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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope.

A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.

It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.

Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.

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I like what you said about good managers. A good manager sets their reports up to win and ensures those reports get the credit, because the manager's job is to enable career progression of their reports.

That's not the situation here. We aren't enabling the career progression of software which does matrix multiplications.

Accountability of us schmucks at the end of the org chart goes both ways. We get some reward when we do it right, and we improve when we do it wrong.

A reward might be something tangible or might be as small as your own personal satisfaction.

An improvement is hopefully identifying what went wrong and doing better next time, and in extreme cases your employer will let you try again at a different workplace.

> we improve it when we do wrong

The question of whether it's better to frame a reaction to issues in a positive, do-better-next-time or a negative, don't-do-that-again way (fwiw, I agree that the positive way is better) is orthogonal to the argument I was trying to make about who is the recipient of that reaction. Scapegoating the agent is farcical. Clearly, "make no mistakes" style prompts are a poor approach to agentic development.

> the manager's job is to enable career progression of their reports... we aren't enabling the career progression of [fancy calculators]

While I do agree that good human managers concern themselves with career development of their human direct reports, I disagree that it's a fundamental part of the job description. The foundation is for a manager to get and keep their reports being productive. Human workers are often concerned with career progression, so good managers concern themselves with such career progression as well. Agents are not, but that doesn't mean that lauding good agentic work is meaningless. Lauding the work is also valuable for: (a) reinforcing a culture of positivity and celebration, which rubs off on human workers as well, (b) part of a culture of continuous evaluation of agents and models - asking questions like, are there cheaper or faster models that would be just as effective?

It's interesting how this relates the classic problem of "responsibility vs authority".

Humans, especially ones under abusive managers, often have a lot of responsibility but no authority that affects the outcome.

In an ideal situation you either have both, or none. You make the decision and answer for it, or you follow decisions but don't get blamed when it's wrong.

LLMs managed to slide into a space where they get to make authoritative decisions but if something fails we don't really blame them.

I'm not saying LLMs should be held responsible, but it's funny how people claim they replace humans, but are giving them an extremely easy, kid-gloves, success target.

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