{"slug": "running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer", "title": "Running an engineering process without being an engineer", "summary": "A GTM engineer without a software engineering background has adopted an engineering process to build AI-powered workflows, using Linear for task management and a multi-agent system where each stage leaves reasoning behind. The developer relies on open models like DeepSeek for high-volume tasks and Claude Code for complex thinking, emphasizing context over prompting.", "body_md": "I'm not a software engineer. My background is GTM. So now I'm a [GTM Engineer](https://marianomartene.com/gtm-engineer/) I guess. I've spent years helping SaaS founders figure out how to get from founder-led execution to scalable growth. Today, though, I see GTM more as a code problem and spend a surprising amount of time shipping software.\n\nThe most interesting concept to borrow was the **engineering process**.\n\nProgramming and engineering are different jobs.\n\nEverything I work on starts as a Linear issue.\n\nWhether it's a GTM workflow, an internal tool, or a client feature, it goes through the same pipeline:\n\n```\nBacklog → Todo → In Progress → Review → Done\n```\n\nWhen an issue is ready, an orchestrator agent picks it up:\n\nThe interesting part isn't that there are three agents—it's that **every stage leaves its reasoning behind**. Each handoff becomes a comment in Linear explaining what changed, what was tested, and what still looks risky. The ticket itself becomes the audit trail.\n\nThat completely changed how I work and pushed me toward separating everything into small tasks.\n\nI borrowed almost directly from Matt Pocock's workflow: grilling ideas before writing code. Since only 20% of my time is coding, I had to adapt it to work.\n\nMy flow looks like this:\n\n`/grill-me`\n\n`/to-prd`\n\nChecklists work exceptionally well for LLMs—they force the model not to skip steps.\n\nThis has probably improved quality more than switching models ever did.\n\n**Reserve expensive thinking for Claude Code:**\n\n**Everything else runs on open models:**\n\nThese don't need frontier intelligence—they need throughput. Moving that work onto DeepSeek also let me remove a paid search API because agents could perform the same discovery directly.\n\nI stopped thinking about prompting as the important part. **Most quality comes from context.**\n\nEverything important about my business lives inside the repository:\n\n`CLAUDE.md`\n\n— Business rulesEvery new session starts with this context already loaded—lean and on-demand. That means I'm no longer explaining my business over and over. I'm onboarding agents the same way I'd onboard a new teammate, with core context and pointers to their systems (CRM, email, transcripts, etc.).\n\nThis is a very different workflow from what I imagined AI-assisted development would look like a year ago.\n\nI still don't think of myself as a software engineer. But I also don't think that's the point anymore.\n\nFor me, the most interesting thing was that it gave me access to an engineering process. I'm curious whether other people without a traditional engineering background are converging on something similar.\n\nWhat parts of software engineering have you borrowed? Which open models have earned your trust for high-volume work? My guess is that a lot of us are independently reinventing the same operating system.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/mariano_martene_5cb75456d/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer-5edn", "published_at": "2026-07-25 10:16:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-25 10:31:34.317503+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Linear", "Matt Pocock", "Claude Code", "DeepSeek"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/running-an-engineering-process-without-being-an-engineer.jsonld"}}