Developers (re)discover business school
It is fascinating to observe this moment in time where AI coding agents are gaining popularity and orchestrating those agents is the new frontier. If it was a show narrated by David Attenborough it would work!
Let’s take a random trending post like Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale in which by analysing Gas town (fun post btw) the author gets some insights on what skills will be needed in software development.
It’s a good post and analysis, don’t get me wrong, and it’s also obviously Business Management 101, let’s link the two worlds and give some colour.
| Developer Insight | Business Insight |
|---|---|
| Design and planning becomes the bottleneck when agents write all the code | Cheap unskilled labour needs stronger and more skilled managers |
| Buried in the chaos are sketches of future agent orchestration patterns | Learn from other Companies mistakes (50% of business school curriculum) |
| The price is extremely high, but so is the (potential) value | If the market values innovation, invest in R&D |
| Yegge never looks at code. When should we stop looking too? | Managers shouldn’t micro-manage |
Now that I connected the dots, what else can developers learn from business school that will help them colonise the latest frontier?
- A bad org never makes a timely decision
Structure your workers (agents) sensibly, recognising their role and skills upfront, or you will be waiting a long time for stuff to slush around and get lost - Incentives trump intentions
Be clear in your instructions and goals, more goal-oriented less guidelines - One manager to 5-8 direct reports
That’s your upper bound, if you get to 9, need to add another layer of middle management (now you get why there are 10 people between you and the CEO?)
There are more, but you get the gist, from now on, when you think about orchestrating agents, just think of a successful software company and replicate their practices and org chart you will be 10 steps ahead of any vibe-coding cowboy.