One of the makers of Claude Code describes a moment that horrified him. He saw pull requests coming in from one of the designers on the team. His first thought: why on earth is a designer putting up code? He reviewed it, ready to step in. And the answer was plain: she was just fixing a button. The code looked good. Maybe it was fine. Now, he says, it is completely normal.
That is the shift this part is about. Not the technology, but who does the work.
Why the wall falls
The logic underneath is simple. Claude writes the code. That moves the center of gravity to something else: what is the idea you have? Whoever knows the product context, understands the customer and thinks about the design comes up with better ideas, even without years of programming experience. Execution is no longer the bottleneck. Judgement is.
And so the roles merge. At the Claude Code team this is not theory. Designers build their prototypes directly in the app, instead of paying an engineer to make it. Product managers make changes themselves. The finance team runs in Claude Code and does its projections there. Ask the data scientists and you hear the same story. Everyone just has it open.
What companies see happening
They see this pattern in the organisations they talk to as well. First the engineers pick it up. Then the adjacent roles look over their shoulder, see how powerful it is, and try it themselves. It spreads not through a rollout plan, but through curiosity.
The question they ask is, to me, the sharpest of the whole conversation. Is the future product or engineering? Does everyone become a product manager, or does everyone become an engineer? The answer: both. The product team writes code, the design team writes code, and the engineers ship complete products, from idea to launch, including the work with legal and marketing.
Why this hits home for me
This is exactly what I talk about with organisations. The question is not whether we teach everyone to program. The question is whether we dare to take down the wall between who thinks and who builds. Because as long as that wall stands, every idea waits on someone else with the right skill. Take it down, and the scarce thing is no longer execution, but the taste and judgement to choose what you build.
And yet I want to add one critical note. If everyone can build, who guards the coherence? Fixing a button is not the same as carrying a system. The answer is not putting the wall back, but good verification and review. The roles may blur. The care may not.
Part 6 of a series on how the makers of Claude Code work with it themselves. Earlier: the bug was already fixed before I started and I dropped Plan mode.