I Am a Bad Manager

Daniel Bulli

19 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

All these AI tools make it feel like you can do anything.

Not "ship a little faster" anything. More like "spawn 10 agents and have a swarm doing everything" anything. Debugging. Refactoring. Tests. Docs. Research. All of it, in parallel.

And that power is real.

But it comes with a cost that's hard to name at first.

The new addiction isn't coding. It's prompting.

You think of an idea and your brain immediately goes: how do I prompt this?

You set it off. Something decent comes back. That little hit of progress feels like momentum. So you do it again.

It stops being coding or prototyping. It becomes a loop of turning thoughts into tasks.

And then it leaks.

Into lunch. Into movies. Into time with your family.

Every moment starts to feel like an opportunity to turn a thought into output.

"Every moment now holds the temptation to turn a thought into output."

Why it consumes you: fear.

You fear you'll lose the idea if you don't act on it right now. It feels important. Every thought deserves a swarm.

So you move faster than reality can support.

You skip UI/UX. Skip testing. Trust the AI to fill in the gaps.

"Reality still shows up. It just shows up as rework."

You don't want to be the bottleneck. So you become the manager you used to hate.

You're too cautious to give AI full control. But you don't want to slow things down.

So you hover. Supervise. Keep a tight grip.

You become a micromanager.

No pause. No closure. Just one more task before you log off, so you can wake up to results.

"I've had that manager. They're exhausting."

The employee you're neglecting is your own brain.

Your brain is remarkable. Not just at generating ideas, but at filtering them. Connecting them. Knowing which ones are actually worth building.

But you've stopped giving it space to do that.

Every idea feels urgent. Every thought becomes a task. Every moment becomes potential output.

"That's not creativity. That's anxiety dressed up as productivity."

The tools aren’t the problem.

Losing the discipline to filter is.

Still learning that.

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