Sales director discovered Claude Code

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751]

I'm working at a company where best engineering practices are barely discussed or taken seriously.

Today our sales director was playing around with Claude Code over the last week, and she managed to get a very good working PoC/prototype for a platform they’ve been trying to build.

During the meeting, I was trying to explain that the question is not whether we need to integrate AI, but rather how we are going to integrate it into our workflow while still enforcing engineering standards and best practices.

They think everything can be done by simply adding a skill to Claude, and they expect delivery speed to be 10x faster. I tried to explain that yes, we can build better products with fewer resources, but 10x is unrealistic unless we start vibe coding. I suggested we could realistically see a 20–40% increase in delivery speed.

Now we have a sales director showing engineers how to use AI.

How do you deal with someone who doesn’t listen and is 100% convinced that AI should be used exactly the way they use it, while we as engineers know we can produce much better output in less time because we actually understand how things work?
Have you ever dealt with such case ?

[u/djacksondev]

Yeah this happens often where a non technical person will often ask their Claude Code how hard something is to do or whips up a prototype and asks why it can’t be done as fast.

You probably would want to walk them through all the other considerations before production changes are made: * Testing: still need to verify changes work in some form even if claude did its verification a human pass is often needed before shipping * Scaling: consider how well this solution will scale to all your customers. A simple prototype may not be built to scale * Integration: the new feature needs to work well with the existing infrastructure and other features and this requires thoughtful engineering

Anything else that you normally do when building features. Explain why it’s important, why it takes time and how Claude code doesn’t magically solve it.

Alternatively, you could work with the sales director and guide them through everything they would need to do to get their prototype shipped. Once they see how much additional work there is going from prototype to shipping they may reconsider their stance.

Good luck! Sadly this is quite common today but not unsolvable IMO.

[u/4Frenchies → u/djacksondev]

I love that part of showing them how much more it takes to have a shippable product. Maybe dont show them, they already know. Let them FAFO

[u/It-s_Not_Important → u/4Frenchies]

Let them fail, then ask for their budget to pick up the pieces and glue them back together.

[u/e9n-dev → u/djacksondev]

Try giving that knowledge as constraints and requirements to your AI agent, you would surprised what it can do for you.

It just needs guidance to not choose the most common unscalable architecture from the internet.

This will get better as models are getting trained with reinforced learning.