Comment by empath75
2 months ago
If you a) know what you are doing and b) know what an llm is capable of doing, c) can manage multiple llm agents at a time, you can be unbelievably productive. Those skills I think are less common than people assume.
You need to be technical, have good communication skills, have big picture vision, be organized, etc. If you are a staff level engineer, you basically feel like you don’t need anyone else.
OTOH i have been seeing even fairly technical engineering managers struggle because they can’t get the LLMs to execute because they don’t know how to ask it what to do.
> can manage multiple llm agents at a time
How is that supposed to work? Humans are notoriously poor at multi-tasking. If you spend all day context switching between agents you’re going to have a bad time.
I deployed a whole fleet of agents working Jira tickets and PRs a couple of weeks ago. You manage them the way you manage people.
it's like that '11 rules for showrunning' doc where you need to operate at a level where you understand the product being made, and the people making it, and their capabilities, in order to make things come out well without touching them directly.
(https://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/11_laws_o...)
if you can do every job + parallelize + read fast, and you are only limited by the time it takes to type, claude is remarkable. I'm not superhuman in those ways but in the small domains where I am it has helped a lot; in other domains it has ramped me to 'working prototype' 10x faster than I could have alone, but the quality of output seems questionable and I'm not smart enough to improve it