4 ms·
The word is "management", not "leadership". This comes across as a LinkedIn post filled with vague notions and weak writing. The conclusion also completely con
by miyoji 2mo ago
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.
- jnovek 2mo ago“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”.
- AuthorizedCust 2mo agoLeadership 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- spacechild1 2mo agoExactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.
- jnovek 2mo agoThese 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.
- Jare 2mo ago> 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)
- phil21 2mo agoYep 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.
- 7952 2mo agoI 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.
- AuthorizedCust 2mo agoVOLUNTARILY 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.
- simonw 2mo agoI 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.)
- roenxi 2mo agoBeing 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.
- jameshart 2mo ago… 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.
- andsoitis 2mo agoLeaders 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.
- jameshart 2mo agoThe 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.
- terrut 2mo agoI 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.
- andai 2mo agoI tell it "believe in yourself" and task goes from unsolvable to trivial. It's human ;)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- DrewADesign 2mo agoSounds like that leader should fire his agent.
- LogicFailsMe 2mo agoSure 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.
- netsharc 2mo agoAnd 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.
- LogicFailsMe 2mo agoBabylon 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 https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Apocalypse_Box What has surprised me is that JMS has never seemingly noticed this.
- rayiner 2mo ago> 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.
- netsharc 2mo agoJuniors turn to seniors. You can never trust AI won't glitch... lol
- 2mo ago
- rayiner 2mo ago> 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.
- krisoft 2mo agoSure, 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.
- mikeocool 2mo agoIf 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.
- khuey 2mo agoYes, 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.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoIsn't that just regular management?
- Muromec 2mo agoRegular 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.
- newsomix9xl 2mo agoThat'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.
- creato 2mo agoYou'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.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoI 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.
- Muromec 2mo agoThat is why them on the higher floors like it so much. The higher the flower, the more they like it
- sixhobbits 2mo agoManagement 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)
- pixelready 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- matherial 2mo agoIt'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.
- usrusr 2mo agoTempted 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.
- jayd16 2mo agoPeople seem to be conflating loss of control and predictable outputs with management. Maybe that's intentional spin or just wishful thinking.
- 8by3 2mo agoWhile 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.
- j45 2mo agoMaybe LLMs can have more than one valid way to come out the same quality outcome from different backgrounds and experiences.
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoIf 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)
- AbstractH24 2mo agoI’d say strategy, which is a subset of management
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]