Claude Code has changed how we do engineering
Prioritization is different. Our company has shipped way faster in the last two months. Multiple customers noticed. It helped us build a “Just Do It” culture and kill prioritization paralysis.
Claude Code (or OpenAI Codex, Cursor Agents) is an AI coding tool that is so good it made us rethink coding as an organization.
Building a platform is hard.
PromptLayer is the workbench for building and testing LLM products. That means we support different use-cases, different technical teams, different non-technical teams, and a mix of both.
We are building a new type of knowledge-work. Our product is general purpose. And that means there are A LOT of edge-cases. And a never ending stream of bugs & feature requests. The hardest part is choosing what to work on.
Great product is a balancing act between iterative fixes and stepwise features.
You’ll never innovate if you don’t carve out deep work time, limit distractions, and tackle those hard problems. But you’ll also die a death of 1,000 cuts if you don’t cross your t’s, dot your i’s, and fix those minor product annoyances.
Claude Code gives us an answer to prioritization.
If a task takes less than one hour, just build it with AI.
Claude Code solves the context switch.
I’m a technical founder who no longer codes every single day. The codebase is changing and growing without me and jumping back in (without breaking things) is harder and harder. Context switching blocks me from coding more. That, and prioritization hell… But Claude Code knows my whole codebase
As a team, we’ve knocked out basically our whole backlog with Claude Code.
All those small features we’ve been dying for, but unable to carve time out for. Full screen buttons, copy buttons, little annoying bug fix on the run page, loop nodes, and so much more.
You would be surprised at how productive a 20-minute Claude Code session can be.
We are no longer blocked by specialists.
“I’m only a backend engineer” is no longer a valid excuse.
“I’m a bad designer” is no longer a valid excuse.
Frontend engineers are no longer gatekeepers. Backend engineers can build UI. PMs can fix copy and layout themselves. Claude fills the gaps.
If you have an idea, just Claude Code it.
Types of Claude Code features:
- Small nice-to-have wins. Things you want but realistically will never be prioritized. Now you can just do it.
- UI polish, quality-of-life, developer experience
- High priority & time-sensitive. Customer bug report? No need to wait for the “right” engineer.
How our team actually uses it:
- Bug fixes. Often as simple as pasting in the Slack bug report to Claude Code.
- End-to-end mini features. Well-scoped, closed functionality. Build a detailed MD file and one-shot it.
- Feature first pass. Use AI to get over writer’s block, or unfamiliar codebases, and build a simple first draft.
My advice to CTOs: start by using it yourself.
Until you understand the power, you will never be able to evangelize effectively.
Force everyone on the team to try it. If you must, literally sit down with engineers and use it together. Many will start with “Oh it’s not right for me” but all will eventually be convinced.
There is something for everyone. It’s useful for docs, UI, migrations. If an engineer still won’t touch AI codegen, that’s a giant red flag.
Don’t skip code review. Claude Code makes mistakes. Understand the gotchas: excessive useEffect, lack of DRY, performance issues. Heavily review code… especially frontend code from backend engineers.
I have no affiliation with the Claude Code team (although I would love to meet them 👋). I just love the tool. It’s changed our company, and I hope it will change yours as well.
There is whole other topic here on non-technical uses of Claude Code… but I’ll save that one.
I also wrote an article of how it works behind-the-scenes, which is pretty interesting.
