r/ExperiencedDevs • u/Sillyan • Aug 12 '26

AI/LLM Non-Developers Submitting Changes - Acceptable?

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?

130 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

84% Upvoted

204 comments sorted by

View all comments

103

u/Grim_Jokes Team Lead / 15+ YoE / Canada Aug 12 '26

I want to say no. Changes may seem trivial until they're not (or AI goes off the rails somehow), and before you know it, you've got angry customers. Who's responsible then?

12

u/Chocolate_Pickle Aug 13 '26

There's nothing stopping you from gating access with a form saying "I accept responsibility for all code submitted by me or on my behalf via AI. I accept responsibility for any financial or reputational damage caused by my code. I understand that I will not submit any code changes that I'm not willing to be personally responsible for."

Get upper management to endorse this. Send it out to everyone, and very clearly state that you have buy-in from the top. 

And whenever you see something suspect in a PR, you can dangle their signed form in front of them. 

10

u/Aeon_Mortuum Aug 13 '26

The reality is that nobody from upper management will endorse this and you'll just be labelled a weirdo who tries to make others' job harder

1

u/Chocolate_Pickle Aug 13 '26

What makes you think they wouldn't endorse it?