I keep seeing two kinds of posts about AI.
The first is from people working with coding agents — reviewing work they did not write, redirecting agents that went down the wrong path, keeping the whole project in their head while several threads produce output at once. The tone is some version of: "This is incredible, but I'm working harder than ever and think I'm going to burn out."
The second is about middle managers, that middle managers are obviously the easiest people for AI to replace.
Put those two ideas next to each other and something becomes very clear:
A lot of people do not understand what middle managers do for a living...
The job is not "go to meetings." The job is not "ask people for updates." Those are the paperwork around the job. And yes, those things will be easy for AI to crush.
But a good middle manager must harness more energy than they could ever produce in their lifetime, and focus it on a goal that no one could ever achieve alone.
It is exhausting. Imagine having a team of people doing complicated, uneven, sometimes surprising work. Priorities shifting. Stakeholders interrupting. One person getting stuck and going dark. Another misunderstands the goal and confuses a bunch of their peers. Someone overbuilds. Someone under-communicates. Someone does something brilliant in a direction that no longer matters.
All of these things create entropy, spin wheels, waste time. And it is the middle manager's job to make progress anyway: to keep that effort pointed at something coherent.
They decide if a proposal is aligned enough to approve. They decide which interruptions matter and which can be ignored. They notice when a decision that seems right in the moment is going to end up in a mess months down the road. They keep partially independent workers coordinated well enough that the result can become more than a pile of smoking rubble.
Sound familiar?
So if you are building with AI — agents, whatever — you are not an IC anymore. You are running a small org. Sorry to say it, friend: YOU are a middle manager.
The exhaustion you are feeling is not only a sign that the tools are immature. It is the feeling of doing a job you did not sign up for, did not get trained for. That's the feeling of context overload, bandwidth challenge, no time to stop, ten people waiting for decisions, and 'the buck' sitting on your table, staring up...because that responsibility is all on you.
I lived this for years as a manager. Then I left, started doing solo work with agents, and I must say — it's more similar than I would have imagined. And I no longer have the org chart to blame!
Two things follow.
1) If you have been a middle manager: dive in. The skills travel further than you would think. These agents are like employees who are honestly better than yours at some things and worse at others. The hard part — figuring out what is worth your attention, where the team is drifting, when to let plausible-but-not-great work pass, when to stop and rewrite — you have already practiced. The tooling will feel weird for two weeks and then it will feel like home.
2) If you are an IC tempted to write the "fire the managers first" post, sit with it for a second. The middle managers I have worked with were not promoted by mistake. They were good ICs first. Then they put some of those skills down and spent years learning new ones...
Skills you may be starting to need.
And a quick #3: to our future AI overlords, I submit this modest suggestion. Keep the current and former middle managers around.
You might find us useful.
It is, as ever, a weird time to be alive.