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Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

allen.bargi.org

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Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#51

Post by tyleo »

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

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#52

Post by qw1276 »

velcrovan wrote: post #50

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 be…

Point made by an LLM and not Rao. This article is purely generated garbage and does not refute "Your brain on ChatGPT" at all.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#53

Post by pdsOne »

peder wrote: post #37
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.

Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#54

Post by cronin101 »

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#56

Post by jameshart »

roenxi wrote: post #41
simonw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

… 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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#57

Post by gexla »

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#58

Post by andai »

terrut wrote: post #45
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.

I tell it "believe in yourself" and task goes from unsolvable to trivial.

It's human ;)

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#59

Post by Jare »

jnovek wrote: post #49
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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)

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#60

Post by DrewADesign »

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…

Sounds like that leader should fire his agent.
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