We’re becoming coaches, not footballers. That’s the idea I’ve been kicking around with colleagues lately. And no, not literally kicking, because most of what I know about football (soccer, for American readers) comes from Ted Lasso.
In football, the coach stays off the pitch during the match. That’s not just etiquette, it’s the rules. The coach shapes the team all week in training: the patterns, the positioning, the principles, the set pieces. Then on match day, they stand in the technical area and let the players play. They don’t run out to adjust a player’s foot angle before a shot or dictate exactly how to sell a fake. Those details absolutely matter, but they’re not the coach’s to micromanage. A coach who keeps stepping onto the pitch has a worse team, not a better one.
The shift I’ve been noticing in our work with AI agents feels a lot like that. For most of our careers, we’ve been the footballers. The craft was in the execution: the specific lines of code, the exact shape of a function, the judgment calls at the keystroke level. That craft still matters. But increasingly, the models and the harnesses around them are capable of handling that layer of the work, and the place our judgment creates the most value has moved up a level. It’s in defining what the system should do, what the hard constraints are, what the edges of “good” look like, what failure modes we won’t tolerate. It’s in the training week, not the match.
The uncomfortable part, at least for me, is that staying off the pitch is hard. Our whole careers have trained us to dive in when something looks off. Seeing an imperfect line of code and not touching it requires real restraint. And here’s what makes the restraint worth building: it isn’t just that stepping onto the pitch wastes your time. Over-instructing the model actively makes it worse. There’s a growing body of research on what some are calling “over-prompting”: the finding that past a certain point, piling on more rules, examples, and step-by-step directions degrades output quality rather than improving it. It turns out the coach who keeps shouting foot-angle corrections from the sideline doesn’t just waste their own breath. They distract the player from playing.
The part of the metaphor I don’t want to lose: the coach still owns the outcome of the game. Staying off the pitch isn’t the same as checking out. A coach who gives players latitude on execution is still accountable for whether the team wins, whether the strategy was right, whether the players were prepared. That maps almost perfectly onto our work. We’re not handing off responsibility when we let the system do what it’s equipped to do. We’re reserving our attention for the parts where only we can make the call, and we still own the whole outcome of what ships.