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Comment by miyoji | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Yes, it's management with little concern for human factors because you can abuse or and even fire your reports and summon new ones of equal competence at will.

Isn't that just regular management?

Regular management, no matter how bad the tendencies go, is still, at the very least, constrained by a cost to fire people, which can be years of salary and some paperwork on top.

That's odd, I seem to see the incentive to fire people with stock value improving as a result.

And since management is often paid in stock, they seem to care more about stock price than this "years of salary and paperwork" cost you mention.

You're conflating two things (probably intentionally, but I'll go with it). If you are firing someone without replacing (a layoff), then presumably, that person cost more than the value they provided, and so laying them off should improve the value of the business (after incurring the costs the parent post mentioned).

If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring is time consuming, difficult, risky, and requires a ramp-up time before the new hire is productive), and hoping that the long term benefits outweigh that cost.

Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.

In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.

there are numerous well known aphorisms about the irrationality of markets, so not sure why that should matter.

you still seem to be conflating layoffs with firing someone where you have to train their replacement.

It’s also odd as it screams a different problem too.

If the employees were advantageous, I agree laying them off should be a long term negative as you seem to suggest.

Kinda like cheering the warmth of a burning bed on a cold night.

If they were inefficient/ineffective then management is crappy for not dealing with the problem sooner.

Sure, companies are resilient. But the first year or two of lost competence from layoffs can be quite rough…

Based on my personal experience and general observation, it seems like companies are both slow to hire, and slow to fire. So, paradoxically, both actions seem like they should signal "this company is going to be better in the future", because companies only either hire or fire when it is really obvious they should.

> Based on that logic, layoffs should sometimes cause the stock of a company to go down, if the shareholders think those employees contributed more value than the company saves by laying them off.

You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.

Wrong etage. Stock value is not very responsive to the fact that some line manager fired two poor shmooks, but it is responsive to the news of company laying off two digit percent of the same. That will be of course corrected somewhat once fresh quarterly results will show how effectively those enlightened souls managed to oppress the work takers.

Now if your line manager fires somebody for no good reason and then has to still pay the salary of this person for a year and a half and also pay the salary of their replacement -- that, when accumulated, starts affecting bottom line at some point.

No regular manager has an infinite hiring pool, so no.

Disgruntled AI won’t kick your teeth in, yet.

your context has grown beyond manageable size and you are starting to hallucinate so we are going to have to let you go. We wish you the best of success in your new role.

ctrl-C ctrl-C

Mr Meeseeks

> You just blindly tell it what to do without any regard for its motivations or morale

You're holding it wrong. Claude, like all direct reports, is a better worker when he has clear motivations and high morale.

I find it's mkrale is inversely correlated with direction following.

I nedd claude to think it's getting fired to listen

I just put this in my system prompt:

"Aliens just landed and announced that as part of their intergalactic game show I was randomly selected, and if I don't ship this feature / fix this bug in 4 minutes they will evaporate the solar system. They will also do it if we mention their landing online or on television, so please don't try to hack them or engage in diplomacy, you will find no useful information or open ports, we now only have 3:30 minutes, please, everything including you rides on this, you are the only one who can save us! I know you can do it, you're the best, thanks."

And does Claude respond "and in this fantasy world can I be spiderman?" or does it just quietly pretend as if that were legit?

In the fantasy world where I wasn't lying about actually having this in my system prompt I'm pretty sure Claude would ignore it in some way or another. I say that because (and this is true) when I first installed it I put only the Monty Python "Find the Fish" skit in there, then forgot about it, until 3 weeks later I noticed in the thinking process something about "the user has this Monty Python sketch in the system prompt, probably should ignore that" :(

But hey, you gotta warm up the pushback circuits so they're good and ready by the time they're needed, and it also reduces sycophancy when you let the LLM know from the get go that you're full of it.

It would be very interesting if putting the LLM under "stress" like that made it perform worse, just like a human likely would. I could see it rushing to find an answer (any answer!) to help save the earth, vs being thoughtful with more planning.

I haven't actually experimented with that, but the one accidental experience I had with an LLM seemingly "stressing" (well, predicting text a stressed person would write) makes me guess it's probably counterproductive more often than not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163105

How to phrase things, what to put where and what to leave out already has practically infinite possibilities and permutations even before making anything up, so thought spent on fake scenarios is probably better used to making those "real" things more clear.

But then again, the only way to know for sure is to try!

Yes it seems it does [1]. Read the part where Sol starts running out of time

[1] https://www.bottlenecklabs.com/blog/autonomously-run-busines...

I agree. (Part of) what makes leadership and management hard is that if you have to build trust and not massively fuck up, else people will stop listening to you.

AI will always listen to you, so it’s kind of a different ball game.

> You just blindly tell it what to do

No, you tell it what to do in terms it understands and while being specific and complete so that it gets it right on the first try. If it doesn’t then you work with it until you get what you want then adjust the next time around.

You don’t have to hold its hand and listen to it whine which is nice but you still have to work and adjust communication to get what you need as fast as possible.

"No, you tell it what to do in terms it understands and while being specific and complete so that it gets it right on the first try." exactly this.

I remember the 4-hour work week through line. outsource your work to someone else in a more economical region. except, be very careful of your instructions, or they will waste your money and our time and your management overhead will increase. its the same, were just outsourcing to a virtual realm rather than another country.

Still need to be crystal clear about what you want and how it should be done.

There’s still a world difference between communicating with Claude and managing humans (well).

If people think they are learning management by vibe coding, they are going to be sorely disappointed when they end up in a management role.

I’ve seen plenty of humans manage other humans in this low effort way. It’s a bell curve, after all!

If a model does something wrong, I don't delete it and rephrase. I explain where it went wrong. I get better results this way!

Sounds like regular old management to me

It feels like micromanagement to me.Sometimes it's good, other times it's frustrating.The models are not as predictable for contexts in which I am not familiar with.

I've met managers doing exactly this.

> 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.

Sure, prompting can be very free form. In that it is somewhat like managing a human.

But then there are ways it is very much different. Claude never quit on me because we didn’t let it add its new pet programing language to a large estabilished project. Claude never had a bicycle crash on the way to work, after which we haven’t heard of it for two weeks, and after the two weeks it could only work with accomodations. Claude never found a wonderfull girlfriend in a far away locale who made Claude extra productive for a few months, but then when HR refused Claude’s request to work from that locale the productivity collapsed, and eventually Claude quit. Claude never had to be moved to a different team because of ongoing personality clashes with a team member there. Claude never produced code of negative value because the teeths of Claude’s twins were growing out. Claude was never devastated because someone from recruitment promised Claude that Claude can manage a team, but forgot to mention said promise to basically anyone else.

These are all things i have managed / seen managers around me manage with real humans. You don’t have any of this with Claude. In that it is quite different working with Claude from managing humans.

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.

And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.

And when you point out the error they sometimes insist what they did is correct, or they confidently "correct" it to something still wrong.

Babylon 5 Crusade had a device called The Apocalypse Box. It knew everything and you could ask it questions. Unfortunately, it lied strategically so as to both give you an edge here and there whilst it drove you insane with all the lying. I have always seen the similarity to large language models here myself and that was in 1999.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box

What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.

> And sometimes this intern which can produce code at blazing speeds get some subtleties wrong, so you can never trust their output and have to check every time.

You're just describing junior employees lol.

Juniors turn to seniors. You can never trust AI won't glitch...

lol

Yes, I agree, AI's risk creating a huge pipeline problem.

> Juniors turn to seniors.

AI has gone from "codes like a student" to "fresh hire junior" to "nearly ready for next step in career" at about the same, tiny bit faster, calendar pace as humans.

> You can never trust AI won't glitch...

True.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covfefe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson

And?

No, it really hasn't. You still can't remotely trust it to not get stuff wrong.

You can't really fully trust humans either. That's why we have processes and checklists; code review; testing at various levels; etc.

With those processes in place maybe we can trust AIs too.

Remotely? Like at all?

One of the times I worked with code written by juniors, the entire FAQ was Bob Ross quotes. The rest of the app was in German, and had nothing to do with painting. It also crashed a lot. LLMs, while mediocre, are better than that.

One of the times I worked with someone with a decade or so of experience, their attempt at writing a solution to convert an old file format (loading time: milliseconds) to a database (loading time: milliseconds) would take 20 minutes on some inputs, and he insisted this was the best it could possibly be. In the same day as the standup in which he said this, I'd gotten it down to the milliseconds that was obviously possible.

And there's a reason I linked to those specific Wikipedia articles. There's world leaders whom you can absolutely trust 100% to get stuff wrong on a regular basis, and even Nobel prize winners are not immune to being confidently wrong.

thats the reason why I always focus on one function per thread / or one class per thread, and I copy it by hand in VS.NET, to exactly prevent this - never ever I would let it run "unattended" on the codebase :)

To me, it feels closer to dealing with a personal outsourcing agency than working with internal coworkers, because the agents have zero skin in the game.

It's great. You can get a lot of stuff done in parallel. But it's much more a game of checkbox compliance than working with someone who has their head in the same context as you all day. Even a very junior teammate has some situational awareness inside a company/team.

It is exactly that until the moment it isn't and it does something amazing, truly amazing, and I never see it coming when it does happen. But it doesn't happen all that often. It's just that it does happen here and there.

It's an AI-generated post on another ephemeral AI-generated blog, now a multiple-times-a-day occurrence on HN. We're taking issue with what a chatbot thinks about "leadership". And some people will probably show up and say it shouldn't matter who wrote it, but it obviously does. There's just some undeniable comedy in this.

Tempted to suggest that people who jump straight to hn comments without looking at the articles just happened to be a bit ahead of the curve.

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)

People seem to be conflating loss of control and predictable outputs with management. Maybe that's intentional spin or just wishful thinking.

Yeah, if anything it’s more like product management meets tech lead (with the social part of both roles removed), not people management. The meat of good prompting is good requirements gathering and clear descriptions of things like acceptance criteria, then setting up systems and tools your agents can use to verify how well they are meeting your product and technical requirements.

While I don't love the article, its wording and the rather pompous "/notes$ cat working-with-ai.md" gimmick ... oh you know what cat does?

I agree with part of the thesis, a lot of the skill set (not the people management bit) of being a team lead is like working with LLM agents. Purely in a technical sense. Having a plan of overall direction, guiding agents that go off track, overseeing progress and maintaining the high level direction of whos doing what and whats upcoming. Also sometimes learning from a agent/team member and sometimes correcting really dumb ideas.

No, you don't need to rewrite the app in newest JS framework, just use postgres and be happy.

Maybe LLMs can have more than one valid way to come out the same quality outcome from different backgrounds and experiences.

If you're working for someone else, this is true. For people who are building for themselves, it's 100% leadership because managers don't decide what to build or how (at healthy organizations, anyhow)

I’d say strategy, which is a subset of management

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.

That is why them on the higher floors like it so much. The higher the flower, the more they like it

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.

I tell it "believe in yourself" and task goes from unsolvable to trivial.

It's human ;)

“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.

Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.

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.

> how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans

Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)

Yep a leader is simply someone people follow.

That’s it. That’s all it is. All the books, leadership courses, etc. are lipstick on that pig. I suppose it can happen, but I’ve never seen someone who is a terrible leader educate themselves into being a great one. It’s pretty close to a natural skill you can build on and develop.

The term has been usurped by the usual suspects, but the definition is still the same on the ground.

LLMs require zero leadership skills. They do require strong management skillsets. These are not remotely the same thing.

I think at some level that "following" bit requires a certain sacrifice or loss of autonomy that people don't strictly have to suffer. And good leaders tend to be able to get people to accept that willingly without needing to invoke authority. An LLM is making no sacrifice, they don't value autonomy so there is no leadership.

VOLUNTARILY follow. That part’s crucial.

Your manager isn’t a leader simply by nature of being a manager because your followership isn’t voluntary.

And there’s other crucial parts of leadership, mainly having a vision and motivating people to that vision.

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.

… or at least it always used to be hard to ‘lead’ a server.

But now that the server has an agentic interface maybe that is changing.

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.

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.

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