This tech founder says prompting AI agents is a lot like managing people

The best managers of AI agents may be people who have already managed humans, one AI founder said.

Ivan Burazin, the cofounder and CEO of New York-based AI firm Daytona, has a team of about 30 people across teams in the US and Europe.

He told Business Insider that in recent months, he’s pushed his staff to build more AI agents; his 16 engineers each run an average of five agents, and no one at the company writes code anymore.

That’s brought one thing to light for him: Staff who have managed others are way better at prompting AI agents to get exactly what they want than those with no people-management experience. “We’ve found that people who manage people and understand how to communicate what they want — inputs versus outputs — they’re much better at running agents,” he said.

On the other hand, an engineer who’s not managed anyone, even if they’re great at their job, is wired like an individual contributor, Ivan said.

He said they implicitly expect that people — and agents — will understand what they’re asking for, and get stressed and frustrated when it doesn’t pan out. “And so they never think about how to communicate, ‘This is what I want.

This is how I expect you to do it, or what I think the outcome should be,'” he added.

That said, Burazin doesn’t support the idea of people managers alone.

He said managers with no technical knowledge — such as in marketing or in engineering — are not useful, and everyone should be getting their hands dirty with actual work.

Burazin and his cofounders, Vedran Jukić and Goran Draganić, founded Daytona in 2023, which provides secure sandbox infrastructure for companies to run AI agents and AI-generated code in isolated environments.

The company recently raised $48 million in a Series B funding round, according to Crunchbase.

Burazin’s comments align with how managerial roles in tech companies have changed in recent years.

After an era dubbed “The Great Flattening,” in which companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google laid off middle management for efficiency, more tech leaders are now juggling coding and product development alongside staff management.

Burazin says he supports his staff running multiple AI agents, because it helps him keep his team small.

Hiring at Daytona is “very slow,” he said, because each new hire adds a layer of complexity. “Agents help with that because you can have smaller human teams, hence the communication is smaller, and you can continue to be fast,” he said.