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Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

allen.bargi.org

201–210 of 223 posts

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#201
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…

but managing humans is simpler in many ways, too: there's accountability for one. and it's much easier to reason about the capability boundary of a human.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#202

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.

> deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built. /wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o The /wayfinder Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM

Does this actually work for you?

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#203
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that just regular management?

Disgruntled AI won’t kick your teeth in, yet.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#204
post #139

Coding 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 co…

I love(d) coding. I also love leveraging LLMs to create so many projects that I otherwise would not have done.

Idk. I don't feel that "projects" have any value nowadays. Firstly, you don't get any respect, people just thinking "I could prompt that too". Secondly, if anyone can do that, what's the point?

We have so much stuff coming nowdays that no one care

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#205
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bro the president suggested we nuke a hurricane and raped someone and is dismantling our natural resources, the bar is substantially worse than a couple months technical debt.

Fellow Apple product user. Join me in jeering at people who drink instant coffee.

I use Apple and drink instant coffee, though!

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#207
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.

One of the times I worked with code written by juniors, the entire FAQ was Bob Ross quotes. The rest of the app was in German, and had nothing to do with painting. It also crashed a lot. LLMs, while mediocre, are better than that.

One of the times I worked with someone with a decade or so of experience, their attempt at writing a solution to convert an old file format (loading time: milliseconds) to a database (loading time: milliseconds) would take 20 minutes on some inputs, and he insisted this was the best it could possibly be. In the same day as the standup in which he said this, I'd gotten it down to the milliseconds that was obviously possible.

And there's a reason I linked to those specific Wikipedia articles. There's world leaders whom you can absolutely trust 100% to get stuff wrong on a regular basis, and even Nobel prize winners are not immune to being confidently wrong.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#208
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#209
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.

[dead]

Re: Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

#210

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.

Because there are so many different jobs all over the place. Job boards are full of people crying out for help. Every morning I wake up to a literal sea of emails from hiring managers looking for my aid. I only choose those jobs that look interesting and only work with the people who pay and treat me well. /s
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