Non-engineers making code changes, has anyone actually made this work without it becoming a disaster?
We've been going back and forth internally about whether to let non devs touch the codebase directly for small stuff copy changes, form field tweaks, feature flag toggles. The argument is that it frees up engineers from a constant drip of low-value tickets. The counter-argument is that every time we've tried something like this before, it creates more cleanup work than it saves.
The previous attempt involved giving a PM access to a CMS-adjacent layer that was supposed to be safe.Within two months we had inconsistent terminology across the product, a broken form validation message that went unnoticed for three weeks, and a tooltip that contradicted what the feature actually did. The engineer review step existed in theory but got skipped because everyone assumed someone else had checked it.
I'm genuinely curious whether this is a process failure or a fundamental problem with the idea. Teams who've made non-engineer self-service work what did the guardrails actually look like? Was it scoped to specific file types or directories? Did you require PR review regardless of change size, or did that just recreate the bottleneck you were trying to eliminate?
And for teams where it failed: was the failure about tooling, trust, process, or something else entirely? I want to figure out if there's a version of this that actually works at scale or if we're chasing something that sounds better in a planning doc than it plays out in practice.
