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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

#61

Post by LogicFailsMe »

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…

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#62

Post by Jare »

pdsOne wrote: post #53
peder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#63

Post by gedy »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #40

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 growin…

> 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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#64

Post by pydry »

cautiouscat wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#65

Post by netsharc »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #61
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…

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#68

Post by LogicFailsMe »

netsharc wrote: post #65
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box

What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#69

Post by rayiner »

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…

> 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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#70

Post by rayiner »

netsharc wrote: post #65
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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