The age of incredibly powerful 'manager nerds' is upon us, Anthropic cofounder says
Managers need to have "soft skills" like communication alongside harder technical skills. But what if the job becomes more about managing AI agents than people?
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says AI agents are ushering in an era of the "nerd-turned-manager."
"I think it's actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now, where I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful," he said on an episode of the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast last week.
"We're going to see this rise of the nerd-turned-manager who has their people, but their people are actually instances of AI agents doing large amounts of work for them," he added.
Clark said he's already seeing this play out with some startups that have "very small numbers of employees relative to what they used to have because they have lots of coding agents working for them."
He's not the only tech exec to predict AI agents will let teams do more with fewer people.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Stripe Sessions conference last week that tapping into AI can help entrepreneurs "focus on the core idea" of their business and operate with "very small, talent-dense teams."
"If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," Zuckerberg said.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in March that he thinks "vibe coding" — or using generative AI tools to quickly develop and experiment in software development — will help smaller startup teams do the work of 50 to 100 engineers.
"People are getting to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early stage venture," Tan said. "You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps."
AI researchers and other experts have warned there are risks to over-reliance on the technology, especially as a replacement to human manpower, including LLMs having hallucinations and concerns that vibe coding can make it harder in some instances to scale and debug code.
Mike Krieger, the cofounder of Instagram and chief people officer at Anthropic, said on a podcast earlier this year that he predicts a software developer's job will change in the next three years to focus more on double-checking code generated by AI rather than writing it themselves.
"How do we evolve from being mostly code writers to mostly delegators to the models and code reviewers?" he said on the " 20VC" podcast.
The job will be about "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale," he added.
A spokesperson for Anthropic previously told BI the company sees itself as a "testbed" for workplaces navigating AI-driven changes to critical roles.
"At Anthropic, we're focused on developing powerful and responsible AI that works with people, not in place of them," the spokesperson said. "As Claude rapidly advances in its coding capabilities for real-world tasks, we're observing developers gradually shifting toward higher-level responsibilities."
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