Never Forgive Them
complete delegation
Linus shares his evolving perspective on chat interfaces and his experience building a fully autonomous chatbot agent. He argues that learning to trust and delegate to such systems without micromanaging the specifics is key to collaborating with autonomous AI agents in the future.
I've changed my mind quite a bit on the role and importance of chat interfaces. I used to think they were the primitive version of rich, creative, more intuitive interfaces that would come in the future; now I think conversational, anthropomorphic interfaces will coexist with more rich dexterous ones, and the two will both evolve over time to be more intuitive, capable, and powerful.
I kept checking the database manually after each interaction to see it was indeed updating the right records — but after a few hours of using it, I've basically learned to trust it. I ask it to do things, it tells me it did them, and I don't check anymore. Full delegation.
How can I trust it? High task success rate — I interact with it, and observe that it doesn't let me down, over and over again. The price for this degree of delegation is giving up control over exactly how the task is done. It often does things differently from the way I would, but that doesn't matter as long as outputs from the system are useful for me.
Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity
Unfortunately, I have never experienced anything I'd call leadership from anyone that has called themselves a member of "the leadership team". From my friends, yes. From some serious thinkers, yeah. From "leadership", not even close. Instead, society presents us with an endless parade of people parroting nonsense ranging from the insanely over-excited ("Get shit done! Woo!") to the utterly soulless ("Continuous Improvement Playback & Strategy"). Shut the fuck up! All we do is land the output of APIs in a warehouse, guys. You sound insane.
These people are running some horrific version of leadership that consists entirely of them turning up and repeating the same tired cliches on a loop. Reduce silos. Be more Agile. We must go forward, not backwards. Can you imagine how fucked in the head you'd have to be to imagine you can hold a four hour unrehearsed session and that you expect it to be so good that you demand everyone be there for it?
I don't think leadership roles should really exist in many domains, as I've indicated earlier. Leadership should naturally flow between team members based on the task being performed, competence of each member, and psychodynamic energy (read again: vibes) on any given day.