I am a manager. I hate being a manager. Granted, I manage a whopping two people (two and half, if we're being realistic about job tasks), but I still don't enjoy it. I understand it is a necessary evil in a company of size greater than two, and on the whole it isn't too bad. I am very lucky to work with talented hard working people.

What I don't enjoy, however, is the AI incursions into my life that make me have to put on my manager hat beyond my regular people-management responsibilities. There are two aspects to this. One is AI nuisances in daily life, such as Gmail's persistent suggestions, or AI search results clogging up what I'm actually looking for. On this front, I am no longer a user of a computer in control of the machine; I have become a parent to a child second guessing everything I'm saying. And as a parent of a 3 month old and a 5 year old, I certainly am not seeking more of this in my life.

Thirty years ago, the problem used to be formulating my thoughts in a way the computer could parse, and as long as your intentions aligned with what the computer was capable of, you could have your way: a keystroke produced a character in a textbox, a formula entered produced a list of figures, a search query produced a list of results. You were solely responsible for what you got.

Today, the situation is scarcely better in terms of end result, but the frustration in getting there is dramatically heightened. Now I need to plead with the computer that yes, I did mean to type what I did. No don't autocorrect it. And for God's sake stop shoving words into my mouth! Search results are no longer the best guess of what I meant, and instead a full-on re-interpretation of my words in order to fit my query to results that it would like to present to me. It is the equivalent of interacting with someone who finishes all of your sentences. And as "efficient" as that may be, a paucity of words spoken was never the goal. I must now manage the over-eager employee all too happy to please, at every turn of my computing life. AI is a system that wishes to offload the burden of responsibility for taking action without assuming the responsibility of understanding the intended result.

The second aspect is the use of AI at work. While I have managed (ha!) to avoid it until now, it is seeming more and more like an inevitability, as that is how the world of software engineering is shifting. I am not a brilliant software engineer or architect. My only advantages are having thought of combinations or trying them before other have, and most of the time it takes 3 or 4 iterations before I stumble upon the "right" way to build something. AI is supposed to help with this situation, by cutting down the iteration time, or removing it altogether. But where I previously could understand the failings of iterated designs by having worked through them, how am I to evaluate the output of an AI now? Claude can draft design documents explaining every decision it made, while I'm not even sure what questions should have been asked.

People liken AI to junior employees. In the same way I don't particularly enjoy managing, I don't particularly enjoy mentoring either. I have always been a cowboy coder, and working with others does not come easily. Where AI in daily life second guesses me, I must now second guess the LLM in every interaction. It is now my problem to break down tasks into small chunks so that the AI can go off independently and not go wild while working on them. I'm left doing the highest risk and lowest reward part of the job. This is not why I chose this career.

I always like to go back to the analogy with home building. Using an LLM is like having to specify the location of every nail and screw in your blueprints, for fear that the AI will frame your wall with 100 screws per stud. And while I'm sure the county building department would be happy to see this level of detail (who am I kidding, they'll spite you even harder), this is simply not how people work in practice. In the process of framing a house, you may find a stud interferes with a pipe or a structural member blocks access to fastening, and you adapt. You are a skilled carpenter; you can figure out a workaround on the spot that meets code. Now, do you trust an LLM to do that, at every encounter where a spec conflicts with design architecture? This is a level of micromanagement that would make me throw up my hands and do it myself.

Since the dawn of mankind, we have sought to use technology to automate our lives or make our lives easier in some way. As a programmer, I think of it as the natural tendency to invest in laziness. In the modern age, what more laziness is there to achieve? We can eat food straight out of can while our eyes are glued to screens streaming enough content to fill a hundred lifetimes. The only advocates of AI at this point are corporations, in the demand for ever higher "productivity". This is productivity entirely divorced from the size of the harvest from an acre of land. This is productivity aimed at extracting more value out of human capital, at engineering more financial instruments to rig markets, and build more addictive engagement platforms.

And I am being asked to manage it.