Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

Because it is

Skynet makes you think that.

Foolish human.

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.

It's hardly "leadership" when you can yell at your serfs all you want and get away with it.

...and browsing HN these days feels more like cringing than informing oneself. This is a LinkedIn-level "insight", upvoted presumably because it's about "AI"?

Except nothing is at stakes, there are no failure modes beside shitty vibecode output, and noone is responsible for nothing.

Maybe if you weren't really coding to begin with, or didn't enjoy it. There's a ton of "temporarily embarrassed CEOs" who seem to be unable to think about LLMs as anything but their employees, which is an incredibly limiting perspective in my view.

Anyone who's fallen in love with programming itself and doesn't see software production as a means to an end is not really likely to see things like this.

I see AI as an accelerator of implementing my own choices. I'm generally opposed to metaphors, designs or strategies which excessively anthropomorphize it; it seems completely wrong-headed and counterproductive.

If I were a stronger man, I would make a comment about dealing with people vs dealing with code and having to route around bugs that are both fundamental to the problem and a POV, along with some inherent in how I setup the program and simply someone else problem I've inherited to simply being burned into the hardware and will never be neatly papered over.

I don't have good leadership or good management or good people skills. I can use AI just fine as run of the mill software engineers.

Pointless, stupid article. Digital garbage, as garbage as LLM slop. So many words to say nothing.

Why are LLM users such poor leaders then?

To go anywhere serious you have to lead people, but even the ones who should be leading people are heads down talking to the LLM

I agree with the OP's point. But if you've worked in a corporate environment, isn't that just how it is? Like how programming work and getting promoted to a manager are essentially different careers—they feel like fundamentally different things.

They're different kinds of work, and both are interesting in their own way. But in the freelance market, LLMs have already become the baseline, so I have to use them whether I like it or not. There are both pros and cons.

It's good to be able to read code and understand its structure, but writing code and reading it to transform it into a different structure are different skills. There's definitely some decay in raw coding ability, though. So I use LLMs for professional coding and for tasks that I couldn't do before, while I keep hand-coding smaller things that feel manageable.

Honestly, I think most people who hate LLM coding actually hate being forced to use it under workplace pressure. And when LLM output looks bad, it's often because managers tend to be strict about their subordinates' work but lenient about their own. Once an LLM generates something, people tend to get attached to it and become more forgiving—since it feels like they made it.

It's tough that LLMs have made deadlines tighter. But these days, compared to the old days when I had to go through interviews and conversations to build a proposal, I actually find it more convenient that clients send me proposals written by LLMs. There are pros and cons to everything.

Bro finds out AI is not deterministic.

"Not predictable" is cope for the true failing. "AI" is not reliable.

As for the purported upside of the random variability in output... seriously? Who would want an RNG in a C compiler's code generator. Or worse, its parser?

Yes, the Führerprinzip. Slop coders will meet their Stalingrad soon due to technical debt and so will AI corporations due to financial debt.

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It’s a management of management position I’d say. You’re not just managing AI, if you were already in a management or lead type role then now you’re managing people, the LLMs they manage, and any LLM you’re managing.