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.
“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.
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.
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.
To me, working with AI feels a lot like the previous experiences of “working in a sprawling enterprise codebase spanning multiple systems each with emergent behavior”, except now I can outsource the introspection and validation loops to something that never gets bored instead of spending 2h hyping myself up to concentrate for a 3h stint.
I was already in a management position when this started. But I also have 20 years of development experience. So for me it has been a super power. I do feel bad for all the devs trying to break into the industry right now though, it must be hard. I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company. I haven’t fired anyone but I have no plans to expand the team, even as our workload increases as the companies keep growing.
I agree completely. Maybe binge vibe coding is "management" or "leadership" but for actually building production applications all the classic low-level concerns still apply. VIM keybindings didn't change that, autocomplete and syntax highlighting didn't change that, and having an LLM write the actual lines of code doesn't change that.
Sounds dubious. Every software architect that I encountered who did not code at the same time was a bit of an embarrassment. But everyone pretended that they know what they are doing either because they (usually management) could not evaluate usefulness or expertise of these so called "architects" or because we simply needed to keep our jobs to pay the bills.
I feel like I'm the crazy one these days for using LLMs as tools. I don't write code anymore, but I still do the same level of engineering. I get fantastic results with minimal slop, and I feel it's because I still use my goddamn brain and engineering skills.
The way I use LLMs seems to be most analagous to the way vibecoder's LLMs use subagents. They exist to solve a bounded task or to write specific code in support of the engineering model in my head. I intentionally never did much research into how others were using LLMs before starting myself, and it seems like that was a good thing. It seems like the majority of people have given up on thought and just slam "do my job with no mistakes or hallucinations" into a prompt and then get confused and angry when it doesn't work. Or worse, don't check if it worked and ship anyway.
In my view, it has aspects of both leadership and development.
You need to direct agents to do work worth doing and then you need to understand the output. Some of the emotional parts of management are gone since agents don't care if you tell them to throw everything away and take a different approach. Some of the therapeutic parts of development are gone since you don't need to hand craft a clever code structure.
I wouldn't say it's more like one or the other though. One of the most important jobs of a leader is finding work worth doing for their team. One of the most important jobs of a developer is ensuring system cohesion. Both of these are hard jobs.
To me, AI failure cases look like doing either of these jobs poorly:
1. Writing a big pile of tools that really provides no user value
2. Not reading the code and ending up with broken systems
I first saw this point made by Venkat Rao more than a year ago in "Prompting is Managing" [1]. It was written in response to the "Your brain on ChatGPT" paper that was then making the rounds, about how LLM use is supposedly making people stupid.
Venkat argued that the study subjects did poorly not because LLMs were dulling their minds, but because the study subjects were freshman students with no management skills being tested on tasks that required delegation, quality gating and exception handling. The study put people in a situation that created role confusion and concluded that the poor outcomes were due to "cognitive debt" induced by LLM use.
This hasn't been my experience whatsoever. Maybe I just don't vibecode, but it still feels like coding, I'm just not typing the letters. I'm still thinking about the domain, the separation of concerns, all that software architecture jazz.
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.
My Eng lead has no coding experience, 25 years of management experience, yet has driven 3 separate projects into technical bankruptcy to date.
He just accepts anything that Claude says as truth. He vibecoded over 60,000 lines of code in 3 weeks, but couldn’t get it to do what he want and made a project overrun for 3 extra months. When the pissed off stakeholders called a meeting to ask what was going on he didn’t show up and sent his junior engineer to answer questions and take the blame. Now thats leadership.
For me, it's more like natural language coding, or maybe technical management of envs, states and tools. Leadership is about humans, feelings, personal differences or soft skills
Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.
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.
Built a production API almost entirely AI-assisted recently. Didn't feel like leadership to me, felt more like code review at a much higher volume. I wasn't delegating decisions, just constantly checking the generated code actually did what I needed lol.
I actively do it in a way, where i steer and understand the important bits. Because otherwise the cognitive and technical debt would annoy me to a point, where i would want to do software at all.
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.
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.
Maybe if you weren't really coding to begin with, or didn't enjoy it. There's a ton of "temporarily embarrassed CEOs" who seem to be unable to think about LLMs as anything but their employees, which is an incredibly limiting perspective in my view.
Anyone who's fallen in love with programming itself and doesn't see software production as a means to an end is not really likely to see things like this.
I see AI as an accelerator of implementing my own choices. I'm generally opposed to metaphors, designs or strategies which excessively anthropomorphize it; it seems completely wrong-headed and counterproductive.
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 when it's not working you're entirely blocked without a workaround.
Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.
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.
Perhaps some of the people who got into traditional leadership roles got there due to factors besides their raw leadership abilities. LLMs are an equalizer, and with them, the inability to lead them simply becomes a "skill issue", for the lack of a better term.
An equalizer, yes. They lift up those with little skill, and they drag down the top talent.
This is a practical effect by which top talent is neutralized. Where they should lead people, they talk to models instead. ...now you have a generation of leaders that don't deal well with any real emotion or disagreement. They can steer but not lead -- many no longer believe in the value or efficacy of leading people.
Of course you are also right to point out that many people in "traditional leadership roles" have been content to sit back and steer rather than heading of the charge. I still wish to command both talents: steering and leadership. I refuse to flatten myself out to fit in better, and I always have.
I agree with the OP's point. But if you've worked in a corporate environment, isn't that just how it is? Like how programming work and getting promoted to a manager are essentially different careers—they feel like fundamentally different things.
They're different kinds of work, and both are interesting in their own way. But in the freelance market, LLMs have already become the baseline, so I have to use them whether I like it or not. There are both pros and cons.
It's good to be able to read code and understand its structure, but writing code and reading it to transform it into a different structure are different skills. There's definitely some decay in raw coding ability, though. So I use LLMs for professional coding and for tasks that I couldn't do before, while I keep hand-coding smaller things that feel manageable.
Honestly, I think most people who hate LLM coding actually hate being forced to use it under workplace pressure. And when LLM output looks bad, it's often because managers tend to be strict about their subordinates' work but lenient about their own. Once an LLM generates something, people tend to get attached to it and become more forgiving—since it feels like they made it.
It's tough that LLMs have made deadlines tighter. But these days, compared to the old days when I had to go through interviews and conversations to build a proposal, I actually find it more convenient that clients send me proposals written by LLMs. There are pros and cons to everything.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To me, working with AI feels a lot like the previous experiences of “working in a sprawling enterprise codebase spanning multiple systems each with emergent behavior”, except now I can outsource the introspection and validation loops to something that never gets bored instead of spending 2h hyping myself up to concentrate for a 3h stint.
I was already in a management position when this started. But I also have 20 years of development experience. So for me it has been a super power. I do feel bad for all the devs trying to break into the industry right now though, it must be hard. I’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company. I haven’t fired anyone but I have no plans to expand the team, even as our workload increases as the companies keep growing.
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.
I agree completely. Maybe binge vibe coding is "management" or "leadership" but for actually building production applications all the classic low-level concerns still apply. VIM keybindings didn't change that, autocomplete and syntax highlighting didn't change that, and having an LLM write the actual lines of code doesn't change that.
> deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
/wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o
The /wayfinder Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM
Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.
Sounds dubious. Every software architect that I encountered who did not code at the same time was a bit of an embarrassment. But everyone pretended that they know what they are doing either because they (usually management) could not evaluate usefulness or expertise of these so called "architects" or because we simply needed to keep our jobs to pay the bills.
I feel like I'm the crazy one these days for using LLMs as tools. I don't write code anymore, but I still do the same level of engineering. I get fantastic results with minimal slop, and I feel it's because I still use my goddamn brain and engineering skills.
The way I use LLMs seems to be most analagous to the way vibecoder's LLMs use subagents. They exist to solve a bounded task or to write specific code in support of the engineering model in my head. I intentionally never did much research into how others were using LLMs before starting myself, and it seems like that was a good thing. It seems like the majority of people have given up on thought and just slam "do my job with no mistakes or hallucinations" into a prompt and then get confused and angry when it doesn't work. Or worse, don't check if it worked and ship anyway.
In my view, it has aspects of both leadership and development.
You need to direct agents to do work worth doing and then you need to understand the output. Some of the emotional parts of management are gone since agents don't care if you tell them to throw everything away and take a different approach. Some of the therapeutic parts of development are gone since you don't need to hand craft a clever code structure.
I wouldn't say it's more like one or the other though. One of the most important jobs of a leader is finding work worth doing for their team. One of the most important jobs of a developer is ensuring system cohesion. Both of these are hard jobs.
To me, AI failure cases look like doing either of these jobs poorly:
1. Writing a big pile of tools that really provides no user value
2. Not reading the code and ending up with broken systems
I first saw this point made by Venkat Rao more than a year ago in "Prompting is Managing" [1]. It was written in response to the "Your brain on ChatGPT" paper that was then making the rounds, about how LLM use is supposedly making people stupid.
Venkat argued that the study subjects did poorly not because LLMs were dulling their minds, but because the study subjects were freshman students with no management skills being tested on tasks that required delegation, quality gating and exception handling. The study put people in a situation that created role confusion and concluded that the poor outcomes were due to "cognitive debt" induced by LLM use.
[1]: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managin...
Point made by an LLM and not Rao. This article is purely generated garbage and does not refute "Your brain on ChatGPT" at all.
This hasn't been my experience whatsoever. Maybe I just don't vibecode, but it still feels like coding, I'm just not typing the letters. I'm still thinking about the domain, the separation of concerns, all that software architecture jazz.
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.
I don’t agree with the leadership argument; it’s definitely management. But one of the most important aspects of leadership is communication.
My Eng lead has no coding experience, 25 years of management experience, yet has driven 3 separate projects into technical bankruptcy to date.
He just accepts anything that Claude says as truth. He vibecoded over 60,000 lines of code in 3 weeks, but couldn’t get it to do what he want and made a project overrun for 3 extra months. When the pissed off stakeholders called a meeting to ask what was going on he didn’t show up and sent his junior engineer to answer questions and take the blame. Now thats leadership.
For me, it's more like natural language coding, or maybe technical management of envs, states and tools. Leadership is about humans, feelings, personal differences or soft skills
Yeah this has removed all the boring and annoying part of building software for me. I can focus on the problems to solve and the solutions, and iterate much faster. Debugging has never been this easy. It's crazy.
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.
The people I’m seeing getting really good results are the opposite. Strange.
Give some examples of the good results these kind of people are getting out of it...
https://status.claude.com/
Built a production API almost entirely AI-assisted recently. Didn't feel like leadership to me, felt more like code review at a much higher volume. I wasn't delegating decisions, just constantly checking the generated code actually did what I needed lol.
Yes, i was thinking what was this feeling as im doing my MBA and this is it.
Its really interesting especially having different agents with different prompts and then having each one based on their reasoning, etc
I actively do it in a way, where i steer and understand the important bits. Because otherwise the cognitive and technical debt would annoy me to a point, where i would want to do software at all.
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.
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.
Yes, the Führerprinzip. Slop coders will meet their Stalingrad soon due to technical debt and so will AI corporations due to financial debt.
Maybe if you weren't really coding to begin with, or didn't enjoy it. There's a ton of "temporarily embarrassed CEOs" who seem to be unable to think about LLMs as anything but their employees, which is an incredibly limiting perspective in my view.
Anyone who's fallen in love with programming itself and doesn't see software production as a means to an end is not really likely to see things like this.
I see AI as an accelerator of implementing my own choices. I'm generally opposed to metaphors, designs or strategies which excessively anthropomorphize it; it seems completely wrong-headed and counterproductive.
For every choice I make it makes a dozen choices though.
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 when it's not working you're entirely blocked without a workaround.
Just astounding we decided to put a DMV in our IDEs.
I don't have good leadership or good management or good people skills. I can use AI just fine as run of the mill software engineers.
Pointless, stupid article. Digital garbage, as garbage as LLM slop. So many words to say nothing.
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.
Why are LLM users such poor leaders then?
To go anywhere serious you have to lead people, but even the ones who should be leading people are heads down talking to the LLM
Perhaps some of the people who got into traditional leadership roles got there due to factors besides their raw leadership abilities. LLMs are an equalizer, and with them, the inability to lead them simply becomes a "skill issue", for the lack of a better term.
An equalizer, yes. They lift up those with little skill, and they drag down the top talent.
This is a practical effect by which top talent is neutralized. Where they should lead people, they talk to models instead. ...now you have a generation of leaders that don't deal well with any real emotion or disagreement. They can steer but not lead -- many no longer believe in the value or efficacy of leading people.
Of course you are also right to point out that many people in "traditional leadership roles" have been content to sit back and steer rather than heading of the charge. I still wish to command both talents: steering and leadership. I refuse to flatten myself out to fit in better, and I always have.
I agree with the OP's point. But if you've worked in a corporate environment, isn't that just how it is? Like how programming work and getting promoted to a manager are essentially different careers—they feel like fundamentally different things.
They're different kinds of work, and both are interesting in their own way. But in the freelance market, LLMs have already become the baseline, so I have to use them whether I like it or not. There are both pros and cons.
It's good to be able to read code and understand its structure, but writing code and reading it to transform it into a different structure are different skills. There's definitely some decay in raw coding ability, though. So I use LLMs for professional coding and for tasks that I couldn't do before, while I keep hand-coding smaller things that feel manageable.
Honestly, I think most people who hate LLM coding actually hate being forced to use it under workplace pressure. And when LLM output looks bad, it's often because managers tend to be strict about their subordinates' work but lenient about their own. Once an LLM generates something, people tend to get attached to it and become more forgiving—since it feels like they made it.
It's tough that LLMs have made deadlines tighter. But these days, compared to the old days when I had to go through interviews and conversations to build a proposal, I actually find it more convenient that clients send me proposals written by LLMs. There are pros and cons to everything.