r/softwareengineer • u/vlad9321 • 2d ago

How are AI coding agents changing engineering roles on your team?

I work at a fintech startup with five developers and we haven’t yet launched our product, so we are early on. Our nontechnical CEO now builds and maintains small CRUD apps with AI agents, including an onboarding admin and some small apps that integrate with other services like Stripe.

He’s questioning whether we need dedicated frontend developers, or whether product/business analysts using agents—with senior engineering oversight—would be more effective. His tendency is to overly simplify the responsibilities of the developer and I have a hard time debating and proving he’s wrong.

I use agents heavily too, focusing on design, reviewing generated code, and validating behavior. I see his point for simple interfaces, but I’m unsure how broadly it generalizes.

For experienced devs using agents in production:
1. Have non-engineers successfully taken over development work?
2. How have your responsibilities and team structure changed?
3. What have you learned after months of maintenance and incidents?

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u/juniperico 2d ago

A CEO building his own CRUD apps clearly doesn't know what the role of a CEO is. His job is to see the headwinds of the next 6-18 months for your business and make decisions accordingly. Spending time in claude code means no one is at the helm which means no one is gonna be placed to spot that iceberg up ahead. For a fintech that's not tech-driven, that doesn't sound like a ship you want to be on for very long

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u/stayOffOfAll 2d ago

They haven't

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u/CPTSOAPPRICE 2d ago

  1. no, but I know there are places like ramp where non-engineers contribute a decent chunk.

  2. smaller team, producing more software, much more of a forward deployed role. if you are waiting for the ticket instead of making the ticket these days, you’re gone. much more time to test too if you aren’t writing code.

  3. I still review everything the agents write, but I also still write a fair bit of code, my guess is I write more than the average SWE today. typically I try to give agents tasks where I know I can describe what the code should look like though. at least for me that’s been a good rule of thumb to make them produce better stuff more quickly. and it also allows me to prevent stupid shit more easily

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u/skibbin 17h ago

They got rid of me