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Comment by scudsworth | Hacker News Reader

>Our head of product is a reformed lawyer who taught himself to code while working here. He’s shipped 150 PRs in the last 12 months.

>The product manager he sits next to has shipped 130 PRs in the last 12 months.

this is actually horrifying, lol. i haven't even considered product guys going ham on the codebase

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Honestly, it's been pretty great at my tiny startup. The designer has a list of tweaks he wants that I could do pretty quickly... once I'm done with my current thing in a day or two. Or he can just throw claude at it. We've got CI, we've got visual diff testing, and I'll review his simple `margin-left: 12px;`->`margin-left: 16px;`.

But we're unlocking:

A) more dev capacity by having non-devs do simple tasks

B) a much tighter feedback loop between "designer wants a thing" and "thing exists in product"

C) more time for devs like me to focus on deeper, more involved work

Ostensibly the PRs are getting reviewed so it’s, maybe, not that bad but I had a similar reaction: I can slap together something with some wood, hammer, nails and call it a chair. Should I be manufacturing furniture?

Sure, if it's good, it works, it's reliable and people like it.

Code review makes this a lot less scary. Honestly it seems like mostly a win. A while ago at my day job, a moderately technical manager on another team attempted to contribute a relatively simple feature to my team's codebase. It took many rounds of review feedback for his PR to converge on something close to our general design guidelines. I imagine it would have been way less frustrating and time consuming for him if he could have just told an AI agent what to do and then have it respond to review feedback for him.

It is definitely scary if the good PMs who are solid at authoring requirements are able to just make it happen. Not worried for the most part tho.

Mwahahaha

Noncoders are about to learn about the code maintenance cycle

that's actually great! win-win for everybody. Although not fun reviewing those early PRs.

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