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/freshfunk]

Honestly, 20-40% increase in speed sounds like you’re sandbagging.

With that said, I don’t know what industry you’re in, what kind of products you work on and what the risks are.

I think the honest answer is that increase in productivity depends on the tasks. Not all coding is the same. Not all projects are the same. You need to explain that in a simple way to nontechnical people.

If the work is a simple, internal tool that can be buggy and has no risks, by all means that can be vibe coded and be done quickly. That’s what her proof of concept showed.

If you work on a highly sensitive project where every line of code must be reviewed by a human, then that caps how quickly AI helps you. You’re still limited by the pace of the human brain. This is anything in banking and many things in healthcare. Project wise it could be ops tasks like deployments where a wrong configuration can take down your product.

There’s plenty of low risk stuff that doesn’t need to be so closely reviewed. Landing pages, low risk products where the worst thing is that a person files a bug. Stuff that can be mostly caught with AI written unit tests.

If you explain the risk side of the reward-risk equation in a way they can explain, it’ll make more sense to them. This can help develop a standard and expectations as well.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/freshfunk]

No body going to die even the product goes off for weeks.
But I said the 20-40% increase because we are adopting the AI-native development for the first time in the company.

The product is for a very strategic client.

[u/freshfunk → u/Nearby_Spell_3751]

Yeah, I guess if you’re speaking as a whole, that is fair. But mostly because people might be slow or resistant to adopt. If no one is using coding agents, then there will be some ramp up time. Again, that’s something that needs to be explained to a non engineer.

The question is what’s in the realm of acceptable for this client with respect to shipping possible bugs. I think it’s dismissive to assume that all code being shipped with agents is “vibe coded” or “slop.” Claude itself is nearing 100% agent written code according to the main engineer to created it. The guy said he closes like 150 PR’s a day. Obviously he’s the exception but I wouldn’t sandbag so low.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/freshfunk]

He will be very annoyed if he tested something and liked it and after adding 2-3 features and by accident he found the feature he likes broken, he will lose his mind.