alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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”.
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.