I am working on building development tools that optimize for the workflow of an engineer working as a management of agents. I call it an agentic management environment; think of it as an “agent manager’s IDE” designed for experienced technical users. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic.
Agents are intelligent tools that can do a lot, sure, but from a human organizational perspective, they are still best treated as tools. Fundamentally, AIs can be spun up and down at will while humans cannot, so you don’t need to design AIs into your org chart (just form AI “task forces” instead!) while you do need to for humans.
Consequently, although I agree that managing agents is a radically new way of doing work and that it’s effective enough to be the future of engineering (and knowledge work more generally), I would be wary of overly anthromorphizing AI agents and thinking of engineers as operating as managers. You can think of them as “AI managers” and many concepts from the technical parts of a management role carry over, but that is something like 30% of the job of a manager overseeing people. The other 70% are completely different.
Yes, the intention is not to analogize managing bots with managing people, but to say that management was never really about people management, that was instrumental to the real goal of managers, which is to manage outcomes for the business, which is what we now are asking ICs to do since they don’t have to spend so long writing code.
Yeah I agree with your point, I think all I wanted to point out is a problem in terminology, since I find the “manager” word confounded by the people manager meaning.
Also, I don’t think responsibility for business outcomes alone is enough to call someone a manager—a lot of roles do directly own business outcomes, especially at smaller companies, without usually being called a “management” role. (Though I can’t really think of a better word for this at this moment.)
However, the word manager does have a sense of “delegation/management of other agents or complex systems, usually to create multiplicative impact”, which applies equally whether you’re managing humans or AIs. I think that’s the sense I’m trying to convey when I say “AI manager”.
I am working on building development tools that optimize for the workflow of an engineer working as a management of agents. I call it an agentic management environment; think of it as an “agent manager’s IDE” designed for experienced technical users. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic.
Agents are intelligent tools that can do a lot, sure, but from a human organizational perspective, they are still best treated as tools. Fundamentally, AIs can be spun up and down at will while humans cannot, so you don’t need to design AIs into your org chart (just form AI “task forces” instead!) while you do need to for humans.
Consequently, although I agree that managing agents is a radically new way of doing work and that it’s effective enough to be the future of engineering (and knowledge work more generally), I would be wary of overly anthromorphizing AI agents and thinking of engineers as operating as managers. You can think of them as “AI managers” and many concepts from the technical parts of a management role carry over, but that is something like 30% of the job of a manager overseeing people. The other 70% are completely different.
Yes, the intention is not to analogize managing bots with managing people, but to say that management was never really about people management, that was instrumental to the real goal of managers, which is to manage outcomes for the business, which is what we now are asking ICs to do since they don’t have to spend so long writing code.
Yeah I agree with your point, I think all I wanted to point out is a problem in terminology, since I find the “manager” word confounded by the people manager meaning.
Also, I don’t think responsibility for business outcomes alone is enough to call someone a manager—a lot of roles do directly own business outcomes, especially at smaller companies, without usually being called a “management” role. (Though I can’t really think of a better word for this at this moment.)
However, the word manager does have a sense of “delegation/management of other agents or complex systems, usually to create multiplicative impact”, which applies equally whether you’re managing humans or AIs. I think that’s the sense I’m trying to convey when I say “AI manager”.