this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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I think in your mental model lies the very popular misconception that humans are any good at coding, and that architects were able to do their jobs because they were sitting on top of competent operators.
I'd argue that this is wholly untrue. In fact, for 30 years the software development field has produced mountains of sociology and processes designed to coerce good software out of idiots writing arbitrary code. Idiot subordinates is the baseline here, not an anomaly introduced by AI.
I'd even go further and say that current gen AI is marginally better than the average developer so as an architect you're still herding cats but the cats are marginally less crazy than they were, say, 10 years ago. The methods are roughly the same : deep roadmaps, shallow sprints, frequent iterations and constant supervision. It's not ideal but it has produced all the software known to man, including critical life-or-death stuff.
At least, human agents can take responsibility for their actions, and they learn. When they fail to do so, they get fired.
You're right, it's not only that the subordinate is an idiot. It's also a pathological liar that never learns and can't take the blame for their fuckups.
If a subordinate persistently sneaks in bad code despite being told not to, this is grounds for dismissal as far as I'm concerned.
It looks like you're attributing human intentions to a machine, that can't be healthy. You're also dismissing how humans routinely lie, deflect blame (especially when their job is at stake), or fail to learn for a myriad of valid reasons.
Agents don't "sneak in" bad code, or "lie". They get shit wrong sometimes, or they get lazy at the tail end of a long task, which are not categorically new things in software development. Even excellent engineers do it. If your only response to that is to say "yeah but i can fire them" then you are a bad lead. Just some corpo mid-manager eager to push blame and consequences at your underlings instead of creating a system that allows them to perform within their individual limitations.
You're right that they don't learn in that the model doesn't re-weight itself based on your feedback but that one is so trivially solved that it's not even a subject. Haven't you ever worked with brilliant stoner/creative types ? They forget shit all the time so you learn to write everything down and devise stratagems so the relevant information they keep forgetting is pushed to the front of their mind regularly. Well, i'd do that, but you'd just fire them on the spot i guess.
My point is : on the one hand you're overestimating the failure modes of AI, and on the other hand you're dismissing the failure modes of humans. With the added simplistic authoritarian thinking "i'd fire them anyways if they don't behave".
Being a good lead means knowing when someone's not going to cut it, and when to let them go to protect the rest of the team. My boss recently failed to do so, and 3 people got laid off as a result because the money spent on the rotten apple was used compensating for their lackluster output and could not be used to pay the good employees' salaries.
Additionally, it also means seeing through your colleagues' bullshit (blame deflection, deception) and reacting accordingly. And even when you see through the bullshit, you sometimes need to compromise and learn to tolerate it because the tradeoff is worthwile. Sometimes.
Thanks for judging my performance as a lead based on fuck all. Now, moving on the point at hand.
You're spot on when saying that LLMs are not human beings and don't have intentions. The truth is, I don't actually care. The tech is advertized as a replacement for human programmers, and I judge on its actions in that context.
Moving back to your point - you're right that it doesn't lie. It's an analogy. However, it gaslights like a pathological liar and does the things it's been specifically told to not do, and does so repeatedly. If a human acted similarly, it'd be gone without delay, even when omitting the quality issues it has which humans also have.