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- Hacker News
- > As a leader, I can explain a task and get exactly what I asked for.
Doubt. This sentence reads strange and disconnected. The scan of the article results in 100% ai generated.
by pjio - I love the level of empowerment they unlock for super cheap. I have a personal assistant that's a Slack bot talking to ohmypy on an old Mac M1 turned into a server. It has access to my calendar, remembers the things I need to remember, and pulls data from a gym tracker—an app I vibecoded just for myself—to pull books and papers and create audio, and easy to digest introductions that help me understand a paper before reading it. Plus, the system leverages the Getting Things Done method to help me stay on top of things.
I can save ideas and ask a CLI terminal to work on them. If I want to do something advanced, I can use Zed, but even from my phone via remote control, I can talk to agents. I always approve the plan before handing off the task.
It's crazy, it's like having a personal assistant and an army of junior engineers. And you can just use a ZDR provider and an open-source harness to stay private and not share your data.
And the models keep getting better and better!!
by Frannky - "I want to do something advanced" - what exactly? What is exactly your contribution in this endless rat race?by bah9
- 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.
by simonw - If you consider Anthropic’s software as “good results” than I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite.by slopinthebag
- but managing humans is simpler in many ways, too: there's accountability for one. and it's much easier to reason about the capability boundary of a human.
- The people I’m seeing getting really good results are the opposite. Strange.by GPerson
- Give some examples of the good results these kind of people are getting out of it...by nx77
- Coding is dead, so do my joy of this profession. If I wanted to become full time manager - I would do it earlier
Ok, guys, it's been fun 10 years. Yes, I am silly nerd who enjoyed understand problem and create HIS OWN solution
Agentic coding is like playing chess with an engine and telling it what opening to use. I guess some do enjoy it
Honestly surprised how many people feeled relief becoming managers instead of coders. I guess we - people who enjoyed coding - always were just a loud minority
And please, don't reply to me with this nonsensical bs about "ye ye I am still owner of my code and I just scaled my knowledge". I worked with ai too much and seen too much people to believe it
by bah9 - I love(d) coding. I also love leveraging LLMs to create so many projects that I otherwise would not have done.
- yes coding is dead but i like having less rounds with QA and more "nice to have" juice in my projects .
i feel that what i miss the most is not the coding it self but the effort i used to put in to it. no effort no dopamine no happy.
since i got into the coding because it's a tool to solve problems, and now i have a better tool to solve the same problems, this is what im working on reclaiming, the effort part.
- The words "management" and "leadership" are used to convey many kinds of meaning, so I think it is important to elaborate carefully what we mean when we say that "working with LLMs is more like <x>".
For me, one of the most important aspects of leadership is having a long-term vision, and being able to communicate it. In other words, it answers the question of WHAT.
One of the most important aspects of management is being able to organize resources to materialize that vision. In other words, it answers the questions of WHO and WHEN.
We still need to answer the question of HOW -- which require the expertise -- architecture and implementation.
All of these elements are necessary when doing anything -- even by myself -- but become even more important when using many external resources to do it -- be it a team of people or a team of LLMs.
by kukkeliskuu - 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.
by toprerules - I don’t agree with the leadership argument; it’s definitely management. But one of the most important aspects of leadership is communication.by bicepjai
- 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.by cautiouscat
- every week theres a new vibe coding manifesto, more detached from reality than the last.
it'll pass, but until then we'll be subjected to a litany of dumb hot takes.
by pydry - 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.
by wewewedxfgdf - > 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
- Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.by peder
- These days I have a good intuition as to where an agent can actually do what I want as opposed to creating spaghetti. The best analogy I have come up with is that LLMs are like water and will take the shape of the bowl you build.
The upside is that there's way more water than bowl. The catch is that you have to be the type of person who could build the bowl in the first place.
by vatsachak - 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.by dotancohen
- 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.
by graceful6800 - 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’ve basically stopped hiring devs for my company
So you were just hiring devs to tell them what to do? I honestly like having the self organizing and problem solving that comes from hiring good people, and that I could trust people without dictating. Companies always benefited from that from what I saw. I guess this is why I never liked shops that outsourced to external contractors, and why I don't like "agentic" ai dev.
by gedy - This might need controversial but there were too many devs to begin with. I'm young and know people who are getting jobs, it's just that they actually enjoy programming.by vatsachak
- The task is very simple: Thousands of super fast fairly good contractors show up at your company's front door. You can't really trust them with data, they do occasionally make mistakes, they have to learn everything about your organization and product from scratch, and btw they leave in 10 minutes again.
If you can design your organization to handle this, you gain superpowers. And of course this is a management problem rather than coding exercise.
by flemhans - The art is to try and rape your contractors, give them prep work to do on their own time, then treat them like employees.
I don't fall for that anymore though.
by sscaryterry - Interesting analogy but inaccurate. The time AI can spend on tasks these days is much, much longer than 10 minutes.by BenzeneDream
- 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.
by boron1006 - Future president in the making.by butterknife