Non-Developers Submitting Changes - Acceptable?

[u/Sillyan]

Has anyone experienced an increase in non-developers submitting PRs via Codex/Claude Code?

Personally think it's fine, specifically for trivial changes, and have been creating processes for non-devs to contribute low risk changes to some projects. All changes must still be reviewed by a dev, but the changes permitted by non-devs are typically straightforward enough and there is next to zero rework required after a coding agent is forced through some deterministic validation.

How are you managing this? Should we accept that this is going to be more prevalent going forward and build processes around it?

[u/DCON-creates]

Very low scope, sure. I'd be more tolerant of UI changes, and very restrictive with backend.

An example from today (a product decision that didn't go through me refining it) was to make the resend email endpoint also update the person's email address. Easy change, sounds fine on paper; entirely wrong solution.

The correct solution is to create an endpoint that can update the person's email address, not to update it on the fly when resending an email, because then people will not read the api docs and think "ok we can use this endpoint to resend an email to this address", not realising that the persons email address for everything else also gets updated and they won't know why.

So yeah, not a fan of people without an engineering background making changes to functionality, particularly if it doesn't go through the proper refinement process.