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Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

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Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#41

Post by roenxi »

simonw wrote: post #30
jnovek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 managem…

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 exam…

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#42

Post by jameshart »

jnovek wrote: post #24
miyoji wrote: post #7

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…

“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 managem…

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#43

Post by Gareth321 »

7nolikov wrote: post #35

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

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#44

Post by worldthruword »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #6

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.

> 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

The /wayfinder Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#45

Post by terrut »

miyoji wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#46

Post by boron1006 »

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#47

Post by graceful6800 »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#48

Post by [deleted] »

miyoji wrote: post #7

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…

[deleted]

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#49

Post by jnovek »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #29
jnovek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 managem…

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#50

Post by velcrovan »

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-managin...

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