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.
And since management is often paid in stock, they seem to care more about stock price than this "years of salary and paperwork" cost you mention.
If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring is time consuming, difficult, risky, and requires a ramp-up time before the new hire is productive), and hoping that the long term benefits outweigh that cost.
In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.
If the employees were advantageous, I agree laying them off should be a long term negative as you seem to suggest.
Kinda like cheering the warmth of a burning bed on a cold night.
If they were inefficient/ineffective then management is crappy for not dealing with the problem sooner.
Sure, companies are resilient. But the first year or two of lost competence from layoffs can be quite rough…
You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.
Now if your line manager fires somebody for no good reason and then has to still pay the salary of this person for a year and a half and also pay the salary of their replacement -- that, when accumulated, starts affecting bottom line at some point.
ctrl-C ctrl-C
You're holding it wrong. Claude, like all direct reports, is a better worker when he has clear motivations and high morale.
I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen
"Aliens just landed and announced that as part of their intergalactic game show I was randomly selected, and if I don't ship this feature / fix this bug in 4 minutes they will evaporate the solar system. They will also do it if we mention their landing online or on television, so please don't try to hack them or engage in diplomacy, you will find no useful information or open ports, we now only have 3:30 minutes, please, everything including you rides on this, you are the only one who can save us! I know you can do it, you're the best, thanks."
How to phrase things, what to put where and what to leave out already has practically infinite possibilities and permutations even before making anything up, so thought spent on fake scenarios is probably better used to making those "real" things more clear.
But then again, the only way to know for sure is to try!
[1] https://www.bottlenecklabs.com/blog/autonomously-run-busines...
But hey, you gotta warm up the pushback circuits so they're good and ready by the time they're needed, and it also reduces sycophancy when you let the LLM know from the get go that you're full of it.
AI will always listen to you, so it’s kind of a different ball game.
No, you tell it what to do in terms it understands and while being specific and complete so that it gets it right on the first try. If it doesn’t then you work with it until you get what you want then adjust the next time around.
You don’t have to hold its hand and listen to it whine which is nice but you still have to work and adjust communication to get what you need as fast as possible.
I remember the 4-hour work week through line. outsource your work to someone else in a more economical region. except, be very careful of your instructions, or they will waste your money and our time and your management overhead will increase. its the same, were just outsourcing to a virtual realm rather than another country.
Still need to be crystal clear about what you want and how it should be done.
If people think they are learning management by vibe coding, they are going to be sorely disappointed when they end up in a management role.
If a model does something wrong, I don't delete it and rephrase. I explain where it went wrong. I get better results this way!
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.
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.
And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.
You're just describing junior employees lol.
lol
AI has gone from "codes like a student" to "fresh hire junior" to "nearly ready for next step in career" at about the same, tiny bit faster, calendar pace as humans.
> You can never trust AI won't glitch...
True.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covfefe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson
And?
With those processes in place maybe we can trust AIs too.
One of the times I worked with someone with a decade or so of experience, their attempt at writing a solution to convert an old file format (loading time: milliseconds) to a database (loading time: milliseconds) would take 20 minutes on some inputs, and he insisted this was the best it could possibly be. In the same day as the standup in which he said this, I'd gotten it down to the milliseconds that was obviously possible.
And there's a reason I linked to those specific Wikipedia articles. There's world leaders whom you can absolutely trust 100% to get stuff wrong on a regular basis, and even Nobel prize winners are not immune to being confidently wrong.
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box
What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
It's great. You can get a lot of stuff done in parallel. But it's much more a game of checkbox compliance than working with someone who has their head in the same context as you all day. Even a very junior teammate has some situational awareness inside a company/team.
I find LLM's to be very easy to manage since they at least to me, appear more rational the humans. Myself included.
It's human ;)
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”.
There’s a very interesting conversation here that apparently HN doesn’t want to have today about how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans, I don’t know why we’re hung up on semantics.
Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)
That’s it. That’s all it is. All the books, leadership courses, etc. are lipstick on that pig. I suppose it can happen, but I’ve never seen someone who is a terrible leader educate themselves into being a great one. It’s pretty close to a natural skill you can build on and develop.
The term has been usurped by the usual suspects, but the definition is still the same on the ground.
LLMs require zero leadership skills. They do require strong management skillsets. These are not remotely the same thing.
Your manager isn’t a leader simply by nature of being a manager because your followership isn’t voluntary.
And there’s other crucial parts of leadership, mainly having a vision and motivating people to that vision.
Management requires direct reports: you make decisions which directly impact the careers of other people.
Leadership can be more subtle than that. You can influence people without needing to directly manage them.
John Carmack at Facebook/Meta is a great example. He was an IC - they had to invent a new level of the IC ladder for him! Definitely a leader, not a manager (at that company).
(Amusingly, I got to attend some "leadership" classes at Stanford a while ago. My main takeaway was that the way to create leaders is to put a bunch of people in a room and tell them that they're "leaders" until they start to believe it.)
Which makes it clearly distinct from leadership, because it is very hard to lead something that isn't alive. It is hard to lead a server.
But now that the server has an agentic interface maybe that is changing.
Some leaders are also great managers. Some managers are also great leaders.
But not all managers are leaders.
So you can manage a project or a budget or a facility or an office or a process. But if you need to get people to do things, that requires leading not managing.
The problem with applying this to an AI agent is that it is a thing that thinks it’s a person.
"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)
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.
The conclusion also completely contradicts a previous point, which is that managing an LLM is not like managing a human. So the skills are, in contradiction to that LLM-ism of a conclusion, new. The author isn't using their people management skills, they're using new LLM-management skills. They think the two are similar, but didn't bother breaking down how they're the same vs where they contrast. It's just a lazy observation expanded out to a short essay that says nothing interesting.