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>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 si

by asdev 1y ago

>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. In a serious organization, non technical people should not be shipping any sort of code. They should be doing the highest leverage things possible to help the business, and if that seems to be coding, there are grave issues in the company.

ghiculescu 1y ago
How do credibly define "non technical people" when everyone's code is written by an LLM? Serious organisations sound awful.
- asdev 1y ago
  non technical people are people who are not hired for an engineering role
wheelerwj 1y ago
This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
n_ary 1y ago
I see a fraudulent benefit in this case. When these non-tech people go into public talks or anything, they can suddenly claim “oh, I use AI to write 80% of my code” and voila! No one will ask whether their responsibility is to write code or do any engineering, simply being able to give some surface level claims makes them credible enough and feed the hype while appearing cool. It also gives investors more confidence to shower them with money when needed, as non-tech people are also doing AI coding and they are super agile! When Msft CEO claims that 80% code written by AI, there is a 50% doubt, but when someone adds that, yeah so I have done 150 PRs, now it feels more concrete and real.
- ghiculescu 1y ago
  Author here. We don't have (or want) any investors. I encourage PMs to code because it's good for the business. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I wrote about this years before we started doing AI-backed-coding: https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/opening-the-codebase-up-to-everyone https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/opening-the-codebase-up-to..., so some of the details are no longer correct, but the philosophy is the same.
CraigJPerry 1y ago
>> In a serious organization, non technical people should not be shipping any sort of code Just as you want developers building domain knowledge for all the benefits it brings, you want a role like product owner to be developing their understanding of delivering software. Sometimes the highest leverage thing to be done is making teams of people work better together. One aspect of achieving that can be better understanding of what each role does.

by asdev 1y ago

ghiculescu 1y ago

How do credibly define "non technical people" when everyone's code is written by an LLM? Serious organisations sound awful.

asdev 1y ago
non technical people are people who are not hired for an engineering role

wheelerwj 1y ago

This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen

n_ary 1y ago

I see a fraudulent benefit in this case. When these non-tech people go into public talks or anything, they can suddenly claim “oh, I use AI to write 80% of my code” and voila! No one will ask whether their responsibility is to write code or do any engineering, simply being able to give some surface level claims makes them credible enough and feed the hype while appearing cool. It also gives investors more confidence to shower them with money when needed, as non-tech people are also doing AI coding and they are super agile! When Msft CEO claims that 80% code written by AI, there is a 50% doubt, but when someone adds that, yeah so I have done 150 PRs, now it feels more concrete and real.

ghiculescu 1y ago
Author here. We don't have (or want) any investors. I encourage PMs to code because it's good for the business. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I wrote about this years before we started doing AI-backed-coding: https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/opening-the-codebase-up-to-everyone https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/opening-the-codebase-up-to..., so some of the details are no longer correct, but the philosophy is the same.

CraigJPerry 1y ago

>> In a serious organization, non technical people should not be shipping any sort of code Just as you want developers building domain knowledge for all the benefits it brings, you want a role like product owner to be developing their understanding of delivering software. Sometimes the highest leverage thing to be done is making teams of people work better together. One aspect of achieving that can be better understanding of what each role does.