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
I agree with this piece and, also,... I suspect that's why people end with "management brain" (brain rot): it operates by having you bark orders at it, like a micro-managing boss; you're not doing the work, but telling others what to do and how to do it.
rolandog
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
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
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
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
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.
toprerules
Whoever thinks this is the case might have managed people but has never led them.
clickety_clack
This has been my case. I feel like I am ordering them to do task and verifying that they do exactly what I tell them to do. Rinse and repeat. My empty mind wanders off into thinking what task can I ask them to do.
orsenthil
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.
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
rolandog
VladVladikoff
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
My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.
wewewedxfgdf
cautiouscat
This isn’t leadership, it’s just communication. Suddenly realizing that real SWE is full of soft skills isn’t a novel epiphany.
toprerules
clickety_clack
orsenthil
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...
velcrovan