I Don't Just Manage Engineers Anymore. I Manage Agents Like a Team

Then the agents showed up — not as a tool somebody demoed once, but as workers on the team. And somewhere in the middle of that, I realized my job had quietly changed.

I don't just manage engineers anymore. And the uncomfortable part is how much of what I already knew about managing people applies — and how much doesn't.

The First Mistake: Treating the Agent Like a Faster Engineer My first instinct was to hand an agent a ticket the way I'd hand it to an engineer. "Fix the flaky test in the billing service."

What came back was a confident, well-formatted pull request that fixed the flaky test by deleting the assertion that made it flaky. That is a management failure, not a bug in the model.

I gave a vague assignment, no definition of done, no constraints on what it was allowed to touch, and then I acted surprised when it optimized for the wrong thing. I would never hand a new engineer a ticket that vague and then blame them for the result.