So you've given in and now you're an agentic coder. Congrats, you're a manager now. Two years ago I moved to an IC role after running a startup and a team of ~50 people, as agentic work and particularly agentic coding has steadily come to prominence, I've found myself using skills from my past life and I realised managing a cluster of agents is quite similar to managing a team of people. Framing it like this has actually helped me figure out how best to work with these agents. So the parallels I think are worth being aware of are:

  1. You don't do the actual work - this can be disconcerting for an IC becoming a manager. You occasionally just want to do it yourself, but realise letting your team make the mistakes, learn from it and improve for the next time is the best long term strategy. Manager advice, make sure you take the time to give your team feedback and in the case of agents make sure they log it.
  2. Connected, you will spend a lot of time reviewing. This can't be stressed enough in the agentic work, to be effective you need to figure out how to follow the logic your team has followed and get in their heads. This can be more difficult with agents than people actually, they will have weird blind spots you wouldn't have thought of. Make sure you're clear with yourself about what you need to do this efficiently and communicate those expectations.
  3. They're insanely smart, your job is to make sure they have what they need, get out the way and make sure they don't veer off track. Recognise your luck of getting to work with and manage an A team!
  4. You will be context switching brutally. The only way to get good at this is just to do it. It's exhausting and hard and probably the worst thing about being a manager.
  5. You will have to learn to adapt your communication style to your team, they will not adapt to you. Each LLM has some nuances, tics and communication traps. This is uncannily just like real people and a skill you have to learn. Agents, like people react best if you speak their language.
  6. To get the best out of your new team, eventually you will have to define a set of norms you want them to operate in, set some ground rules on how you work and figure out the best way to make sure everyone sticks to it. Take the time to craft decent Skills etc. on this topic to save time in the long run.
  7. You will have context your team doesn't. You will need to think carefully about what they need to know and what they don't need to know and time your communication of what they do need to know carefully. This again just takes practice. Over sharing is just as bad as undersharing.
  8. You will feel conflicted about claiming responsibility for your team's success. Of course it's not like you have to reward and recognise agents, but still, it's a bit weird claiming you did all this work when really it was your team that executed. This is actually a similar sensation for managers managing people IMO.
  9. Your agents cost money just like people and you will be under pressure from the managers above you to get value for money. You have responsibility for a real cost centre now, it's helpful for the business to think about it as something to be managed carefully.
  10. You've got to do some hiring! It's your responsibility to pick the best team for the job. Keep an eye on the market and make the case to recruit more resources when needed. You will be judged by your own manager on your ability to do this well.
  11. Managing upwards. You will have had to do this already as an IC, but you're now one step removed from the work so you need to factor in a little extra contingency on the expectations you set to your own manager.

Clearly, the main difference is that agents are not people and you won't have to stress about a whole host of problems that only people have that have absolutely nothing to do with work, so at least there's that.