Nope, effective management is on YOU, not them. If everyone you’re managing is completely transparent and immediately tells you stuff, you’re playing in easy mode
And suppose getting developers to not lie or hide important information is on me, what should I do to get an LLM to not do that?
I really think that the people who have the hardest time adapting to AI tools are the ones that take everything personally.
It's just a text generator, not a colleague.
The person you are responding to is quite literally making the same point. This entire thread of conversation is in response to the post's author stating that using a coding agent is strongly akin to collaborating with a colleague.
So much this. There are many managers who are effective at managing people who do not need management.
You're trying to sell AI here, right? And the argument is that AI is like hard mode... which developers are already in, but might not be.
It's just not a very good sales pitch.
Working alone can be much easier than managing others in a team. But also, working in a team can be far more effective if you can figure out how to pull it off.
It's much the same as working with agents. Working alone, without the agents, it's easier to make exactly what you want happen. But working with agents, you can get a lot more done a lot faster-- if you can figure out how to make it happen. This is why you might want hard mode.
This is what we shoot for, yes, but many of the most interesting war stories involve times when people should have been telling you about snags but weren't-- either because they didn't realize they were spinning their wheels, or because they were hoping they'd somehow magically pull off the win before the due date, or innumerable other variations on the theme. People are most definitely not reliable about telling you things they should have told you.
> if you feel you have to review every line of code anyone on the team writes...
Somebody has to review the code, and step back and think about it. Not necessarily the manager, but someone does.
This comes up a lot. A person sometimes does an undesirable thing that an AI also does. So you might as well use the AI.
But we don't apply this thinking to people. If a person does something undesirable sometimes then we accept that because they are human. If they do it very frequently then at some point, given a choice, you will stop working with that person.
Training is one thing, but training doesn't increase the productivity of the trainer; it's meant to improve the capability of the trainee.
At any level of capability, though - whether we're talking about an intern after one year of university or a senior developer with 20 years of experience - effective management requires that you're able to trust that the person tells you when they've hit a snag or anything else you may need to know. We may not be talking 100% of trust, but not too far from that, either. You can't continue working with someone that doesn't tell you what you need to know even 10% of the time, regardless of their level. LLMs are not at that acceptable level yet, so the experience is not similar to technical leadership.
If you've ever been tasked with leading one or more significant projects you'd know that if you feel you have to review every line of code anyone on the team writes, at every step of the process, that's not the path to success (if you did that, not only would progress be slow, but your team wouldn't like you very much). Code review is a very important part of the process, but it's not an efficient mechanism for day-to-day communication.