alt Hacker News> 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, 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.