Increasingly, Ethan Mollick notes, work at OpenAI looks like managing AI:
A quarter of OpenAI workers have at least four agents running at one time every week. And, as coding is done by AIs in specialized harnesses and apps, other roles start to become coders of a sort. And they are good at it.
A separate study of Claude Code users found that software engineers had a similar success rate to other professions when actually using Claude code on coding tasks.
What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt.
We are moving from a world where non-experts use chatbots to fill in gaps to one in which experts use agents to get work done. And the best way to use agents is to think of yourself as a manager.
This is because each session begins at the center of the manifold, and human expertise is required to push it further and further into distant regions. The more expertise you have, the more you can push the session in a specific direction, the closer you get to uncovering something genuinely useful in the LLM’s latent space. Interacting with a chatbot is sort of like an exercise in highly selective decompression.