Join Our Intro to Claude Code for Non-Engineers on Maven!

Ryan Smith · 2025-12-17T04:06:57.809Z

I've got a first Lightning Session on Maven! Would love to see you there. Recent workshops and projects showed many (most!) people who are non-engineers hit friction installing Claude Code. It's such a powerful toolset operating in a system terminal. Run research, build documentation, build additional documentation and templates on a knowledge base ... and so we have a free 30 minute session to get going. You will need a minimum $20/mo Claude plan to authenticate. https://maven.com/p/747df1/intro-to-claude-code-for-non-engineers?utm_source=instructor&utm_medium=ll_share_link&ajs_uid=807760

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Join Our Intro to Claude Code for Non-Engineers on Maven! | ProductBC

9 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Philip Walston
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As someone who uses Claude Code as my daily driver, it's great to see someone helping to reduce the FUD. I'm still amazed when the PMs who started the day afraid of a command line end the day deep into it and very happy.
🙌1
Ryan Smith
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seeing Teresa Torres' posts on LinkedIn lately give me a lot of hope. There were some dark days there in 2023 and 2024. I recall a number around 400,000 PMs had been laid off from 2022-2024. Salaries were (are still) on a downward pressure from the over supply in many regions. That's changing fast for AI PMs, who are very few, and getting double their prior comp. The new product builder role ships far more value. Now we need to upskill everyone, especially in Canada, where we tend to have a lot of branches and tier 2 opportunities.
Philip Walston
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Yeah, it was a really insightful post. Especially given her approach.
👍1
Aleks Pamir
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Ryan Smith I really need a reason to get this purchased by my company which is deep in Microsoft/CoPilot land. Are there any real justifications/comparisons between choosing Claude over CoPilot or do you think CoPilot would do what Claude does if we wait for some time?
Ryan Smith
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Aleks Pamir - Microsoft Copilot opened up enterprise to LLMs. Their security and assurance is why we're here today. Every power user I know that has tried the agentic AI products has Claude Code. They may also use Antigravity (Google) or Codex (OpenAI), or Cursor with Opus 4.5, but it's in the mix. Without knowing the decision-makers, I can't respond to their objections. You may be locked in because Microsoft is great at doing so. However, some light digging around and using the tools will expose advantages - including the SWE bench tests, code quality, error and bug minimization. I was on a call this morning about the verbose attribute which writes more detailed specs in Claude. Alternatively, you could point to Andrej Karpathy (fmr Open AI who coined "vibe coding") who has been posting about his Claude use, or Andrew Ng making comments this week about how impressive Claude Code is executing. A few months ago, it was the parallelization of agents and additional memory structures. What 'appears' to be the advantage since the November release of Opus 4.5 is the extra reasoning bump that is improving code quality.
Ryan Smith
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·
I'd add, while Co-pilot was falling way behind up to the last few months, they are less behind today. They stuck to an AI assistant approach a bit long, while other like Claude Code went more fully agentic. The way I can give a brief or vague prompt and Claude can spin up multiple specialist agents to execute and see complex chunks of tasks all the way through - research, plan/reason, sprint planning, TDD, code (any language or framework), run E2E and debug, then run CICD/DevOps is, like alien technology
Ryan Smith
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or this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/djoume_something-is-happening-to-me-im-now-activity-7411876157001879553-9cKQ?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=android_app&rcm=ACoAAAAAjVYB9OAEZJ3PsjRhyrHDygLPLM-1n0c&utm_campaign=share_via
Aleks Pamir
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Ryan Smith could the reason be that CoPilot "...stuck to an AI assistant approach a bit long" is that Enterprise users Microsoft is targeting are more hesitant to see AI as a job disruptor instead of a tool. I'm not talking about executive level, but rank & file who are given the tools and asked to use them. As you're probably aware, there are two schools of thought about AI, AI as an augmenter (gives individual humans superhuman skills to make them more productive individually) and AI as a replacer (completely eliminates certain jobs, increasing company productivity). Depending on who your audience/target market is, going with the wrong approach could antagonize your customers, and Microsoft is approaching this market as an upsell to existing customers, so they might be treading more carefully. Of course this is speculation on my part, and coming from a place where accusing Microsoft of incompetence has not been proven effective in the long run...
Aleks Pamir
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·
I will definitely give Claude a try now that you've explained the differences clearly. In my case, this would have to be in personal space, for now. Thanks for the feedback.

Philip Walston
·
·
As someone who uses Claude Code as my daily driver, it's great to see someone helping to reduce the FUD. I'm still amazed when the PMs who started the day afraid of a command line end the day deep into it and very happy.
🙌1
Ryan Smith
·
·
seeing Teresa Torres' posts on LinkedIn lately give me a lot of hope. There were some dark days there in 2023 and 2024. I recall a number around 400,000 PMs had been laid off from 2022-2024. Salaries were (are still) on a downward pressure from the over supply in many regions. That's changing fast for AI PMs, who are very few, and getting double their prior comp. The new product builder role ships far more value. Now we need to upskill everyone, especially in Canada, where we tend to have a lot of branches and tier 2 opportunities.
Philip Walston
·
·
Yeah, it was a really insightful post. Especially given her approach.
👍1
Aleks Pamir
·
·
Ryan Smith I really need a reason to get this purchased by my company which is deep in Microsoft/CoPilot land. Are there any real justifications/comparisons between choosing Claude over CoPilot or do you think CoPilot would do what Claude does if we wait for some time?
Ryan Smith
·
·
Aleks Pamir - Microsoft Copilot opened up enterprise to LLMs. Their security and assurance is why we're here today. Every power user I know that has tried the agentic AI products has Claude Code. They may also use Antigravity (Google) or Codex (OpenAI), or Cursor with Opus 4.5, but it's in the mix. Without knowing the decision-makers, I can't respond to their objections. You may be locked in because Microsoft is great at doing so. However, some light digging around and using the tools will expose advantages - including the SWE bench tests, code quality, error and bug minimization. I was on a call this morning about the verbose attribute which writes more detailed specs in Claude. Alternatively, you could point to Andrej Karpathy (fmr Open AI who coined "vibe coding") who has been posting about his Claude use, or Andrew Ng making comments this week about how impressive Claude Code is executing. A few months ago, it was the parallelization of agents and additional memory structures. What 'appears' to be the advantage since the November release of Opus 4.5 is the extra reasoning bump that is improving code quality.
Ryan Smith
·
·
I'd add, while Co-pilot was falling way behind up to the last few months, they are less behind today. They stuck to an AI assistant approach a bit long, while other like Claude Code went more fully agentic. The way I can give a brief or vague prompt and Claude can spin up multiple specialist agents to execute and see complex chunks of tasks all the way through - research, plan/reason, sprint planning, TDD, code (any language or framework), run E2E and debug, then run CICD/DevOps is, like alien technology
Ryan Smith
·
·
or this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/djoume_something-is-happening-to-me-im-now-activity-7411876157001879553-9cKQ?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=android_app&rcm=ACoAAAAAjVYB9OAEZJ3PsjRhyrHDygLPLM-1n0c&utm_campaign=share_via
Aleks Pamir
·
·
Ryan Smith could the reason be that CoPilot "...stuck to an AI assistant approach a bit long" is that Enterprise users Microsoft is targeting are more hesitant to see AI as a job disruptor instead of a tool. I'm not talking about executive level, but rank & file who are given the tools and asked to use them. As you're probably aware, there are two schools of thought about AI, AI as an augmenter (gives individual humans superhuman skills to make them more productive individually) and AI as a replacer (completely eliminates certain jobs, increasing company productivity). Depending on who your audience/target market is, going with the wrong approach could antagonize your customers, and Microsoft is approaching this market as an upsell to existing customers, so they might be treading more carefully. Of course this is speculation on my part, and coming from a place where accusing Microsoft of incompetence has not been proven effective in the long run...
Aleks Pamir
·
·
I will definitely give Claude a try now that you've explained the differences clearly. In my case, this would have to be in personal space, for now. Thanks for the feedback.