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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

#151

Post by Henchman21 »

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.

Sounds like regular old management to me

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#152

Post by jakzurr »

boron1006 wrote: post #46

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 sho…

Thanks for sharing this; I'm hoping your horrific experience will help some of my friends, who are afraid LLM's will take everyone's jobs.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#153

Post by slopinthebag »

I don’t agree, sorry. The LLM is a code generation machine, it’s nice because it can generate code much faster than my hands can. But it’s not management or leadership because there is no human element there. And the workflow is still code generation, as much as people want to make agents the thing.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#154

Post by teaearlgraycold »

khuey wrote: post #79
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.

Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.

Mr Meeseeks

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#156

Post by sscaryterry »

flemhans wrote: post #98

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 probl…

The art is to try and rape your contractors, give them prep work to do on their own time, then treat them like employees.

I don't fall for that anymore though.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#157

Post by velcrovan »

qw1276 wrote: post #52
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.

Yes, ‘Sloptraptions’ advertises itself as an AI-assisted newletter.

Whatever your feelings about AI writing (I make a point of not using AI for writing, myself), it's silly to claim Rao is not the one making the point here. The piece links to the transcript of the chat session that generated it, where after having the LLM ingest the paper, he prompts it:

> ‘I want to make the following critical argument: “Have you met the median manager with a few reports or median faculty with a few grad students? Not your work, not your cognitive debt. Otoh, this sort of framing entirely misses the new kinds of work you are doing, which is often illegible or even invisible. A curious factor affecting AI discourse is that most people researching and commenting about the second-order effects have “individual contributor” mindset. Even a modest amount of supervisory experience demonstrates the difference between thinking vs monitoring/supervising, and between being responsible for getting thinking done versus accountable for it. I use AI a lot and it feels indistinguishable from supervisory work to me, with similar cognitive effects. If you manage too much versus doing your own hands on work, you become… a manager. How good you are depends on your aptitude for management work.’

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#158

Post by cryptographical »

It feels like controlling an infinite genie. if you control it well, it is extremely powerful, but it will take anything literally in many cases. But if you master it, and treat it as a compiler of intent, using Plan mode appropriately, you can accelerate and punch far above your weight class.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#159

Post by slopinthebag »

simonw wrote: post #4

I think this comparison holds up. I've noticed that a lot of people I know who get really good results from LLMs and agents are people with significant people management experience. Companies like Anthropic seem to understand that too. It's impressive how many CTOs and CEOs Anthropic have hired for individual contributor positions, which I think is because those leadership skills transfer surprisingly well to working…

If you consider Anthropic’s software as “good results” than I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite.
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