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.

> 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 ("The spacing here looks weird, give me a few recommendations on how to fix it."). You can also say stuff like "make this look more modern and conform to modern AppKit guidelines." You don't have to micromanage it, at least when you break things down into small features. (But that's true of humans too.)

[1] Claude is significantly better than Grok at doing Mac UI app development. Interestingly, Grok is significantly better than Claude at legal research and summarizing/analyzing non-code documents.

Sure sure, but it is surprisingly like managing an intern, or a fresh engineer where there is a pre-existing language barrier. At least in my experience it is. There might be a dash of carefully negotiating with the devil himself in the mix to make sure you ask for precisely what you wish to have built or you get something that meets the spec of what you told it but it isn't what you wanted.

Management is following a defined repetitive process to coordinate a team across some or all of projects (who should do what and how long should they spend on it), skills (is their work up to scratch and how can they improve) and HR (do they need to be paid more to not quit and do they need to be told to take sick leave to recover).

"Leadership" is more LinkedIn thought leadership BS but I think it's a useful distinction to make from management and is more about inspiring people to work towards a common goal, making difficult decisions with imperfect information and finding creative solutions to business problems.

To me working with AI does feel more like the latter, there isn't yet a clear path and set of processes for everyone to follow and getting the agents to do what you want does take similar skills in terms of inspiration (finding the right prompt) and creativity (figuring out how to join all the shiney new toys into reliable systems)

Yeah, if anything it’s more like product management meets tech lead (with the social part of both roles removed), not people management. The meat of good prompting is good requirements gathering and clear descriptions of things like acceptance criteria, then setting up systems and tools your agents can use to verify how well they are meeting your product and technical requirements.

It's an AI-generated post on another ephemeral AI-generated blog, now a multiple-times-a-day occurrence on HN. We're taking issue with what a chatbot thinks about "leadership". And some people will probably show up and say it shouldn't matter who wrote it, but it obviously does. There's just some undeniable comedy in this.

While I don't love the article, its wording and the rather pompous "/notes$ cat working-with-ai.md" gimmick ... oh you know what cat does?

I agree with part of the thesis, a lot of the skill set (not the people management bit) of being a team lead is like working with LLM agents. Purely in a technical sense. Having a plan of overall direction, guiding agents that go off track, overseeing progress and maintaining the high level direction of whos doing what and whats upcoming. Also sometimes learning from a agent/team member and sometimes correcting really dumb ideas.

No, you don't need to rewrite the app in newest JS framework, just use postgres and be happy.

People seem to be conflating loss of control and predictable outputs with management. Maybe that's intentional spin or just wishful thinking.

If you're working for someone else, this is true. For people who are building for themselves, it's 100% leadership because managers don't decide what to build or how (at healthy organizations, anyhow)

I’d say strategy, which is a subset of management

I will offer a perspective on a currently incomplete thought. It is management, but it is management of how management imagines managing a human, which, lets face it, is not that great. In a weird way, management as a group now has almost exactly what they have always wanted: an answer presented in a cheerful and serious way that requires expertise to disprove as bs.

Maybe LLMs can have more than one valid way to come out the same quality outcome from different backgrounds and experiences.

Sounds like that leader should fire his agent.

I don't think there is much crossover unless your model responds well to being anthropomorphized.

I find LLM's to be very easy to manage since they at least to me, appear more rational the humans. Myself included.

“Leadership”, whether you like the LinkedIn-ism or not (I also think it’s stupid), generally refers to upper management, not people management.

At my startup, my team reached a headcount of ~30 and I had to design process to keep things moving. Getting a bunch of disparate parts in even a 100 person company to produce the artifacts needed to create software is a massive undertaking that doesn’t involve people management at all. The two responsibilities can be completely divorced from each other if you want.

I never thought I’d be dusting off those skills again because I do strictly IC work now, but I’m now using them every day. It feels (a subjective term, which the author used as well) like when I was in “leadership”.