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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

#91

Post by vatsachak »

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.

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#92

Post by knollimar »

otekengineering wrote: post #85
mikeocool wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I find it's mkrale is inversely correlated with direction following.

I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#93

Post by rayiner »

netsharc wrote: post #74
rayiner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Juniors turn to seniors. You can never trust AI won't glitch... lol

Yes, I agree, AI's risk creating a huge pipeline problem.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#94

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

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 will offer a perspective on a currently incomplete thought. It is management, but it is management of how management imagines managing a human, which, lets face it, is not that great. In a weird way, management as a group now has almost exactly what they have always wanted: an answer presented in a cheerful and serious way that requires expertise to disprove as bs.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#95

Post by demibabs »

mikeocool wrote: post #73
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…

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.

I agree. (Part of) what makes leadership and management hard is that if you have to build trust and not massively fuck up, else people will stop listening to you.

AI will always listen to you, so it’s kind of a different ball game.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#96

Post by gedy »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #82
gedy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

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.

Best of luck, I guess I've personally had little success at companies with "I have an idea" types in leadership.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#98

Post by flemhans »

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#99

Post by agentultra »

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.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#100

Post by sixhobbits »

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…

Management is following a defined repetitive process to coordinate a team across some or all of projects (who should do what and how long should they spend on it), skills (is their work up to scratch and how can they improve) and HR (do they need to be paid more to not quit and do they need to be told to take sick leave to recover).

"Leadership" is more LinkedIn thought leadership BS but I think it's a useful distinction to make from management and is more about inspiring people to work towards a common goal, making difficult decisions with imperfect information and finding creative solutions to business problems.

To me working with AI does feel more like the latter, there isn't yet a clear path and set of processes for everyone to follow and getting the agents to do what you want does take similar skills in terms of inspiration (finding the right prompt) and creativity (figuring out how to join all the shiney new toys into reliable systems)

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