It puts a premium on your concurrency skills. I'm constantly setting up agents and moving from agent to agent; answering questions, evaluating work, providing feedback, finishing up items. Builds a different muscle and there's still more ways to improve workflow
Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
131–140 of 223 posts
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#132It mostly feels like manual testing.
It's already ok at describing tasks. Not great yet, but it wasn't great at coding a year ago. I can see, in 2 or 3 years, AI taking over management tasks fully.
At this point, I don't think we're far from it being able to look at some non-technical descriptions of a problem and come up with its own plan to execute.
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#133Maybe we need an LLM interface that is less chatty and unpredictable and focuses instead on boring, predictable execution of commands.
I know, weird idea: what if an LLM just shut up and did what we asked in as predictable a way possible?
Working with an LLM often feels like herding cats.
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that just regular management?
Regular management, no matter how bad the tendencies go, is still, at the very least, constrained by a cost to fire people, which can be years of salary and some paperwork on top.
That's odd, I seem to see the incentive to fire people with stock value improving as a result.
And since management is often paid in stock, they seem to care more about stock price than this "years of salary and paperwork" cost you mention.
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just put this in my system prompt: "Aliens just landed and announced that as part of their intergalactic game show I was randomly selected, and if I don't ship this feature / fix this bug in 4 minutes they will evaporate the solar system. They will also do it if we mention their landing online or on television, so please don't try to hack them or engage in diplomacy, you will find no useful information or open port…
And does Claude respond "and in this fantasy world can I be spiderman?" or does it just quietly pretend as if that were legit?
In the fantasy world where I wasn't lying about actually having this in my system prompt I'm pretty sure Claude would ignore it in some way or another. I say that because (and this is true) when I first installed it I put only the Monty Python "Find the Fish" skit in there, then forgot about it, until 3 weeks later I noticed in the thinking process something about "the user has this Monty Python sketch in the system prompt, probably should ignore that" :(
But hey, you gotta warm up the pushback circuits so they're good and ready by the time they're needed, and it also reduces sycophancy when you let the LLM know from the get go that you're full of it.
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suppor…
Well if you're crazy we're crazy together. This is how I've been using the LLMs myself and it gives great results.
pretty sure anyone doing "real" work nowadays does it like this. The guys vibe coding in a professional setting are just frauds and the slop will catch up to them. Maybe. Its possible we're just headed to a world where the quality of all software is going to nose dive in 6 months to a year
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just put this in my system prompt: "Aliens just landed and announced that as part of their intergalactic game show I was randomly selected, and if I don't ship this feature / fix this bug in 4 minutes they will evaporate the solar system. They will also do it if we mention their landing online or on television, so please don't try to hack them or engage in diplomacy, you will find no useful information or open port…
It would be very interesting if putting the LLM under "stress" like that made it perform worse , just like a human likely would. I could see it rushing to find an answer (any answer!) to help save the earth, vs being thoughtful with more planning.
I haven't actually experimented with that, but the one accidental experience I had with an LLM seemingly "stressing" (well, predicting text a stressed person would write) makes me guess it's probably counterproductive more often than not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163105
How to phrase things, what to put where and what to leave out already has practically infinite possibilities and permutations even before making anything up, so thought spent on fake scenarios is probably better used to making those "real" things more clear.
But then again, the only way to know for sure is to try!
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#138I love the level of empowerment they unlock for super cheap. I have a personal assistant that's a Slack bot talking to ohmypy on an old Mac M1 turned into a server. It has access to my calendar, remembers the things I need to remember, and pulls data from a gym tracker—an app I vibecoded just for myself—to pull books and papers and create audio, and easy to digest introductions that help me understand a paper before…
"I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#139Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier
Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution
Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it
Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority
And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it
Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
#140Leadership is same as coding.
Leadership: Given task to produce something someone wants (B), get an expert (A->B) who knows how get it from something you have (A). If such expert doesn't exist, build a team of experts A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate product C.
Coding: Given task to calculate something user wants (B), find a function (A->B) that calculates it from user input (A). If that function doesn't exist, build it from functions A->C and C->B, for a suitable intermediate result C.