The bottleneck has moved from coding to what you call managers. The aspects of managers you list make sense to me. It changes how you work. Paul Graham describes this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The interleaving is tighter though. Managers are used to work in one-hour blocks. That’s not how you work with coding agents.
But I think one element is overlooked. The bottleneck is not really these kinds of management. In fact, some of those can and will be pushed to the agents too. The real bottleneck is specification. In smaller orgs that is happing in grooming sessions often between stakeholders and the dev team where the developers ask question about special cases the stakeholder didn’t even thought possible. In larger orgs that is the more specialized role of business analysts. But it amounts to the same thing: You need to understand the domain of the business well enough. A domain no LLM will know much about. Not even if you feed it all the available documentation, because much of that often procedural knowledge is in people’s heads.
The bottleneck has moved from coding to what you call managers. The aspects of managers you list make sense to me. It changes how you work. Paul Graham describes this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The interleaving is tighter though. Managers are used to work in one-hour blocks. That’s not how you work with coding agents.
But I think one element is overlooked. The bottleneck is not really these kinds of management. In fact, some of those can and will be pushed to the agents too. The real bottleneck is specification. In smaller orgs that is happing in grooming sessions often between stakeholders and the dev team where the developers ask question about special cases the stakeholder didn’t even thought possible. In larger orgs that is the more specialized role of business analysts. But it amounts to the same thing: You need to understand the domain of the business well enough. A domain no LLM will know much about. Not even if you feed it all the available documentation, because much of that often procedural knowledge is in people’s heads.