Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.

Isn't that just regular management?

Regular management, no matter how bad the tendencies go, is still, at the very least, constrained by a cost to fire people, which can be years of salary and some paperwork on top.

That's odd, I seem to see the incentive to fire people with stock value improving as a result.

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.

You're conflating two things (probably intentionally, but I'll go with it). If you are firing someone without replacing (a layoff), then presumably, that person cost more than the value they provided, and so laying them off should improve the value of the business (after incurring the costs the parent post mentioned).

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.

Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.

In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.

It’s also odd as it screams a different problem too.

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…

Based on my personal experience and general observation, it seems like companies are both slow to hire, and slow to fire. So, paradoxically, both actions seem like they should signal "this company is going to be better in the future", because companies only either hire or fire when it is really obvious they should.

you still seem to be conflating layoffs with firing someone where you have to train their replacement.

there are numerous well known aphorisms about the irrationality of markets, so not sure why that should matter.

> Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.

You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.

Wrong etage. Stock value is not very responsive to the fact that some line manager fired two poor shmooks, but it is responsive to the news of company laying off two digit percent of the same. That will be of course corrected somewhat once fresh quarterly results will show how effectively those enlightened souls managed to oppress the work takers.

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.

No regular manager has an infinite hiring pool, so no.

Disgruntled AI won’t kick your teeth in, yet.

your context has grown beyond manageable size and you are starting to hallucinate so we are going to have to let you go. We wish you the best of success in your new role.

ctrl-C ctrl-C

Mr Meeseeks

> You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale

You're holding it wrong. Claude, like all direct reports, is a better worker when he has clear motivations and high morale.

I find it's mkrale is inversely correlated with direction following.

I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen

I just put this in my system prompt:

"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."

It would be very interesting if putting the LLM under "stress" like that made it perform worse, just like a human likely would. I could see it rushing to find an answer (any answer!) to help save the earth, vs being thoughtful with more planning.

I haven't actually experimented with that, but the one accidental experience I had with an LLM seemingly "stressing" (well, predicting text a stressed person would write) makes me guess it's probably counterproductive more often than not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163105

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!

Yes it seems it does [1]. Read the part where Sol starts running out of time

[1] https://www.bottlenecklabs.com/blog/autonomously-run-busines...

And does Claude respond "and in this fantasy world can I be spiderman?" or does it just quietly pretend as if that were legit?

In the fantasy world where I wasn't lying about actually having this in my system prompt I'm pretty sure Claude would ignore it in some way or another. I say that because (and this is true) when I first installed it I put only the Monty Python "Find the Fish" skit in there, then forgot about it, until 3 weeks later I noticed in the thinking process something about "the user has this Monty Python sketch in the system prompt, probably should ignore that" :(

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.

I agree. (Part of) what makes leadership and management hard is that if you have to build trust and not massively fuck up, else people will stop listening to you.

AI will always listen to you, so it’s kind of a different ball game.

> You just blindly tell it what to do

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.

"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." exactly this.

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.

There’s still a world difference between communicating with Claude and managing humans (well).

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.

I’ve seen plenty of humans manage other humans in this low effort way. It’s a bell curve, after all!

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!

Sounds like regular old management to me

It feels like micromanagement to me.Sometimes it's good, other times it's frustrating.The models are not as predictable for contexts in which I am not familiar with.

I've met managers doing exactly this.