Prompting agents without reading the code is just management

Kenton Varda: building software by prompting agents without ever reading or editing the code “isn’t actually a new thing. It’s just called being an engineering manager”, a different skill with decades of accumulated practice behind it. The analogy is genuinely useful, but it has a gap worth holding onto: a human team carries far more durable memory and shared context between tasks than an agent team does, so the management playbook doesn’t transfer cleanly.