Software Managers have Dunning-Kruegar
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Software development managers (including directors and execs) usually suffer from a problem; they used to be engineers, and they still sort of think that they are. It’s common to hear them ask "what’s so hard about XYZ", or "can’t we just…", which generally requires a senior engineer spend 10-30min explaining that it just doesn’t work that way.
This kind of thing happened before LLMs, you’d have SDM’s gush over some new framework or technology (this was the whole reason you’d go to conferences - to sell flashy garbage to SDMs) and suddenly the whole organization has to suffer through a couple years of using istio, before that manager quits.
Claude in particular targets this weakness. Its tone (like many Californian LLMs) is very sycophantic - "You’re absolute right!", "Good idea!", "You nailed it" – they constantly and subtly reinforce that the manager really is an engineer still. These senior engineers are just being sticks in the mud, really. This is how organizations decide to ink contracts with Anthropic - deep down, the managers actually do believe that they don’t need engineers. They won’t always say it, but that’s the idea.
This is Dunning-Kruegar. If you know nothing about a topic, you freely admit you know nothing. But if you read a little bit about it, enough to understand the broad strokes, suddenly your estimation of your own skill skyrockets - "i know how to do that". But you don’t. You know about it, but you haven’t done it. Once you actually do it, those illusions are dispelled, and you go right back to realizing you know nothing.
SDM will have Claude write some small webpage or tool or golden-path feature, and they’ll ask why the team can’t just do what they did. Can it really be that hard to add a few new things to that?
But [[Production Kills the Vibe]]. The core of software engineering is managing complexity; not making an output happen. Your agent won’t make something production-ready on its own. When you, the manager, are frustrated that you could vibe something in a weekend that your engineering team says will take 3 months to launch, it’s because you only did 5% of the actual work required to put something in front of paying customers.
The usual [[Maximalism of the Gaps]] answer is - just write skills or agents to do that stuff! Your organization has a way it wants to do things, so, write it down and claude will do it. Unfortunately, [[Documentation is Always Wrong]]. Every organization has tried this, and the results haven’t shown any clear victories.
