Ask HN: If 1 person can control 10 AI agents, why would still need that person?
It sounds like augmentation. But taken further, it’s also clear that this compresses the chain of value. Why pay for ten salaries—or even one intermediary—when a client could learn to command the agents directly?
Some say, “You still need a conductor for the orchestra.” That one person is the integrator, the pilot, the one who makes sure the agents are working toward a coherent outcome. Fair enough.
But here’s the counterpoint: clients already do this kind of integration. They don’t ask their suppliers to "be creative," they give precise goals and constraints. If the agents become intuitive enough to understand those same inputs directly, what’s left for the human in the middle to add?
If I used to hire a designer, and now I just prompt a design agent myself… and if the same logic applies to coding, marketing, or legal reasoning… then how far are we really from businesses where clients orchestrate their own AI “staff” directly?
Is the human coordinator role just a temporary bridge?
I’m genuinely curious: have you started working this way? Are you seeing clients question your place in the loop? What do you think we’re underestimating—or overestimating?
Customers don't actually want to do the work of their vendors. I don't want to scan my own groceries at a supermarket, or check myself in for a flight (if checking backs, or traveling internationally anyway). If I wanted to be doing that kind of work, I'd get a job at a supermarket or an airline.
Self service cash registers are huge in Europe and as the tech matured even elderly are choosing them to not wait in queues. There are a lot of complains, but on par with standard registries.
Self checkout on flights, the online one, is the easiest and biggest time saver. Up to a point where cost is not the most important factor to fly with carry-on only.
tacostakohashi chose very precise examples - cash registry and self checkout. These are clearly wrong, as proven by experience.
To meet your point it would be better to say "I don't want to be a farmer or a pilot". But even that is bogus.
Many people that can "be a farmer", plant their own vegetables. It's an option available for many people.
It may not be true in your local example, but it is for mine - almost every person that has a small piece of land (even tiny garden) at least experiments with some vegetables or fruits. On denser areas like mine (where houses are rare, blocks of flats are more common) it's not uncommon to plant tiny amounts on balconies.
Owning a share of "community gardens" right outside of city is insanely popular even with very high prices of those. The one my cousin has parcel in is over 1000 parcels (usually around 20x20 meters or so), where people plant and compost (mandatory).
Many people want to be a farmer if that gives them high quality products. They will jump through hoops to achieve that.
I think that you don't realize how maintaining software products work
Who is going to watch/control the agent and make sure it's doing the right work?
Because if it takes one full-time person to coordinate the agents, and those agents together perform a function that the client wants to support some other endeavor, in order to replace the agent coordinator, they would have to abandon the other things they do for the endeavor for which they are hiring the firm supplying the agents.
If the client was literally completely passive and had no other role in their task than hiring the firm for something that wasn't part of a larger effort thet were actively engaged in, then, sure, they would have nothing relevant to the task to sacrifice by being the agent coordinator, they'd just need to spend the time learning to be an agent coordinator, and then actually become an active full-time participant rather than completely passive -- but presumably they were passive because that's exactly the level of engagement they were willing to put in, or, at least, because they found that being more active in the task had some associated disutility.
I'm not sure who your clients are. Mine do have goals, but ask me to be creative and come up with the constraints. Literally, I had someone ask me for exactly that on my last call. My folks are nowhere near precise. If they were, they would not need me.
Imagine you are a trader and asked agents to build you a perfect trading system and they discuss every next buy/sell and take a call to execute the action.
How do you know in the long term you are making money? What if they decided to cheat on you and started buying stocks which will definitely crash in 1 month, while showing you a progress of profit by day trading other stocks. Would you just let them do what they're doing?
AI agents still need someone who understands context, prioritizes goals, manages trade-offs, and spots misalignment across outputs. That’s not just orchestration, that’s judgment.
Clients may think they can manage agents directly, but most won’t have the clarity or system thinking to turn AI output into coherent outcomes. That’s where founders, strategists, and builders still add real leverage.
The future isn’t agent vs human it’s high-leverage humans using agents better than anyone else.
So the question should be,
"Will AI agents get good enough, where any individual with just a conversion can get a fully functional AI agent such as a coding agent, a legal review agent, a design agent?"
There's always going to be some level of expertise involved and especially with AI some person has to exercise judgement, watching out for hallucinations.
Patience. People don't pay others to do work they're willing to do themselves.
Some ideas question why we would need "middleman" software at all in a decade: what's the point of Photoshop if you can ask AI to fix blemishes and manipulate images and compose your graphics without it? On some level it's selling picks and shovels after the gold rush.