If I were a stronger man, I would make a comment about dealing with people vs dealing with code and having to route around bugs that are both fundamental to the problem and a POV, along with some inherent in how I setup the program and simply someone else problem I've inherited to simply being burned into the hardware and will never be neatly papered over.

I think this comparison holds up. I've noticed that a lot of people I know who get really good results from LLMs and agents are people with significant people management experience.

Companies like Anthropic seem to understand that too. It's impressive how many CTOs and CEOs Anthropic have hired for individual contributor positions, which I think is because those leadership skills transfer surprisingly well to working with agents.

Of course, managing agents is massively easier than managing humans! You don't have to consider the agent's own desires, goals, opinions, or emotional state when telling them what to do. Humans have agency; agents (despite the name) do not.

Not for me.

My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.

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.

Not for me. By asking it to interview me, and then working through the options and their consequences, it feels more like the whiteboarding-with-a-colleague part of engineering. I don't have to remember to specify everything. The agent asks me things that it's unsure about, still ambiguous, or open questions. I have it write down all the decisions we made.

The resulting decisions are fed into the coding loop with guardrails derived from those decisions. The agent one-shots features once it goes into the coding loop.

Careful with the Hegelian master and servant dialectic. It does not always turn out the way the parasites want it to.

So software engineers weren’t already dealing with requirements gathering and contextualizing a problem from real humans or describing work to be done to other people on their team?

This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.

It feels like managing an egregious liar who speaks exclusively in corporate pyschobabble, is completely unpredictable, makes you want to blow your head off in most interactions, but yet is regularly good enough and cheap enough that you can't justify not working with this person - despite wanting desperately not to.

Working with AI feels like dealing with a bureaucracy. There seems to be rules but they're negotiable and illogical. Rules change constantly for no reason. Decisions are capricious and unappealable. But you can sometimes get your way if you carry on enough. It works better depending on the time of day, or some days it doesn't work at all, and it's hard to predict when, and when it's not working you're entirely blocked without a workaround.

Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.