Engineers - Beware Being Seen as a Gatekeeper

Engineers - beware being seen as a gatekeeper.

There's an instinct I see among my friends and colleagues in software engineering to push back hard against non technical folks using AI agents.

Tools like Lovable and Replit have record adoption. Even the ones that started as engineering centric like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are getting adopted by people with no coding background to prototype or propose changes.

The tools are magical and have gotten even better since December, but there's real risk there. It also increases the review burden on the team.

The argument from engineering? We'll loosen the reins when you start wearing a pager too. And this is a fair point.

But. The question to get aligned on is - where are we right now and what trade offs are we willing to accept?

It's intensely frustrating to executives and team members not in engineering to see a tool they can use to make more progress and be met with a hard line.

Are we willing to risk some reliability and customer trust to take more swings? Maybe not. But, assuming that safety is the thing to optimize around is probably not the right choice when our whole industry is going through a watershed change and all the investment and operating playbooks are being shredded.

Getting to clarity on what the right trade offs are for your situation is critical.

Once you're there, figuring out the right processes and ways of working to support the right mix for your situation gets easier.

If engineering is drawing a hard line, but the business is not growing like crazy and needs a spark of progress or innovation, that's not a sustainable place to be.

Safety and reliability still matter a lot, and in some contexts they're everything. Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.

But consider how much they matter in yours vs speed to market - don't die on the hill needlessly. Work to get to clarity, or work with somebody like me whose superpower is translation between the tech folks and the non tech folks.

What processes are working for you that incorporate the spark from outside engineering balanced the right way?

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