Simon Willison made a similar parallel recently:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic...

  “The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on.

  If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote.

  I’m going to look at their documentation and I’m going to use it to resize some images. And then I’m going to start shipping my own features. And if I start running into problems where the image resizer thing appears to have bugs or the performance isn’t good, that’s when I might dig into their Git repositories and see what’s going on. But for the most part I treat that as a semi-black box that I don’t look at until I need to.”

No, because those direct reports can use tools to build deterministic software. LLMs can't, because they themselves are non-deterministic. They will say they did, and they will be wrong. And the LLM you have check will also say it did, and it will be wrong. Etc etc.

These things just can't be in the critical path. They are ridiculously unreliable.

> Being a manager of software developers has always been a non-deterministic form of software engineering.

I disagree. Being a manager of programmers requires that you trust your programmers and have some way of occasionally verifying the correctness and efficacy of what they build to make sure that that trust is still properly placed.

But on top of that, the user of an LLM isn't really akin to a manager of programmers. Human programmers are responsible for what they write [0], and even the ones that only cost ~50% of a senior's total comp [1] are still going to be able to fairly reliably explain to you why they made the decisions they did, and fairly reliably be able to follow instruction. LLMs just aren't there yet, and the major LLM providers may never care to get them there.

A programmer who's using LLMs is a programmer who's using LLMs... not a manager of other programmers. I'm not going to say that the tech will never advance to that point, but it's simply not there yet.

[0] Unless management decides otherwise, of course.

[1] Nvidia's CEO recently mentioned that he'd be "deeply alarmed" if senior staff aren't spending at least half of their total compensation [2] on LLM providers, so I'm going to use that as my benchmark for "expected annual LLM spend".

[2] ...meaning that each senior programmer costs their employer at least 50% more than their total compensation....

> Being a manager of software developers has always been a non-deterministic form of software engineering.

Unless the manager is also a principal/architect, I don’t find this to be agreeable.

It’s similar to saying that you are a non-deterministic chef when you order food from a restaurant.

Well yes but if no humans at the company understand the code then no one is truly responsible for it.