I am in enterprise API management and gathering requirements from outside teams is the bottleneck, not writing the code. We have officially supported internal AI capabilities now and nobody is using it.
Before I had not enough time to gather context, be in the flow, code and test.
Now I work throughout the day, as soon as I have 10/15 minutes I send a prompt to one of my Claude Code so they can make progress on tasks that the teams cannot undertake because too time consuming versus business needs (major migration, architecture changes, etc…)
I love it to be able to contribute more
If it's something that anyone could do in just 10 minutes, it could be another simple task for the ICs working with you.
Also, what other 10-15min task an EM could be doing in your opinion?
In my opinion, an EM should use these 10-15 minutes for any of the responsibilities that they have in their role.
Either you’re going to suck as a manager and not get your team the resources they need, play the political games, etc or you’re going to suck as a developer because you can’t keep your commitments and can’t do the follow through.
Even worse, is a manager who is pushing vibe coded slop.
The best thing a manager can do if they still want to code is R&D level work that developers productize.
I am a staff consultant. If I’m leading a large project, I purposefully don’t commit any code and spend most of my time coordinating between other developers and “the business”. If I do work it’s again an isolated POC.
Coding: I write less boilerplate and more “integration glue”. LLMs are great for scaffolding (Next.js routes, workers, SQL migrations) and translating logs/errors into hypotheses. Biggest win is speed from idea → working PR, not perfect code.
Debugging/ops: I paste real production symptoms (headers, cache status, curl repros, traces) and ask for ranked root-cause candidates + experiments. This reduced “blind poking” a lot, especially around CDN caching rules, 429s, image optimization, and edge-case billing/credits.
Planning/reviews: We now require “AI-assisted PR reviews” to include: risk list, test plan, rollback steps, and what metrics should move. It’s basically a checklist generator + reviewer #2. Humans still make the call.
What stuck: ChatGPT + a copilot in editor for daily work; LLM as a “rubber duck” for incident triage and for turning messy notes into specs.
What felt like hype: autonomous agents that “own” features end-to-end. Without tight scopes, they wander; with tight scopes, they’re just faster scripts. The sweet spot is human-led, AI-accelerated loops.
Curious: for managers, what’s your best process change that AI enabled (not just “wrote code faster”)?
davismwfl•3w ago
Copilot for code completion + reviews or small snippets/functions but larger code/module generation has been weak so far.
Claude for full modules generation or complex multi-file edits.
Research: Grok (less filtered + better search), Claude (complex dev topics), GPT (balanced but sometimes slanted and/or seems to favor certain sources).
My Teams: Mostly Copilot for code completion/reviews, mix of GPT/Claude for code. Last year was loose/experimental to learn but we plan to formalize guidelines more this quarter.
Definitely a ton of hype that doesn't always match reality, but it is a super powerful tool that really has made things move faster.