[HN Gopher] Management as AI superpower: Thriving in a world of ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Management as AI superpower: Thriving in a world of agentic AI
        
       Author : swolpers
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2026-01-27 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.oneusefulthing.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.oneusefulthing.org)
        
       | Aurornis wrote:
       | > And there was something else: most early startups need to
       | pivot, changing direction as they learn more about what the
       | market wants and what is technically possible. By lowering the
       | costs of pivoting, it was much easier to explore the
       | possibilities without being locked in or even explore multiple
       | startups at once: you just tell the AI what you want.
       | 
       | In my experience so far, AI prototyping has been a powerful force
       | for breaking analysis paralysis.
       | 
       | In the last 10 years of my career, the slow execution speed at
       | different companies wasn't due to slow code writing. It was due
       | to management excesses trying to drive consensus and de-risk
       | ideas before the developers were even allowed to write the code.
       | Let's circle back and drive consensus in a weekly meeting with
       | the stakeholders to get alignment on the KPIs for the design doc
       | that goes through the approval and sign off process first.
       | 
       | Developers would then read the ream and realize that perfection
       | was expected from their output, too, so development processes
       | grew to be long and careful to avoid accidents. I landed on a
       | couple teams where even small changes required meetings to
       | discuss it, multiple rounds of review, and a lot of grandstanding
       | before we were allowed to proceed.
       | 
       | Then AI comes along and makes it cheap to prototype something. If
       | it breaks or it's the wrong thing, nobody feels like they're in
       | trouble because we all agree it was a prototype and the AI wrote
       | it. We can cycle through prototypes faster because it's happening
       | outside of this messy human reputation-review-grandstanding loop
       | that has become the norm.
       | 
       | Instead of months of meetings, we can have an LLM generate a UI
       | and a backend with fake data and say "This is what I want to
       | build, and this is what it will do". It's a hundred times more
       | efficient than trying to describe it to a dozen people in 1-hour
       | timeslots in between all of their other meetings for 12 weeks in
       | a row.
       | 
       | The dark side of this same coin is when teams try to rely on the
       | AI to write the real code, too, and then blame the AI when
       | something goes wrong. You have to draw a very clear line between
       | AI-driven prototyping and developer-driven code that developers
       | must own. I think this article misses the mark on that by framing
       | everything as a decision to DIY or delegate to AI. The real AI-
       | assisted successes I see have developers driving with AI as an
       | assistant on the side, not the other way around. I could see how
       | an MBA class could come to believe that AI is going to do the
       | jobs instead of developers, though, as it's easy to look at these
       | rapid LLM prototypes and think that production ready code is just
       | a few prompts away.
        
         | Exoristos wrote:
         | > In my experience so far, AI prototyping has been a powerful
         | force for breaking analysis paralysis.
         | 
         | So is an 8-ball.
        
           | cheschire wrote:
           | ... of cocaine.
        
           | gyanchawdhary wrote:
           | an 8 boll doesn't ship code .. which might be why you like
           | the comparison kind sir
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | Neither does AI prototyping.
        
             | gyanchawdhary wrote:
             | @layer8 .. yeah ... nobody claimed prototypes ship .. but i
             | guess they just prevent teams like yours from shipping
             | nothing.
        
         | alexhans wrote:
         | I haven't had the analysis paralysis problem because I've
         | always been quite decent at restructuring environments to avoid
         | bureocracy (which can one of the most dangerous things for a
         | project) but one thing I've observed is that If operations are
         | not ZeroOps then whoever is stuck maintaining systems will
         | suffer by not being able to deliver the "value adding cool
         | features that drive careers".
         | 
         | Since shipping prototypes doesn't actually create value unless
         | they're in some form of production environment to effect
         | change, then either they work and are ZeroOps or they break and
         | someone needs to operate on them and is accountable for them.
         | 
         | This means that at some point, your thesis of
         | 
         | "The dark side of this same coin is when teams try to rely on
         | the AI to write the real code, too, and then blame the AI when
         | something goes wrong" won't really work that way but whoever is
         | accountable will get the blame and the operations.
         | 
         | The same principles for building software that we've always
         | have apply more than ever to AI related things.
         | 
         | Easy to change, reusable, compostable, testable.
         | 
         | Prototypes need to be thrown away. Otherwise they're trace
         | bullets and you don't want to have tech debt in your tracer
         | bullets unless your approach is to throw it to someone else ans
         | make it their problem.
         | 
         | -----
         | 
         | Creating a startup or any code from scratch in a way that you
         | don't actually have to maintain and find out the consequences
         | of your lack of sustainable approaches (tech debt/bad
         | design/excessive cost) is easy. You hide the hardest part. It's
         | easy to do things that in surface look good if you can't see
         | how they will break.
         | 
         | The blog post is interesting but, unless I've missed something,
         | it does gloss over the accountability aspect. If you can
         | delegate accountability you don't worry about evals-first
         | design, you can push harder on dates because you're not working
         | backwards from the actual building and design and its blockers.
         | 
         | Evals (think promtpfoo) for evals-first design will be key for
         | any builder who is accountable for the decisions of their
         | agents (automation).
         | 
         | I need to turn it into a small blog post but the points of the
         | talk https://alexhans.github.io/talks/airflow-summit/toward-a-
         | sha...
         | 
         | - We can't compare what we can't measure
         | 
         | - Can I trust this to run on its own?
         | 
         | Are crucial to have a live system that makes critical
         | decisions. If you don't, have this, you're just using the
         | --yolo flag.
        
         | chunky1994 wrote:
         | > The dark side of this same coin is when teams try to rely on
         | the AI to write the real code, too, and then blame the AI when
         | something goes wrong. You have to draw a very clear line
         | between AI-driven prototyping and developer-driven code that
         | developers must own. I think this article misses the mark on
         | that by framing everything as a decision to DIY or delegate to
         | AI. The real AI-assisted successes I see have developers
         | driving with AI as an assistant on the side, not the other way
         | around. I could see how an MBA class could come to believe that
         | AI is going to do the jobs instead of developers, though, as
         | it's easy to look at these rapid LLM prototypes and think that
         | production ready code is just a few prompts away.
         | 
         | This is what's missing in most teams. There's a bright line
         | between throwaway almost fully vibe-coded, cursorily
         | architected features on a product and designing a scalable
         | production-ready product and building it. I don't need a mental
         | model of how to build a prototype, I absolutely need one for
         | something I'm putting in production that is expected to scale,
         | and where failures are acceptable but failure modes need to be
         | known.
         | 
         | Almost everyone misses this in going the whole AI hog, or in
         | going the no-AI hog.
         | 
         | Once I build a good mental model of how my service should work
         | and design it properly, all the scaffolding is much easier to
         | outsource, and that's a speed up but I still own the code
         | because I know what everything does and my changes to the
         | product are well thought out. For throw-away prototypes its 5x
         | this output because the hard part of actually thinking the
         | problem through doesn't really matter its just about getting
         | everyone to agree on one direction of output.
        
         | ryandrake wrote:
         | Most places I've worked, the "slow execution speed" wasn't
         | because it took a long time to physically write the code, but
         | it took a long time to get those other Analysis Paralysis
         | things you mentioned: consensus among multiple ImportantPeople
         | who all were expected to demonstrate "impact", agonizing over
         | risks (perceived and real), begging VPs/leadership for their
         | "buy-in", informing and receiving feedback from other vague
         | "stakeholders" and so on. The software writing itself was never
         | the bottleneck, and could be prototyped in 1/10th to 1/100th of
         | the time it took to actually make the decision to write it.
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | 5 years ago: ML-auto-complete - You had to learn coding in depth
       | Last Year: AI-generated suggestions - You had to be an expert to
       | ask the right questions         Now: AI-generated code - You
       | should learn how to be a PM         Future: AI-generated
       | companies - You must learn how to be a CEO         Meta-future:
       | AI-generated conglomerates - ?
       | 
       | Recently I realized that instead of just learning technical
       | skills, I need to learn management skills. Specifically, project
       | management, time management, writing specifications, setting
       | expectations, writing tests, and in general, handling and
       | orchestrating an entire workflow.
       | 
       | And I think this will only shift to the higher levels of the
       | management hierarchy in the future. For example, in the future we
       | will have AI models that can one-shot an entire platform like
       | Twitter. Then the question is less about how to handle a database
       | and more about how to handle several AI generated companies!
       | 
       | While we're at the project manager level now, in the future we'll
       | be at the CEO level. It's an interesting thing to think about.
        
         | tintor wrote:
         | one-shot doesn't mean what you think it means.
         | 
         | one-shot means you provide one full question/answer example
         | (from the same distribution) in the context to LLM.
        
         | philipwhiuk wrote:
         | > more about how to handle several AI generated companies!
         | 
         | The cost of a model capable of running an entire company will
         | be multiples of the market cap of the company it is capable of
         | running.
        
           | behnamoh wrote:
           | "AI-generated company" as in the AI writes the A-Z of the
           | code required to have a working platform like Twitter.
           | Currently it can build some of the frontend or some of the
           | backend, but not all. It's conceivable that in the future AI
           | can handle the entire chain.
           | 
           | Also you're forgetting the decreasing cost of AI, as well as
           | the fact that you can buy a $10k Mac Studio NOW and have it
           | run 24/7 with some of the best models out there. Only costs
           | would be the initial fixed cost and electric (250W at peak
           | GPU usage).
        
             | jplusequalt wrote:
             | >Also you're forgetting the decreasing cost of AI
             | 
             | AI is still being heavily subsidized. None of the major
             | players have turned a profit, and they are all having to do
             | 4D Chess levels of financing to afford the capex.
        
               | behnamoh wrote:
               | Even if AI subsidies go away, the Mac Studio scenario
               | still holds.
        
         | myth_drannon wrote:
         | No, no companies and no CEOs. Just a user. It's like StarTrek
         | replicator. Food replication. No you are not a chef, not a
         | restaurant manager, not agrifarm CEO but just a user that
         | orders a meal. So yes you will need "skills" to specify the
         | type of meal but nothing beyond that.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | If AI gets to be this sophisticated, what value would you bring
         | to the table in these scenarios?
        
           | behnamoh wrote:
           | > what value would you bring to the table in these scenarios?
           | 
           | I bring the table, AI brings the value.
        
             | candiddevmike wrote:
             | So... nothing. Glad we're in agreement here. If AI can do
             | all the things people hope/dream it can, there won't be any
             | value in doing it on behalf of folks. I would argue that
             | even some "AI provider" (if that could even be a thing
             | given a sophisticated enough agent) would see diminishing
             | returns as the tech inevitably distills into everyone
             | having bespoke agents running locally and
             | handling/organizing/managing everything (of whatever needs
             | managing, who knows).
             | 
             | Basically I don't see how you can be an AI maximalist and a
             | capitalist at the same time. They're contradictory, IMO.
        
               | behnamoh wrote:
               | what value do _you_ bring to the table or to this
               | discussion?
        
             | jplusequalt wrote:
             | Oops, sorry I already brought my own!
        
             | gritspants wrote:
             | "The value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed
             | juice. Much more."
        
           | wordpad wrote:
           | EVERY developer will own their own hyper niche SAAS?
        
         | andyfilms1 wrote:
         | I've never understood this train of thought. When working in
         | teams and for clients, people always have questions about what
         | we have created. "Why did you choose to implement it like
         | this?" "How does this work?" "Is X possible to do within our
         | timeframe/budget?"
         | 
         | If you become just a manager, you don't have answers to these
         | questions. You can just ask the AI agent for the answer, but at
         | that point, what value are _you_ actually providing to the
         | whole process?
         | 
         | And what happens when, inevitably, the agent responds to your
         | question with "You're absolutely right, I didn't consider that
         | possibility! Let's redo the entire project to account for
         | this?" How do you communicate that to your peers or clients?
        
         | jplusequalt wrote:
         | >While we're at the project manager level now, in the future
         | we'll be at the CEO level.
         | 
         | This is the kind of half baked thought that seems profound to a
         | certain kind of tech-brained poster on HN, but upon further
         | consideration makes absolutely zero sense.
        
           | behnamoh wrote:
           | thanks for your intellectual contribution to the HN
           | community.
        
             | jplusequalt wrote:
             | I think calling out ill thought out comments is a public
             | service. Especially because many people who read these
             | comment sections are not engineers.
        
               | behnamoh wrote:
               | I was being sarcastic; your comment was a low blow. You
               | didn't say _why_ you disagreed with it. Might wanna read
               | HN guidelines before leaving comments here.
               | 
               | @dang
        
               | hxugufjfjf wrote:
               | I'm not sure you can tag dang like that, but I don't
               | think its against the rules either.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | The moment we have true AGD (artificial general developer),
         | we'll also have AGI that can equally well serve as a CEO. Where
         | humans sit then won't be a question of intellectual skill
         | differentiation among humans anymore.
        
         | pksebben wrote:
         | I'd advise caution with this approach. One of the things I'm
         | seeing a lot of people get wrong about AI is that they expect
         | that it means they no longer need to understand the tools
         | they're working with - "I can just focus on the business end".
         | This seems true but it's not - it's actually more important to
         | have a deep understanding of how the machine works because if
         | the AI is doing things that you don't understand you run a
         | _severe_ risk of putting yourself in a very bad situation -
         | insecure applications or servers, code with failure modes that
         | are catastrophic edge cases you won 't catch until they're a
         | problem, data lossage / leakage.
         | 
         | If anything, managing the project, writing the spec, setting
         | expectations and writing tests are things llms are incredibly
         | well suited for. Getting their work 'correct' and not
         | 'functional enough that you don't know the difference' is where
         | they struggle.
        
       | pglevy wrote:
       | > I think many people have the skills they need, or can learn
       | them, in order to work with AI agents - they are management 101
       | skills.
       | 
       | I like his thinking but many professional managers are not good
       | at management. So I'm not sure about the assumption that "many
       | people" can easily pick this up.
        
       | philipwhiuk wrote:
       | > I find it interesting to watch as some of the most well-known
       | software developers at the major AI labs note how their jobs are
       | changing from mostly programming to mostly management of AI
       | agents.
       | 
       | "AI labs"
       | 
       | Can we stop this misleading language. They're doing product
       | development. It's not a "laboratory" doing scientific research.
       | There's no attempt at the scientific method. It's a software firm
       | and these are software developers/project managers.
       | 
       | Which brings me to point 2. These guys are selling AI tooling.
       | Obviously there's a huge desire to dogfood the tooling. Plus, by
       | joining the company, you are buying into the hype and the vision.
       | It would be more surprising if they _weren 't_ using their own
       | tools the whole time. If you can't even sell to yourself...
        
         | ajzushzb wrote:
         | AI works best when you're selling it (author fits in this
         | category as well).
        
           | wordpad wrote:
           | Reminds me of blockchains and blockchain advocates.
        
             | Ronsenshi wrote:
             | But of course - AI is exactly where all the crypto bros
             | moved to since hype around crypto went down.
        
           | gyanchawdhary wrote:
           | ... and perhaps AI sucks when you're fearful it collapses
           | years of "experience" into a prompt
        
             | Ronsenshi wrote:
             | If only there were no conflict of interest - since you're
             | directly invested in AI hype.
        
               | gyanchawdhary wrote:
               | Invested lol
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Commercially driven R&D labs have been around for a long time.
         | _Much_ of research and development has never followed the
         | "scientific method". There's nothing wrong with calling the
         | current set of AI companies "labs" when referring to their
         | research efforts. And their researchers are putting out plenty
         | of academic papers, sharing plenty of research results, so it's
         | not like there's any level of rigor that is lacking.
         | 
         | I don't know why you're trying to suggest some kind of
         | restriction on the word "lab", or based on what. Calling them
         | "labs" is perfectly normal, conventional, and justified
         | terminology.
        
       | ajzushzb wrote:
       | It's hard to take this author seriously given there's no way they
       | reviewed the work their students did.
        
         | pkilgore wrote:
         | It's vibes all the way down now.
        
       | augusteo wrote:
       | The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore. It's
       | deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways.
       | 
       | We've been running agent workflows for a while now. The pattern
       | that works: treat agents like junior team members. Clear scope,
       | explicit success criteria, checkpoints to review output. The
       | skills that matter are the same ones that make someone a good
       | manager of people.
       | 
       | pglevy is right that many managers aren't good at this. But
       | that's always been true. The difference now is that the feedback
       | loop is faster. Bad delegation to an agent fails in minutes, not
       | weeks. You learn quickly whether your instructions were clear.
       | 
       | The uncomfortable part: if your value was being the person who
       | could grind through tedious work, that's no longer a moat.
       | Orchestration and judgment are what's left.
        
         | auguste0 wrote:
         | Translation: Assimilate or die.
         | 
         | Patently shocked to find this on profile:
         | 
         | > I lead AI & Engineering at Boon AI (Startup building AI for
         | Construction).
        
         | lukev wrote:
         | > The skills that matter are the same ones that make someone a
         | good manager of people.
         | 
         | I disagree. Part of being a good manager of (junior) people is
         | teaching them soft skills in addition to technical skills --
         | how to ask for help and do their own research, and how to build
         | their own skills autonomously, how to think about requirements
         | creatively, etc.
         | 
         | Clear specifications and validating output is only a part of
         | good people management, but is 100% of good agent management.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | It's teaching them in the first place. You can't teach an
           | LLM. Writing a heap of AGENTS.md is not teaching. LLMs take
           | it as information, but they don't learn from it in any non-
           | superficial sense.
        
             | joe_mamba wrote:
             | _> You can't teach an LLM. _
             | 
             | Actually you can. Training data, then the way you describe
             | the task, goals, checkpoints, etc is still training.
        
             | js8 wrote:
             | With https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills you kinda can
             | teach new things. And also, I have little doubt Anthropic
             | reads these and future AIs might get trained on the most
             | popular recommendations.
             | 
             | Yes, it's a crutch. But maybe the whole NNs that can code
             | and we don't really know why is too.
        
         | pksebben wrote:
         | I've been saying it this whole time; it's not the engineers who
         | need to be concerned with being replaced - it's anyone involved
         | in the busywork cycle. This includes those who do busywork
         | (grinding through tedium) and those who create it (MBAs,
         | without apologies to the author).
         | 
         | Here's the thing - that feedback loop isn't a magic lamp.
         | Actually understanding _why_ an agent is failing (when it does)
         | takes knowledge of the problem space. Actually _guiding_ that
         | feedback loop so it optimally handles tasks - segmenting work
         | and composing agentic cores to focus on the right things with
         | the right priority of decision making - that 's something you
         | need to be curious about the internals for. Engineering,
         | basically.
         | 
         | One thing I've seen in using these models to create code is
         | that they're myopic and shortsighted - they do whatever it
         | takes to fix the problem right in front of them when asked.
         | This causes a cascading failure mode where the code is a
         | patchwork of one-off fixes and hardcoded solutions for problems
         | that not only recur, they get exponentially worse as they
         | compound. You'd only know this if you could spot it when the
         | model says something like "I see the problem, this server
         | configuration is blocking port 80 and that's blocking my test
         | probes. Let me open that port in the firewall".
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | > it's not the engineers who need to be concerned with being
           | replaced - it's anyone involved in the busywork cycle
           | 
           | This assumes there aren't "engineers" involved in the
           | busywork cycle, which I'm not sure is accurate.
        
             | pksebben wrote:
             | Depends on how you define it, i suppose. It's also not
             | black and white - everyone has some amount of busywork im
             | sure.
        
             | 8note wrote:
             | rather, it defines engineers as not being part of that busy
             | work
             | 
             | eg. the work wssnt for engineers in the first place, or
             | engineers worth their salt would have already automated it
        
         | enraged_camel wrote:
         | >> The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore. It's
         | deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways.
         | 
         | Actually I disagree. I've been experimenting with AI a lot, and
         | the limiting factor is marketing. You can build things as fast
         | as you want, but without a reliable and repeatable (and at
         | least somewhat automated) marketing _system_ , you won't get
         | far. This is especially because all marketing channels are
         | flooded with user-generated content (UGS) that is generated by
         | AI.
        
           | js8 wrote:
           | Recently, I came across Erich Fromm's distinction between
           | "being mode" and "having mode" (AI really explained it the
           | best, would paste it here but it's somewhat long). You're, in
           | contrast with parent post, looking at it from the "having
           | mode" - how to sell the "product" to someone.
           | 
           | But you can also think what would you want to build (for
           | yourself or someone you know), that would otherwise take a
           | team of people. Coding what used to be a professional app can
           | now be a short hobby project.
           | 
           | I played with Claude Code Pro only a short while, but I
           | already believe the mode of production of SW will change to
           | be more accessible to individuals (pro or amateur). It will
           | be similar to death of music labels.
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | >nd the limiting factor is marketing.
           | 
           | Depends if you're talking about new client acquisition or
           | expansion of existing products in order to assure your client
           | doesn't leave.
           | 
           | The issue I see with this, at least in enterprise, is while
           | we may fix some smaller plates of spaghetti, we're busy
           | building massive tangled pasta apps that do even more.
        
         | acedTrex wrote:
         | > The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore
         | 
         | Where are yall working that "writing code" was ever the slow
         | part of process
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | > The uncomfortable part: if your value was being the person
         | who could grind through tedious work, that's no longer a moat.
         | Orchestration and judgment are what's left.
         | 
         | What kind of work do you think people who deal with LLMs
         | everyday are doing? LLMs could maybe take something 60% of the
         | way there. The remaining 40% is horrible tedious work that
         | someone needs to grind through.
        
           | skybrian wrote:
           | Automating part of the grind means that the remaining grind
           | is more fun. You get more payoffs for less work.
        
             | mandevil wrote:
             | Removing all of the fun bits (here is an IDE, let's make
             | something) and some of the grind- but leaving only grind
             | behind- is a worse QoL, at least for me.
        
         | lifetimerubyist wrote:
         | "writing code" was never the limiting factor and if it was you
         | shouldn't be a developer
        
         | suriya-ganesh wrote:
         | This is verifiably false.
         | 
         | You still need to do most of the grunt work, verifying and
         | organizing the code. it's just you're not editing the code
         | directly. Speed of typing out code is hardly the bottle neck.
         | 
         | The bottleneck is visualizing it and then coming up with a way
         | to figure out bugs or add features.
         | 
         | I've tried a bunch of agents, none of them can reasonably
         | conduct a good architectural change in a medium size codebase.
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | >medium size codebase
           | 
           | There's a paper that came out in the latter half of last year
           | about this. I wished I kept its name/publisher around, but in
           | synopsis is once you reach a particular amount of complexity
           | in the task you're trying to achieve you'll run out of
           | context to process it, compressing the context still loses
           | enough details that the AI has to reconstitute those details
           | on the next run, again, running out of context.
           | 
           | Currently at least, the task has to have the ability to be
           | broken up in smaller chunks to work properly.
        
           | 8note wrote:
           | over time ive tried a bunch of people at that task too, and
           | the same problems seems to crop up with both, the
           | understanding about what to do and how to verify whether
           | thats the right track has always been where things break.
        
         | sublinear wrote:
         | > deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways
         | 
         | I feel like this was always true. Business still moves at the
         | speed of high-level decisions.
         | 
         | > The uncomfortable part: if your value was being the person
         | who could grind through tedious work, that's no longer a moat.
         | 
         | Even when junior devs were copy-pasting from stackoverflow over
         | a decade ago they still had to be accountable for what they
         | did. AI is ultimately a search tool, not a solution builder. We
         | will continue to need junior devs. All devs regardless of
         | experience level still have to push back when requirements are
         | missing or poorly defined. How is picking up this slack and
         | needing to constantly follow up and hold people's hands not
         | "grinding through tedious work"?
         | 
         | AI didn't change anything other than how you find code. I guess
         | it's nice that less technical people can now find it using
         | their plain english ramblings instead of needing to know better
         | keywords? AI has arguably made these search results worse, the
         | need for good docs and examples even more important, and we've
         | all seen how vibecoding goes off the rails.
         | 
         | The best code is still the least you can get away with. The
         | skill devs get paid for has always been making the best choices
         | for the use case, and that's way harder than just "writing
         | code".
        
         | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
         | > The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore
         | 
         | Was it ever? If you don't care about correctness and just want
         | the vibes, then hiring idiots for pennies and telling them to
         | write unlimited code was always an option. Way before "AI" even
         | existed.
         | 
         | And I mean pennies literally. Hell, people will do it for free.
         | Just explain upfront that you only care that the code
         | _technically_ works.
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | >then hiring idiots for pennies and telling them to write
           | unlimited code was always an option.
           | 
           | OMG, I see you also deal with ______ Bank.
           | 
           | What I have seen in enterprise organizations is enough to
           | turn a man pale and send him to an early grave.
        
       | Bukhmanizer wrote:
       | When thinking about automation people overindex on their current
       | class biases. For 20 years we heard that robots were going to
       | take over the "burger flipper" jobs. Why was it so easy to think
       | that robots could replace fast food workers? Because they were
       | the lowest rung on the career ladder, so it felt natural that
       | they would be the first ones to get replaced.
       | 
       | Similarly, it's easy to think that the lowly peons in the
       | engineering world are going to get replaced and we'll all be
       | doing the job of directors and CEOs in the future, but that
       | doesn't really make sense to me.
       | 
       | Being able to whip your army of AI employees 3% better than your
       | competitor doesn't (usually) give any lasting advantage.
       | 
       | What does give an advantage is: specialized deep knowledge,
       | building relationships and trust with users and customers, and
       | having a good sense of design/ux/etc.
       | 
       | Like maybe that's some of the job of a manager/director/CEO, but
       | not anyone that I've worked with.
        
       | afro88 wrote:
       | I thought I had a great startup idea. It was niche, but a solid
       | global market. It was unique. There was a genuine pain point
       | being solved. My MVP solved it. The pricing worked, the tiers
       | were sound.
       | 
       | At least ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude told me it was. I did so many
       | rounds of each one evaluating the other, trying to poke holes
       | etc. Reviewing the idea and the "research", the reasoning.
       | Plugging the gaps.
       | 
       | Then I started talking to real people about their problems in
       | this space to see if this was one of them. Nope, not really. It
       | kinda was, but not often enough to pay for a dedicated service,
       | and not enough of a pain to move on from free workarounds.
       | 
       | Beware of AI reviewing AI. Always talk to real people to
       | validate.
        
         | Bukhmanizer wrote:
         | It's weird when the failure modes of AI are similar.
         | 
         | I once solved a Leetcode problem kind of unorthodox and both
         | ChatGPT and Gemini both said it was wrong in the same way. Then
         | I asked both of them to give me a counter example and only
         | Gemini was able to realize the counter example would have
         | actually worked.
        
       | amadeuswoo wrote:
       | The "management as superpower" framing assumes people
       | thoughtfully evaluate AI output. In practice, most users either
       | review everything (slow, defeats the speed benefit) or review
       | almost nothing (fast, but you're trusting the AI entirely). The
       | MBAs who did well probably had domain expertise to spot wrong
       | answers quickly, that's the actual superpower, not generic
       | "management skill
        
       | 1313ed01 wrote:
       | Is there any hope of turning this around so I can still do fun
       | work and AI can take over the management roles instead?
        
       | fogzen wrote:
       | The linked tweets seem like exaggerations or hyperbole. "I
       | shipped 22 PRs yesterday, and 27 the day before" - huh? Are these
       | PRs just one-liner copy changes or something? Even if you're not
       | coding, you have to at least be verifying the changes right? At
       | 15min to run CI and deploy, that's 5.5 hours spent just for
       | changes to go into production. Spending just 15minutes to review
       | and verify and 15minutes to merge and deploy 22 changes is 11
       | hours, no breaks, no meals. Smells like bullshit to me.
        
       | ykurtov wrote:
       | That's his revenge at BigTech for dumping on MBA holders for
       | decades.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2026-01-27 23:00 UTC)