Comment by miyoji
2 days ago
The word is "management", not "leadership". This comes across as a LinkedIn post filled with vague notions and weak writing.
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.
If it is like management, it’s like the most low effort version of management.
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.
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?
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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
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 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.
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!
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.
Sounds like regular old management to me
[dead]
> 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 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."
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I find it's mkrale is inversely correlated with direction following.
I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen
> 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.
Sure sure, but it is surprisingly like managing an intern, or a fresh engineer where there is a pre-existing language barrier. At least in my experience it is. There might be a dash of carefully negotiating with the devil himself in the mix to make sure you ask for precisely what you wish to have built or you get something that meets the spec of what you told it but it isn't what you wanted.
And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.
> And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.
You're just describing junior employees lol.
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thats the reason why I always focus on one function per thread / or one class per thread, and I copy it by hand in VS.NET, to exactly prevent this - never ever I would let it run "unattended" on the codebase :)
Babylon 5 Crusade had a device called The Apocalypse Box. It knew everything and you could ask it questions. Unfortunately, it lied strategically so as to both give you an edge here and there whilst it drove you insane with all the lying. I have always seen the similarity to large language models here myself and that was in 1999.
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box
What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
To me, it feels closer to dealing with a personal outsourcing agency than working with internal coworkers, because the agents have zero skin in the game.
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.
It is exactly that until the moment it isn't and it does something amazing, truly amazing, and I never see it coming when it does happen. But it doesn't happen all that often. It's just that it does happen here and there.
It's an AI-generated post on another ephemeral AI-generated blog, now a multiple-times-a-day occurrence on HN. We're taking issue with what a chatbot thinks about "leadership". And some people will probably show up and say it shouldn't matter who wrote it, but it obviously does. There's just some undeniable comedy in this.
Tempted to suggest that people who jump straight to hn comments without looking at the articles just happened to be a bit ahead of the curve.
Management is following a defined repetitive process to coordinate a team across some or all of projects (who should do what and how long should they spend on it), skills (is their work up to scratch and how can they improve) and HR (do they need to be paid more to not quit and do they need to be told to take sick leave to recover).
"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)
Yeah, if anything it’s more like product management meets tech lead (with the social part of both roles removed), not people management. The meat of good prompting is good requirements gathering and clear descriptions of things like acceptance criteria, then setting up systems and tools your agents can use to verify how well they are meeting your product and technical requirements.
While I don't love the article, its wording and the rather pompous "/notes$ cat working-with-ai.md" gimmick ... oh you know what cat does?
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.
People seem to be conflating loss of control and predictable outputs with management. Maybe that's intentional spin or just wishful thinking.
If you're working for someone else, this is true. For people who are building for themselves, it's 100% leadership because managers don't decide what to build or how (at healthy organizations, anyhow)
I’d say strategy, which is a subset of management
I will offer a perspective on a currently incomplete thought. It is management, but it is management of how management imagines managing a human, which, lets face it, is not that great. In a weird way, management as a group now has almost exactly what they have always wanted: an answer presented in a cheerful and serious way that requires expertise to disprove as bs.
That is why them on the higher floors like it so much. The higher the flower, the more they like it
Maybe LLMs can have more than one valid way to come out the same quality outcome from different backgrounds and experiences.
Sounds like that leader should fire his agent.
I don't think there is much crossover unless your model responds well to being anthropomorphized.
I find LLM's to be very easy to manage since they at least to me, appear more rational the humans. Myself included.
I tell it "believe in yourself" and task goes from unsolvable to trivial.
It's human ;)
“Leadership”, whether you like the LinkedIn-ism or not (I also think it’s stupid), generally refers to upper management, not people management.
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”.
Leadership is a mutual influence process that happens outside formal authority. It’s not a corporate title or rung on a ladder. If one is a leader, that’s a status informally conveyed by the leader’s voluntary followers.
These are different definitions of the same term. Yes, “leadership” is a stupid word to co-opt, but it’s been used this way for 20+ years and I suspect that you know what the author means.
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.
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Yep a leader is simply someone people follow.
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.
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Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.
I think of leadership as distinct from management. Importantly, I think you can be in a position of leadership without needing to be in a position of management.
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.)
Being picky with words, you can be a manager of something other than people, it is the same broad skillset. Managing people has a few skills that are people-specific, obviously. But you can manage servers, manage widgets, etc.
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.
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Leaders lead. Managers manage. It is something you do, rather than your title.
Some leaders are also great managers. Some managers are also great leaders.
But not all managers are leaders.
The best distinction I have heard for ‘leadership’ vs ‘management’ is that you manage things but you lead people.
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.