Would you like to leverage AI in your work? You may be a manager, but you may not know it.
Philip Hsu is at the forefront of AI. He worked at OpenAI until 2025, when he left to found his own startup, Superphonic. Prior to that, he worked at Microsoft and Meta.
In January, Su made the provocative claim on Substack that “AI killed individual posters.”
Su writes that software engineers are being asked to perform tasks once assigned to managers, such as setting priorities, resolving conflicts, and providing feedback. Rather than building, they spend their time “pondering and fine-tuning the machines that build things.”
“The halcyon days of IC are over,” Hsu wrote. “It’s not because the AI’s code is better than yours, it’s because maximizing productivity requires you to focus your time on everything that is ultimately a manager’s task.”
Sue doubled down this week on her podcast, A Life Engineered. He said the role of integrated circuits is “probably over” as engineers delegate their jobs to AI.
If everyone is an (AI) manager, will we no longer need (human) managers? Sue said, “Yes.” He said there are “human coordination problems” that AI cannot solve.
Hsu’s takeover theory emerged amid a “massive flattening” of the Big Tech industry. Flat organizational charts are all the rage. There are few managers and many ICs. Elon Musk’s company is known for not having managers. Amazon and Meta recently weeded out their management ranks, aiming to increase the IC-to-manager ratio.
Meanwhile, CEOs of tech companies are also adopting “founder mode.” According to Paul Graham’s 2024 essay, the opposite is to blame for “manager mode.”
But managers may be back in fashion as long as they manage AI agents. Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser told Business Insider that the company will be taking on a new role: “Agent Manager.”
Tools will continue to evolve. Su has already realized that code created by AI needs to be reviewed more “carefully” than before.
“As it stands, you may feel like you’re managing a team of mostly incompetent interns,” he wrote in the essay. “Soon, you’ll feel like you’re managing a highly performing team that’s better, faster, and smarter than you.”
