Summarizer

I find these agents incredibly useful for eliminating time spent on writing utility scripts for data analysis or data transformation. But... I like coding, getting relegated to being a manager 100%? Sounds like a prison to me not freedom. That they are so good at the things I like to do the least and still terrible at the things at which I excel. That's just gravy. But I guess this is in line with how most engineers transition to management sometime in their 30s.

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it. Science and the academic world I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue. Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it. Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.

You might be right about a Leetcode effect and the difficulty to find new interesting positions. But OP wasn't stressing that at all but the desire to architect and manage. I might have put to much emphasis of the managing and too less on the urge to architect and see things from above. I agree. I am scientist and worked from time to time as a research engineer merely to pay the bills, so I may see things differently. I always like doing lab / field work and first-hand data analysis. Many engineers I know would likely never stop tinkering and building stuff. It may be easier for a scientist than for an engineer to still get trilled, I don't know.

I actually don’t think the author wants to become a real manager, he wants to play a video game where he sends NPCs around to do stuff. Real managers deal with coaching, ownership, feelings, politics, communication, consensus building, etc. The people who are good at it like setting other people up to win.

As a manager who is trying to do all the things you listed well, I would love it to be more like a game sending NPCs around. Ignoring the macro implications of AI, even if very successful at or resistant to it, I’d think there would be very, very few people who are actively seeking people drama. Educating kids can be fun, but educating adults in the business domain is almost always a drag as in any given professional room, you would be very lucky to find one person who is genuinely there out of curiosity rather than obligation or fomo.

I think you might have missed the point > I’d think there would be very, very few people who are actively seeking people drama Theoretically as a manager you get the bump up the power dynamic ladder (and probably pay ladder) because you are taking on the responsibility of "people drama". Being a good manager is antithetical to treating living, breathing human beings as NPCs in a game.

Engineering, to me, is simply "the art of compromise." You can't do that from a high level abstract position. You actually need to stand at the coal face and think about it from time to time. This article encodes an entitled laziness that's destructive to personal skill and quality work.

The article made it seem that the tool made them into the manager of a successful company, rather than the author of a half finished pet project

There’s a whole new genre of blog posts that are just “finally thanks to AI everyone will know how smart I am. Watch in awe as I tell something to do stuff for me”

It’s a fun example, because openclaw is the boss in it and you are the agent.

I think some of it might be genuine. For people that don't code (like management), going from 0 to being able to create a landing page that looks like it came from a big corporation is a miracle. They are not able to comprehend that for anything more complicated than that, the code might compile, but the logical errors and failure to implement the specs start piling up.

> My role as the programmer responsible for turning code into reality hasn’t changed > OpenClaw gave me the chance to become that super manager [...] A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work These two propositions seem to be highly incompatible

> My answer is: become a “super manager.” Honestly I'd rather die

> A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work. That’s what management really is. I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a what happens with good managers .

Indeed. When I was just starting every blog and tweet screamed micro-management sucks. It does if the manager does this all the time. But sometimes it is extremely important and prevents disasters. I guess best managers just develop the hunch and know when to do this and when to ask engineers for smallest details to potentially develop different solutions. You have to be technical enough to do this

It is a really impressive tool, but I just can’t trust it to oversee production code. Regardless of how you isolate the OpenClaw instance (Mac Mini, VPS, whatever) - if it’s allowed to browse the web for answers then there’s the very real risk of prompt injection inserting malicious code into the project. If you are personally reviewing every line of code that it generates you can mitigate that, but I’d wager none of these “super manager” users are doing that.

When everyone can become a manager easily, then no one is a manager.

I think in the future this might be known as AI megalomania

Sounds like someone who doesn't like writing code.

This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it was fun nonetheless. I've been applying for jobs but I don't want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam, I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO LARPing at its finest. Also a big fan of giving it access to my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I need to read or update. I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.

I think a sizable proportion of people just want to play "large company exec". Their dream is to have an assistant telling them how busy their day is, all the meetings they have, then to go to those meetings and listen to random fluff people tell them while saying "mmh yeah what a wise observation" or "mmh no not enough synergy here, let's pivot and really leave our mark on this market, crunch the numbers again". I can't come up with any other explanation for why there seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that much to show for it. They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out of it.

> LARP'ing CEO My experience with plain Claude Code is that I can step back and get an overview of what I'm doing, since I tend to hyperfocus on problems, preventing me from having a simultaneous overview. It does feel like being a project manager (a role I've partially filled before) having your agency in autopilot, which is still more control than having team members do their thing. So while it may feel very empowering to be the CEO of your own computer, the question is if it has any CEO-like effect on your work. Taking it back to Claude Code and feeling like a manager, it certainly does have a real effect for me. I won't dispute that running a bunch of agents in sync won't give you an extension of that effect. The real test is: Do you invoice accordingly?

What has this “team” actually achieved? I keep reading these manager cosplay blogs/tweets/etc but they aren’t ever about how a real team was replaced or how anything of significant complexity was actually built.

If my aim was to be a manager, I would have graduated a business university. But I want to have my hands and head dirty of programming, administering, and doing other technical stuff. I'm not going to manage, be it people or bots. So no, sorry. And 99% those AI-created "amazing projects" are going to be dead or meaningless in due time, rather sooner than later. Wasted energy and water, not to mention the author's lifetime.

This sort of post is useless without examples. What projects have you built? How did you go about it? What challenges did you face? What did you learn? Just saying “this is amazing now I am a super manager turning out projects left and right” is not convincing.

This reads like a peacocking LinkedIn post where someone desperately shows they are not just with it, they are ahead of it. The space is absolutely filled with this sort of noise, primarily people who dismissed AI as something only the nubs like, so now their cope is to do the "now it's useful and I have catapulted ahead of all the others bit".