Leaving aside the quibbling over the meaning of the word leadership, I'll say I personally agree with this sentiment. I returned to a senior IC role after six years managing a small team just as agentic coding was starting to happen. The timing was perfect, I got about 8 months to get my chops back up by hand (I had never really fully stepped away from coding) before the good agentic tools became available at my company.

It was interesting to observe the other engineers around me, none of whom had ever managed people. They tended to try to "program" the agent to produce exactly the code that they envisioned, and were very cautious, seemingly quite afraid that the agent would do something unexpected.

Having managed engineers, I was much more comfortable with asking someone to do something and having them do something more-or-less different from what I was expecting or had envisioned. Sometimes that was worse, sometimes better, than what I'd had in mind, but it was very rare that I would ask an engineer to do something and they would produce exactly the thing I'd imagined.

Having had that experience, I was quite comfortable giving a task to an agent and saying to myself, "Okay, let's see what you come up with," and then evaluating the result. And as with people I knew I had to learn the right way to talk to the agent in order to make myself understood, just as I'd had to learn the right way to talk to each person on my team.

The big differences were that (a) I didn't have to wait days or weeks to see what the agent came up with so the cost of being misunderstdood was much lower, and (b) the agents generally had much, much better reading comprehension than they typical engineer, so in fact I was misunderstood less often.