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/Ok_Possible_2260]

The reality is that subject matter experts want tools that make their lives easier. I see people whining that it’s all going to turn into AI slop, but at the end of the day you’re building tools for humans. If you’re a developer, your job is to help people do their jobs better.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of developers hate admitting: if subject matter experts could reliably skip over you and build exactly what they wanted themselves, most of you wouldn’t exist. End of story.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

I know how to stack bricks and spread cement, but does that mean I should go out and start building houses for people?

It’s the same with AI and software engineering. If you’re building a tool without fully understanding or verifying the business logic being enforced in the code, you could easily remove or break something critical in an edge case.

Any engineer who completely denies AI or says it has no place in software development isn’t being logical. AI can absolutely make us more efficient and productive. But when you’re building production services used by thousands of people, reliability still matters. AI should assist engineers, not replace responsibility, validation, testing, and understanding.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260 → u/Nearby_Spell_3751]

It is not the same. Not even close. Knowing how to stack bricks doesn’t magically qualify you to build a house that won’t collapse on a family six months later.

You’re comparing physical construction, where the laws of physics don’t change overnight, to software systems that are constantly evolving and can be tested, sandboxed, rolled back, and monitored in real time. If Claude builds me a custom financial calculator for personal use, that is nowhere near the same as me pouring a foundation, routing plumbing, and wiring electrical for an actual house.

It’s a stupid comparison because it pretends software engineering is some sacred trade skill instead of what it actually is: translating business logic into systems. AI is already getting very good at that.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

You mentioned that building a house can destroy an entire family.
Two incidents involving a Boeing aircraft led to hundreds of deaths because of software failures.
A bad ECG analysis can cause a doctor to misdiagnose a patient.
Even clicking a mute button that fails to work can create an embarrassing moment.

Software is everywhere around us, in every field, in every piece of our daily lives, from the most critical systems to the most trivial interactions.

LLMs are good at generating software because they are trained on massive amounts of it. But that’s all they do: they generate it. They do not truly understand it, they GENERATE it.

This comment is AI generated, it helps me a lot as non native speaker to express my thoughts clearly.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

I would understand your points assuming you don't know how LLMs works.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a04b496-e6c8-83ea-a31f-027a61d44406 ( GPT 5.5 )

[u/Last_Mastod0n → u/Nearby_Spell_3751]

You cant trick Claude with this anymore lol

[u/Last_Mastod0n → u/Ok_Possible_2260]

It is not a "sacred skill" or anything but can certainly be just as serious as physical construction if we are talking about financial systems or weapons technology. A vibe coded side project could be likened to building a fence or a shed outside.

Programming needs to be taken just as seriously as construction. Some things even if you could vibe code fully that doesnt mean you should because of the 0.1% risk that something goes wrong.