{"slug": "is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes", "title": "Is coordinating a fleet of AI agents the same as managing a team of people? Yes, but mostly no.", "summary": "A 15-year engineering team lead argues that managing AI agents is fundamentally different from managing human teams, despite surface-level similarities in coordination. The author contends the comparison devalues both people management and agentic engineering skills, proposing instead that engineers should view themselves as principal engineers or film directors orchestrating agent squads rather than team managers. The distinction matters because 36% of leaders expect their teams to manage agents within five years, and conflating the two skill sets risks misdirecting professional development.", "body_md": "I’ve led engineering teams in some form for around 15 years now, and recently found myself not quite agreeing with what seems like a fairly common sentiment: that managing AI agents is in many ways the same as leading a team of people. This statement sets off my spidey-sense for some reason, which I hadn’t given enough thought to until now.\n\nI kinda get why people say this, because at face value it *sort of* makes sense, and there are some parallels. You’re coordinating some number of entities (whether human or [clanker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker)\n) with some common goal or deliverable in mind. Yes, it’s nuanced, and yes I’m skirting around some details (look - I’ve rewritten this piece like 6 times already to try to reduce the ranting and rabbit-holing that I tend to do).\n\nThe framing isn’t malicious or baseless. [Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born)\nhas 36% of leaders expecting their teams to *manage* agents within five years, and 28% considering “AI workforce manager” roles. Anthropic has an `agent teams`\n\n[feature](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams)\nwith `team lead`\n\nand `team mate`\n\nsemantics. My issue isn’t with the word “manage” (English is hard), it’s with the often-inferred leap from *engineers will manage agents* to *therefore engineers need engineering management skills*.\n\nI take exception to the comparison because it devalues or trivialises both sets of skills: those needed to lead people well, and those needed to excel at “agentic engineering”. It also risks people taking the statement too literally and thinking that they need to upskill in the wrong areas, or worse might discourage or disengage people who specifically don’t want to be managers.\n\nSo how do I think of it? What’s a better comparison or analogy?\n\nFrom a skill point of view, I think good agentic engineering needs skills often displayed by some of the best Staff/Principal engineers I’ve worked with: coordinating and motivating groups of engineers who don’t report to you, aligning them on a common vision or goal, then providing guardrails and oversight that empower them to deliver on that goal. So perhaps rather than thinking of yourself as a micro-managing team leader, think of yourself as the Principal engineer of your own little squad of agents. 🤖\n\nYou’re not managing a team of agents. You’re the principal engineer of an agent squad: setting scope and guardrails, reviewing the work, course-correcting, holding the product and architectural line.\n\nMost of what makes managing humans hard isn’t the coordination. It’s the longitudinal stuff. Career growth over years. Psychological safety. Motivation when someone loses their drive. Trust built over years. The moral weight of holding power over someone’s livelihood. None of this applies to your fleet of AI agents.\n\nFrom a more abstract or aggregate point of view, rather than generalising these skills as those of a “manager”, I prefer to think of them as those of a feature film director; you’re your own Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. You’re less concerned with the minutiae of managing people. Instead you have a vision of what you want to create, and you orchestrate a cast of skilled actors, providing clear instruction, correcting them if they get something wrong, and finally editing all the pieces together into something impactful.\n\nI love a good analogy as much as the next guy, but no analogy survives full scrutiny. Some directors likely *do* build relationships with actors over multiple films, probably do care about craft development, and have to navigate on-set conflict between high-strung artists. The point isn’t that *director* is a perfect description. It’s that *manager*, I think, is a worse one.\n\nA few practical things to consider:\n\nShockingly, I could be wrong about all of this. Shit is moving fast, the tooling is moving faster, and a year from now the right framing might look completely different. And nobody actually has this all figured out.\n\nBut right now, “everyone is a manager” is the framing I keep bumping into and I think it’s costing us. It’s misrouting capability investment, it’s making engineers who have no interest in becoming people leaders feel like the future doesn’t have a seat for them, and it’s subtly undervaluing the actual craft of people leadership and agentic engineering by collapsing them under the wrong metaphor.\n\nCheers,\n\nDave", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes", "canonical_source": "https://curlewis.co.nz/posts/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes-but-mostly-no/", "published_at": "2026-05-22 04:12:25+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-11 20:18:13.498486+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "Anthropic", "Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-coordinating-a-fleet-of-ai-agents-the-same-as-managing-a-team-of-people-yes.jsonld"}}