--- title: Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and... description: A new Linear study shows AI coding tools have dramatically expanded who can open pull requests - product managers and designers now submit PRs at roughly... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and nobody's quite sure what to do about it | daily.dev og:description: A new Linear study shows AI coding tools have dramatically expanded who can open pull requests - product managers and designers now submit PRs at roughly... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/wQNxmXHxJ.png og:image:alt: Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and nobody's quite sure what to do about it og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and nobody's quite sure what to do about it **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 5 min read · 4 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary A new Linear study shows AI coding tools have dramatically expanded who can open pull requests - product managers and designers now submit PRs at roughly triple their previous rate, executive AI feature usage jumped from under 10% to over 30% year over year, and overall PRs are up 111% over two years. Despite the speed gains, total time spent on product development is rising, not falling, and AI token spend doesn't correlate with delivered value. An engineering manager reflects on living through this shift, arguing the bottleneck has moved from writing code to validation, governance, and security, and that nobody yet has clear answers for who reviews non-engineer PRs, who's on call when they break, and where the line should be drawn on what non-devs should touch. ## Content ## The bottleneck moved A new study from Linear puts numbers to something a lot of engineering teams are already feeling: pull requests are up 111% over two years, driven largely by AI tools, and the people opening those PRs are no longer just engineers. Product managers and designers are now submitting PRs at roughly triple their previous rate. Executive AI feature usage jumped from under 10% to over 30% in companies with 200+ employees, with CEO time spent on AI up 27 percentage points since January alone. The headline finding isn't that AI makes developers faster. It's that AI has spread the act of writing code to people who were never developers in the first place. And the bottleneck has moved. It's no longer development. It's verification. ## Code volume is not the same as value This is the part that gets glossed over in most AI productivity coverage. Token spend doesn't correlate with value delivered. More AI-generated code won't help if your team can't review or deploy it faster. Overall time spent on product development is actually rising despite AI gains, because the work that used to happen before a PR now happens after it. There's a version of Brandolini's Law that applies here: the energy needed to review and verify code is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to generate it. A developer can produce a giant PR in minutes. Vetting it, testing it, understanding what it actually does, and catching the subtle issues that look fine at a glance can take hours. This creates a specific new problem for team leads. In 2024, underperforming developers were relatively easy to spot - they produced little code, or code that didn't run. In 2026, someone can use AI to generate large volumes of plausible-looking code they don't fully understand. The problems are real but harder to find. ## When non-developers open PRs The Linear data on PM and designer PR submissions rising from 1-3% to 8-10% year over year reflects something engineering managers are now dealing with hands-on. AI coding tools have made it genuinely possible for a designer or product manager to write and submit working code. That's not nothing - faster feedback loops, freed-up engineer time, more autonomy for non-engineers. But it opens five questions that don't have clean answers yet: - **Who reviews these PRs?** Engineers are already stretched. Adding a new category of contributor doesn't add reviewers. - **Who teaches non-developers the basics?** Git workflows, what a merge conflict means, when to stop and hand off to an engineer. - **Where does the technical boundary sit?** Not every change a designer wants to make should go through a PR. Figuring out which ones should is its own ongoing negotiation. - **Who's on call when something breaks?** If a PM ships a change that causes an incident, the accountability chain is unclear. - **How do you prioritize the time cost?** Training non-developers, pairing them with engineers, reviewing their output - this is real work that competes with everything else. One engineering manager experimenting with this is pairing each non-developer contributor with a dedicated engineer and running basic training sessions. There's no established playbook yet. Design teams are further along on this than most. Some design leaders are now arguing that AI tools let designers hand off work that's already bound to the design system, responsive, accessible, and verified in a running browser - not just a clickable prototype. Getting there requires designers to pick up a specific skill set: HTML/CSS fundamentals, Git/GitHub workflows, prompting and steering AI build tools, and knowing when to stop and hand off. The suggested ramp is a machine-readable design.md file in a day, designers comfortable in GitHub within a week, and small reviewed PRs within a quarter. The caveat: junior designers still need senior oversight because AI output often looks finished while missing important details. ## Code review needs to change too Code review was never really about catching bugs line by line. Its actual value has always been building shared judgment - alignment on what belongs in a product, institutional knowledge about why things are built the way they are. That function doesn't go away when AI writes the code. If anything it matters more. But the format needs to change. When code volume increases faster than review capacity, reviewing every diff the same way stops working. One approach: shift attention from diffs to intent and constraints, and codify the feedback that comes up repeatedly - roughly three-quarters of review comments - into automated rules. That frees senior engineers to focus on the judgment calls that actually require their attention rather than re-catching the same issues on every PR. The framing that's emerging is that review is merging with planning. The conversation about what should be built and how it should behave needs to happen before the code exists, not after a PR lands. ## What this actually means AI has genuinely changed who builds software. That's real and probably irreversible. But the productivity gains people are expecting haven't fully materialized because the constraint shifted and most teams haven't caught up to it yet. More code generation without fixing the verification bottleneck just creates a larger backlog of unreviewed work. The teams that figure out how to review, govern, and deploy faster are the ones that will actually benefit. Everyone else is just producing more PRs. ## Questions this post answers ### How much has AI coding activity from non-engineers increased according to recent data? Pull requests overall rose 111% over two years, with product managers and designers attaching PRs at roughly triple their previous rate. Executive usage of AI features jumped from under 10% to over 30% year over year, and at companies with 200+ employees, CEO time spent on AI increased 27 percentage points since January, based on a study from Linear. _Track how AI is reshaping who ships code by following engineering workflow trends on daily.dev._ ### Does more AI-generated code actually reduce overall product development time? No, overall time spent on product development is going up, not down, despite AI-assisted speed gains. Token spend on AI usage does not correlate with value delivered, meaning teams are burning through AI usage without necessarily shipping more that matters. The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to validation, governance, and security review. _Engineers weighing AI's real impact on delivery speed can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@akkitto** · 1 upvotes > Close them. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Why AI Code Reviews Are Slowing Down PRs](https://daily.dev/posts/why-ai-code-reviews-are-slowing-down-prs-yubjqxjqr) · Aviator Blog · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [As AI helps us write more code, who’s catching the bugs?](https://daily.dev/posts/as-ai-helps-us-write-more-code-who-s-catching-the-bugs--swtlsnqbi) · LeadDev · 1 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#code-review](https://daily.dev/tags/code-review), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and nobody's quite sure what to do about it","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj"},"datePublished":"2026-08-25T06:09:53.722Z","dateModified":"2026-08-31T17:22:49.501Z","description":"A new Linear study shows AI coding tools have dramatically expanded who can open pull requests - product managers and designers now submit PRs at roughly...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/71b9928473dea2749b1be38aab587341?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/71b9928473dea2749b1be38aab587341?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collections","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collections","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--fk_6ycEi--/f_auto,q_auto/v1780996001/logos/collections?_a=BAMAMiWQ0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":4},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"leadership,ai-coding,code-review,vibe-coding","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collections","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Non-engineers are opening pull requests now, and nobody's quite sure what to do about it"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"Close them.","datePublished":"2026-08-25T14:38:45.999Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/wQNxmXHxJ#c-4zCH06ehZ","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Daniel","url":"https://daily.dev/akkitto","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--FtwJqX4c--/f_auto/v1754900041/avatars/avatar_29TCpY2hJR72V3BlxPXzX?_a=BAMClqZW0"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/non-engineers-are-opening-pull-requests-now-and-nobody-s-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it-wqnxmxhxj#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How much has AI coding activity from non-engineers increased according to recent data?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Pull requests overall rose 111% over two years, with product managers and designers attaching PRs at roughly triple their previous rate. Executive usage of AI features jumped from under 10% to over 30% year over year, and at companies with 200+ employees, CEO time spent on AI increased 27 percentage points since January, based on a study from Linear. Track how AI is reshaping who ships code by following engineering workflow trends on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Does more AI-generated code actually reduce overall product development time?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"No, overall time spent on product development is going up, not down, despite AI-assisted speed gains. Token spend on AI usage does not correlate with value delivered, meaning teams are burning through AI usage without necessarily shipping more that matters. The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to validation, governance, and security review. Engineers weighing AI's real impact on delivery speed can follow this debate on daily.dev."}}]} ```