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.
miyoji
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.
boron1006
Unfortunatly average 'leadership' never had the required skills to lead technically critical 'stuff', and, maybe counterintuitively, because, code is cheap now, right, AI amplified the incompetence.
PeterStuer
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.
flemhans
Finally a post about agentic-coding that's aligned with my thinking.
I treat the experience like I'm managing adolescent Kal-El in a junior dev role.
The kid's strong, fast and smart and does best when I do best by providing clear instructions and guidance in prompts and reference docs.
I also say hello, please/thank you and ttys
fitsumbelay
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.
wewewedxfgdf
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.
VladVladikoff
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.
cautiouscat
I listened to a podcast comparing coding with AI to ‘directing,’ in the sense of directing a film. But I guess it depends on the level of technical involvement vibe coders have with the project. For me, it’s still very close to coding, even though I don’t write most of the code.
deandi007
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.
comments (10)
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.
miyoji
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.
boron1006
PeterStuer
If you can design your organization to handle this, you gain superpowers. And of course this is a management problem rather than coding exercise.
flemhans
I treat the experience like I'm managing adolescent Kal-El in a junior dev role. The kid's strong, fast and smart and does best when I do best by providing clear instructions and guidance in prompts and reference docs.
I also say hello, please/thank you and ttys
fitsumbelay
My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
wewewedxfgdf
VladVladikoff
cautiouscat
deandi007
This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.
toprerules