Trust and the Manager–Agent Parallel

Meet Lauren and the session

(00:00) Everyone, I am Lauren Lauren Tan. I guess not many people know my last name. Uh, I am Potato on Twitter. Uh, potato with spelled with an E. Um, and I have been at Cursor for about 5 months. Uh, previously I was at Meta where I worked on the React team. Uh, specifically working on the React compiler, uh, which was a whole lot of fun.

(00:28) Uh I'm still on the on the core team and and uh contributing to open source here and there. Uh so that that's really nice that they still let me do that. Uh and before Meta, I was at Netflix uh where I was uh both a tech lead and uh I transitioned to be be an engineering manager um for about two years.

So I've had a I've have had a lot of experience going between engineering management and being an individual contributor. (00:58) Uh and I think something I've noticed actually which is quite interesting is that there are so many parallels with you know management skills and how to like manage agents.

Uh and that's actually a big part about what I wanted to chat with you and everybody else about today. Um but yeah that's that's me. (01:17) Uh I do have some like very light slides but uh it's not going to be uh just rambling. So let me just share my screen and hope that I don't leak anything. Uh oh no I need to allow permissions.

>> No worries. Take your time. There's always tech tech trouble. Uh give me one second to rejoin. >> Yeah, go for it. I see many of you already know Lauren from from the looks of the chat here. (01:50) Um, so yeah, it's exciting to to get a chance to chat with her uh and and go through some of her her recent work.

As you guys heard, you know, a lot of recent experience from from Netflix to to Meta and then now over at Cursor. Uh, we're going to chat a little bit about Grockbot as well. So, uh, that'll be exciting. (02:10) I don't know if you guys saw that was a recent release. I think literally maybe yesterday or the day before uh from the cursor team which is kind of like um let's call it like agents for everyone.

You can go check it out if you want and learn a little bit more about the product but um but yeah we'll we'll explore that a little bit today as well. (02:27) All righty. Welcome back. And Lauren, you're just on mute there if uh you want to hop off of mute if you're chatting. >> Yeah, sorry. >> No worries.

>> It's 2026 and I still don't know how to use Zoom. [laughter] >> That's all good. >> Uh okay, so I assume you can see my screen. >> Yes. Yeah, we're good.

Why trust breaks down

(02:57) Um, so yeah, today, yeah, I think I think the big theme for me as I've been using agents to write code, and I'm sure a lot of you have had the same experience as well, is how do you trust it? You know, especially if you are an engineer that's been writing code for a very long time, you have a lot of opinions and lessons that you've learned about doing good engineering.

(03:20) And when you see agents just, you know, winging it and, you know, guessing, hallucinating, uh, you know, confidently stating that they found the smoking gun, uh, for the hundth time, uh, but it's actually not the real problem. You lose a lot of trust. And when you lose when you don't have much trust in your agents, I feel like you you really can't get the most out of them.

The management parallel

(03:44) And for me, the parallel is like with management. Uh so if I'm an a manager an engineering manager of a team and I have a bunch of you know I have a team of engineers uh on my team and I don't trust them then the mode of operation I'm going to be in is going to be like micromanagement right I'll have to spend a lot of time looking over my reports shoulders and checking that they're doing their work well you know that they're not shipping bugs to production and so I drew this chart cuz uh it's not it's not a very scientific chart but (04:19) like this is how I imagine myself and my journey through using agents.

So you know like fast forward or back forward uh or fast back uh fast backwards like a year or so when you know nobody was or not many people were using agents to code. Uh I think you uh you know get into this mode where you are in very heavily in the loop with one or several like a handful of agents and you find yourself just constantly fig uh you know trying to understand what your agents are doing uh and you're very very in the loop.

You're watching every (05:00) single output. you are sitting there prompting um and you really can't parallelize beyond that because you don't again you don't have that trust right you can't go to a 100 agents uh like spawn 100 agents when you don't even trust the output of one agent so over the past 5 months I feel like I've really been able to uh like ascend this trust curve and now I'm at the point where uh I actually have this Sounds kind of scary to say this and it it makes me sound like a slop artist, but I I promise I'm not, but I actually (05:36) have my agents now um automerging PRs for me.

Uh which is like a wild thing to say, but um like I woke up today and there were like 20 PRs landed and I just reviewed them on Maine like they were already landed and they were good. Uh so how did I get to that point is basically what I wanted to talk about today. (05:59) Uh, and again like yeah, feel free to jump in if you have questions, Colin.

Um, but uh, oh yeah, of course I got to show this this chart. Uh, where uh, no do not trust to someone requested to control my computer. Uh, probably won't do that. Uh but yeah, so this chart I think I I'm sharing this chart not to kind of like flex but to kind of show like the journey like so you can see like the curve like it sort of like inversely matches the contributions I've been able to land at cursor.

(06:37) So I joined five months ago and five months ago like I you know my first month I was like not very productive because I was ob you know I was learning the codebase didn't know what the heck was going on and as I got more confident in in my agents uh I've really been able to kind of ramp up my productivity.

(06:57) Uh and again like yeah like last month I shipped a thousand PRs which is ridiculous. Uh, and then this month we're only on the 12th. I'm already at like almost 800 PRs landed. Uh, so the velocity is definitely high and you you I'm sure a lot of you will definitely be questioning like how how much of this code is actually good.

Observe agent behavior
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Build confidence in the work
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Delegate with less supervision