Comment by gopalv

> They are hesitant to take their hand off the wheel because they don’t have full confidence the agents have the right guardrails in place to run off on their own.

This is not a new problem, I've had this problem every summer when a new batch of interns show up.

As they say, if an intern can bring down production, it is not the intern's fault.

The interns are generally so much better than me at writing code, but they're not the best at "software development" (I call it "software gardening").

My training regime is to push them up the next 4 leadership levels from "writing code" - delegation, negotiation, vision and inspiration.

Agents are barely at delegation, with multi-agent harnesses.

They don't negotiate with you, they say yes.

Their vision is limited to the context you gave and most of their output is uninspiring (you can smell "Claude did this" on a UX design pattern easily).

But the humans, they've been thrust into delegation on day 1 & unless you've been a tech-lead manager, you probably haven't exercised that skill yet. Even if you have done that, the way agents work is not exactly how humans work [1] in terms of incentives or even try something they think won't work.

If you've been a good IC for years, the company could always afford to hire a human who specializes in those skills and suddenly you've been promoted to a new role without a pay bump or even a choice.

Most of the "Let's add agents and go faster" is basically adding more manpower to a project behind schedule and the payback is missing because that causes communication gaps & dropped messages.

[1] - https://tinyurl.com/orchestration-imperative