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Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

allen.bargi.org

181–190 of 223 posts

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#181
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…

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Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#182
post #69
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 (…

Sure, prompting can be very free form. In that it is somewhat like managing a human.

But then there are ways it is very much different. Claude never quit on me because we didn’t let it add its new pet programing language to a large estabilished project. Claude never had a bicycle crash on the way to work, after which we haven’t heard of it for two weeks, and after the two weeks it could only work with accomodations. Claude never found a wonderfull girlfriend in a far away locale who made Claude extra productive for a few months, but then when HR refused Claude’s request to work from that locale the productivity collapsed, and eventually Claude quit. Claude never had to be moved to a different team because of ongoing personality clashes with a team member there. Claude never produced code of negative value because the teeths of Claude’s twins were growing out. Claude was never devastated because someone from recruitment promised Claude that Claude can manage a team, but forgot to mention said promise to basically anyone else.

These are all things i have managed / seen managers around me manage with real humans. You don’t have any of this with Claude. In that it is quite different working with Claude from managing humans.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#183
Yeah, if you offload work to someone else and provide direction, it's called management. You know who I wouldn't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? Me, the person managing multiple teams. I wouldn't know what I was doing and I'd make a mess of things.

You know who I definitely don't trust to maintain and operate production software systems? the coding agents my teams use.

As a manager I require my employees to understand what they are building and maintaining as engineers, not as managers. There is no viable alternative to that today.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#184

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…

The most serious vulnerability that any LLM has exposed to date is in the human brain, where a whole lot of people cannot help but anthropomorphize it and they seem to be willing to totally forego critical thinking. I think this vulnerability has existed for a long time but the mass exploitation is going to destroy quite a few organizations.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#185
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.

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Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#186
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're conflating two things (probably intentionally, but I'll go with it). If you are firing someone without replacing (a layoff), then presumably, that person cost more than the value they provided, and so laying them off should improve the value of the business (after incurring the costs the parent post mentioned). If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring…

Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.

In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#187
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Juniors turn to seniors. AI has gone from "codes like a student" to "fresh hire junior" to "nearly ready for next step in career" at about the same, tiny bit faster, calendar pace as humans. > You can never trust AI won't glitch... True. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covfefe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson And?

No, it really hasn't. You still can't remotely trust it to not get stuff wrong.

You can't really fully trust humans either. That's why we have processes and checklists; code review; testing at various levels; etc.

With those processes in place maybe we can trust AIs too.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#188

For me, it's more like natural language coding, or maybe technical management of envs, states and tools. Leadership is about humans, feelings, personal differences or soft skills

Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.

>Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.

It sounds like you were more interested in the finished product, or "delivering value", than you were in solving problems.

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