there whilst it drove you insane with all the lying. I have always seen the similarity to large language models here myself and that was in 1999.
What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
smoe 49 minutes ago [-]
To me, it feels closer to dealing with a personal outsourcing agency than working with internal coworkers, because the agents have zero skin in the game.
It's great. You can get a lot of stuff done in parallel. But it's much more a game of checkbox compliance than working with someone who has their head in the same context as you all day. Even a very junior teammate has some situational awareness inside a company/team.
2 hours ago [-]
DrewADesign 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like that leader should fire his agent.
terrut 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think there is much crossover unless your model responds well to being anthropomorphized.
I find LLM's to be very easy to manage since they at least to me, appear more rational the humans. Myself included.
andai 1 hours ago [-]
I tell it "believe in yourself" and task goes from unsolvable to trivial.
It's human ;)
jnovek 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
jnovek 2 hours ago [-]
These are different definitions of the same term. Yes, “leadership” is a stupid word to co-opt, but it’s been used this way for 20+ years and I suspect that you know what the author means.
There’s a very interesting conversation here that apparently HN doesn’t want to have today about how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans, I don’t know why we’re hung up on semantics.
Jare 1 hours ago [-]
> how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans
Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)
2 hours ago [-]
phil21 43 minutes ago [-]
Yep a leader is simply someone people follow.
That’s it. That’s all it is. All the books, leadership courses, etc. are lipstick on that pig. I suppose it can happen, but I’ve never seen someone who is a terrible leader educate themselves into being a great one. It’s pretty close to a natural skill you can build on and develop.
The term has been usurped by the usual suspects, but the definition is still the same on the ground.
LLMs require zero leadership skills. They do require strong management skillsets. These are not remotely the same thing.
7952 21 minutes ago [-]
I think at some level that "following" bit requires a certain sacrifice or loss of autonomy that people don't strictly have to suffer. And good leaders tend to be able to get people to accept that willingly without needing to invoke authority. An LLM is making no sacrifice, they don't value autonomy so there is no leadership.
spacechild1 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
I think of leadership as distinct from management. Importantly, I think you can be in a position of leadership without needing to be in a position of management.
Management requires direct reports: you make decisions which directly impact the careers of other people.
Leadership can be more subtle than that. You can influence people without needing to directly manage them.
John Carmack at Facebook/Meta is a great example. He was an IC - they had to invent a new level of the IC ladder for him! Definitely a leader, not a manager (at that company).
(Amusingly, I got to attend some "leadership" classes at Stanford a while ago. My main takeaway was that the way to create leaders is to put a bunch of people in a room and tell them that they're "leaders" until they start to believe it.)
roenxi 2 hours ago [-]
Being picky with words, you can be a manager of something other than people, it is the same broad skillset. Managing people has a few skills that are people-specific, obviously. But you can manage servers, manage widgets, etc.
Which makes it clearly distinct from leadership, because it is very hard to lead something that isn't alive. It is hard to lead a server.
jameshart 1 hours ago [-]
… or at least it always used to be hard to ‘lead’ a server.
But now that the server has an agentic interface maybe that is changing.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
Leaders lead. Managers manage. It is something you do, rather than your title.
Some leaders are also great managers. Some managers are also great leaders.
But not all managers are leaders.
jameshart 2 hours ago [-]
The best distinction I have heard for ‘leadership’ vs ‘management’ is that you manage things but you lead people.
So you can manage a project or a budget or a facility or an office or a process. But if you need to get people to do things, that requires leading not managing.
The problem with applying this to an AI agent is that it is a thing that thinks it’s a person.
boron1006 2 hours 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 40 minutes ago [-]
Future president in the making.
N_Lens 25 minutes ago [-]
I don't think we should expect such unreasonable standards from future presidents.
VladVladikoff 2 hours 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.
vatsachak 12 minutes ago [-]
This might need controversial but there were too many devs to begin with. I'm young and know people who are getting jobs, it's just that they actually enjoy programming.
gedy 1 hours 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 29 minutes 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.
wewewedxfgdf 3 hours 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.
vatsachak 10 minutes ago [-]
These days I have a good intuition as to where an agent can actually do what I want as opposed to creating spaghetti. The best analogy I have come up with is that LLMs are like water and will take the shape of the bowl you build.
The upside is that there's way more water than bowl. The catch is that you have to be the type of person who could build the bowl in the first place.
dotancohen 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.
pdsOne 1 hours 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 1 hours 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.
graceful6800 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like I'm the crazy one these days for using LLMs as tools. I don't write code anymore, but I still do the same level of engineering. I get fantastic results with minimal slop, and I feel it's because I still use my goddamn brain and engineering skills.
The way I use LLMs seems to be most analagous to the way vibecoder's LLMs use subagents. They exist to solve a bounded task or to write specific code in support of the engineering model in my head. I intentionally never did much research into how others were using LLMs before starting myself, and it seems like that was a good thing. It seems like the majority of people have given up on thought and just slam "do my job with no mistakes or hallucinations" into a prompt and then get confused and angry when it doesn't work. Or worse, don't check if it worked and ship anyway.
olafgrette 11 minutes ago [-]
Well if you're crazy we're crazy together. This is how I've been using the LLMs myself and it gives great results.
worldthruword 2 hours ago [-]
> deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
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 1 hours 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.
kukkeliskuu 28 minutes 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.
toprerules 3 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t agree with the leadership argument; it’s definitely management. But one of the most important aspects of leadership is communication.
velcrovan 2 hours 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.
Point made by an LLM and not Rao. This article is purely generated garbage and does not refute "Your brain on ChatGPT" at all.
tyleo 2 hours 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
simonw 3 hours 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.
GPerson 2 hours ago [-]
The people I’m seeing getting really good results are the opposite. Strange.
nx77 3 hours ago [-]
Give some examples of the good results these kind of people are getting out of it...
Maybe speak for yourself, or if you insist on that tone, don't even do that.
7nolikov 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
cronin101 1 hours 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.
orsenthil 1 hours 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.
Frost1x 1 hours 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.
gexla 1 hours 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.
rolandog 45 minutes 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.
clickety_clack 53 minutes ago [-]
Whoever thinks this is the case might have managed people but has never led them.
rootsudo 2 hours 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
lagrange77 2 hours 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.
josejux 2 hours 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.
iamwil 3 hours 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.
seba_dos1 35 minutes 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"?
phil1276 3 hours ago [-]
Careful with the Hegelian master and servant dialectic. It does not always turn out the way the parasites want it to.
ModernMech 3 hours 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.
onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours 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 39 minutes ago [-]
What model are you using and in what harness? So I know how to avoid it.
mpalmer 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
For every choice I make it makes a dozen choices though.
cyanydeez 3 hours 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.
copemaxxxing 2 hours 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.
conartist6 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
jdw64 2 hours 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.
qw1276 1 hours 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 36 minutes 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.
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.
You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale. If it does something wrong, you just delete it and slightly rephrase your instructions and have it try again.
You're holding it wrong. Claude, like all direct reports, is a better worker when he has clear motivations and high morale.
I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen
For small scale stuff, it seems very much like managing a human. I've been using Grok and Claude for some small GUI apps, and it's incredible how accurate Claude in particular is for handling vague instructions.[1] I can take a screenshot of some part of the UI and drop it into the chat and say ("The spacing here looks weird, give me a few recommendations on how to fix it."). You can also say stuff like "make this look more modern and conform to modern AppKit guidelines." You don't have to micromanage it, at least when you break things down into small features. (But that's true of humans too.)
[1] Claude is significantly better than Grok at doing Mac UI app development. Interestingly, Grok is significantly better than Claude at legal research and summarizing/analyzing non-code documents.
And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.
You're just describing junior employees lol.
lol
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box
What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
It's great. You can get a lot of stuff done in parallel. But it's much more a game of checkbox compliance than working with someone who has their head in the same context as you all day. Even a very junior teammate has some situational awareness inside a company/team.
I find LLM's to be very easy to manage since they at least to me, appear more rational the humans. Myself included.
It's human ;)
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”.
There’s a very interesting conversation here that apparently HN doesn’t want to have today about how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans, I don’t know why we’re hung up on semantics.
Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)
That’s it. That’s all it is. All the books, leadership courses, etc. are lipstick on that pig. I suppose it can happen, but I’ve never seen someone who is a terrible leader educate themselves into being a great one. It’s pretty close to a natural skill you can build on and develop.
The term has been usurped by the usual suspects, but the definition is still the same on the ground.
LLMs require zero leadership skills. They do require strong management skillsets. These are not remotely the same thing.
Management requires direct reports: you make decisions which directly impact the careers of other people.
Leadership can be more subtle than that. You can influence people without needing to directly manage them.
John Carmack at Facebook/Meta is a great example. He was an IC - they had to invent a new level of the IC ladder for him! Definitely a leader, not a manager (at that company).
(Amusingly, I got to attend some "leadership" classes at Stanford a while ago. My main takeaway was that the way to create leaders is to put a bunch of people in a room and tell them that they're "leaders" until they start to believe it.)
Which makes it clearly distinct from leadership, because it is very hard to lead something that isn't alive. It is hard to lead a server.
But now that the server has an agentic interface maybe that is changing.
Some leaders are also great managers. Some managers are also great leaders.
But not all managers are leaders.
So you can manage a project or a budget or a facility or an office or a process. But if you need to get people to do things, that requires leading not managing.
The problem with applying this to an AI agent is that it is a thing that thinks it’s a person.
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.
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.
My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
The upside is that there's way more water than bowl. The catch is that you have to be the type of person who could build the bowl in the first place.
The way I use LLMs seems to be most analagous to the way vibecoder's LLMs use subagents. They exist to solve a bounded task or to write specific code in support of the engineering model in my head. I intentionally never did much research into how others were using LLMs before starting myself, and it seems like that was a good thing. It seems like the majority of people have given up on thought and just slam "do my job with no mistakes or hallucinations" into a prompt and then get confused and angry when it doesn't work. Or worse, don't check if it worked and ship anyway.
/wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o
The /wayfinder Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM
it'll pass, but until then we'll be subjected to a litany of dumb hot takes.
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.
This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.
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-managin...
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
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.
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.
Its really interesting especially having different agents with different prompts and then having each one based on their reasoning, etc
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.
Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.
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.
Pointless, stupid article. Digital garbage, as garbage as LLM slop. So many words to say nothing.
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
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.
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.
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.