Working with AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding
A software engineer reflects on how AI collaboration mirrors leading a team, not programming a machine. The same request can yield different results, making predictability a thing of the past. The key, they argue, is to treat AI as a collaborator: share context, explain desired outcomes, and refine instructions over time. This shift demands better communication of intent, not just technical commands, turning software work into a conversational leadership exercise.
The technology is new. The leadership skills are not.
- miyoji
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.
- boron1006
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.
- flemhans
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.
- wewewedxfgdf
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.
- newsomix9xl
Maybe we need an LLM interface that is less chatty and unpredictable and focuses instead on boring, predictable execution of commands.
I know, weird idea: what if an LLM just shut up and did what we asked in as predictable a way possible?
Working with an LLM often feels like herding cats.
- VladVladikoff
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.
- Frannky
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!!
- cautiouscat
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.