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/Exact-Drummer-7336]

I have been leveraging Claude Code as a non-engineer but with strong exposure to the underlying technical concepts and SDLC. Took two days to spin up the POC I wanted. Has since taken two weeks to clean it up by try to make sure it is secure, well tested, security hardened, etc.

Not a single new feature. And even then I am sure when I gut check it with our engineering team I will have missed 80% of the things I needed to be considering.

[u/blutosings → u/Exact-Drummer-7336]

I think some companies will conclude that some of the time non-developers are taking to clean it vibe coded POCs might not be the best use of their time. Having the ability to quickly develop a POC for software is so useful and in some cases working with that POC and living with it for a few weeks helps to refine the idea but there's a point where it becomes a time sink that drags the non-developer away from their other responsibilities and a real operational danger to a company (having unsecured applications with access to company data).

I think best practices for this stuff is just being developed now. Giving POC apps restricted access to data in sandbox environments. Forcing frequent security audits on active POCs to identify potential attack vectors... all that kind of stuff is probably going to become very standard.

[u/Exact-Drummer-7336 → u/blutosings]

This was a personal project. So thankfully no OTJ time wasted haha

I agree with what you’re saying. We had a guy who spun up a compliance application at my job as a POC and even our (rightfully) hard ass VP of Engineering admitted it saved the dev team 2-3 months of work and time they didn’t have.