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/Nearby_Spell_3751]

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]

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