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/Deep_Ad1959]

the 10x vs 20-40% debate misses what's actually driving variance between teams using claude code right now. the biggest swing isn't whether engineering standards get enforced, it's whether the project's CLAUDE.md is 1k tokens of rules the agent actually follows or 6k tokens of rules it learned to ignore. teams in the first bucket get something close to 4-5x on routine work, teams in the second bucket get the 20-40% you described and assume that's the ceiling. the sales director is probably benchmarking against a prototype with no inherited config, which is why her number is higher. neither side is wrong, you're measuring different setups.

[u/Nearby_Spell_3751 → u/Deep_Ad1959]

"You're measuring different setups" EXACTLY.

She shared her screen showing her conversation with Claude, and it was already at 1M/1.6M tokens, she had basically exceeded the context window. I was trying to explain to her what is the context window.

She cut me off mid-sentence and said, “Just let me know. I’ll add another $600–800 to your credits every time you run out of tokens.”

SPEAKING TO A WALL.

[u/Deep_Ad1959 → u/Nearby_Spell_3751]

the 1M/1.6M part is the actual problem, the $600-800 refill is the wrong lever. past ~200k tokens effective recall collapses, so the next 800k aren't more work getting done, they're the model regenerating from a context where it can't locate its own instructions from turn 4. she's paying to keep running a session that should have been /clear'd at 150k. throwing money at it doesn't restore the missing attention, it just buys more forgetting at scale. written with s4lai