Mike Olson – Managing AI Like You Manage People
January 16, 2026
With the release of Claude Opus 4.5 (and the pace of improvement in frontier models), we’ve reached the point where AI coding assistants can handle tasks that would previously require a team of skilled developers. The capabilities are impressive enough that drawing parallels between managing AI agents and managing human teams feels less like a thought experiment and more like practical advice.
As someone who has spent years in engineering management and who has more recently been working extensively with AI coding tools, I’ve noticed that the skills transfer remarkably well in both directions. Here are some patterns that work for both.
Working with Agentic coding systems like Claude Code is a significant change, particularly for software engineers used to writing most if not all of the code they work with. As an increasing number of people have observed, working with these systems is much closer to managing developers than being the developer.
This piece takes lessons from working as an engineering manager for with people and applies them to working with Claude code.
