The best managers of AI agents may be people who have already managed humans, according to Ivan Burazin, cofounder and CEO of Daytona.
Burazin said his team has pushed hard in recent months to build more AI agents. Daytona has about 30 people across teams in the US and Europe, and its 16 engineers each run an average of five agents. He said no one at the company writes code anymore.
For Burazin, the biggest lesson is that people who have managed others are better at prompting AI agents to get exactly what they want. They understand how to communicate inputs versus outputs, he said, which makes them better at running agents.
By contrast, he said an engineer who has never managed anyone often thinks like an individual contributor. That person may expect people, and agents, to understand what is being asked without enough context. When that does not happen, stress and frustration follow.
Burazin said the fix is simple: spell out what you want, how you expect it done, and what the outcome should be. He also said management alone is not enough. In his view, managers without technical knowledge, whether in marketing or engineering, are not useful, and everyone should still get their hands dirty with actual work.
Daytona, which Burazin founded in 2023 with Vedran Jukić and Goran Draganić, 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 land at a moment when tech management is changing fast. After what was dubbed 'The Great Flattening,' companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google laid off middle management for efficiency. More tech leaders are now juggling coding, product development, and staff management at the same time.
Burazin said he supports employees running multiple AI agents because it helps him keep the human team small. Hiring at Daytona is 'very slow,' he said, because each new hire adds complexity.
The playbook here is straightforward: smaller teams can move faster if communication is sharp and expectations are clear. For founders, that matters because every extra layer of headcount raises coordination costs. AI agents may not replace management, but Burazin’s point is that they do reward founders who already know how to set direction, delegate well, and keep the team lean.
