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All episodesDevExJuly 2, 2026<br>DevEx for Non Developers with Frances Coronel, Slack

Frances Coronel, senior software engineer at Slack, talks about the shift to multiplayer software development, enabling non-engineers with AI tooling, and why sharing your custom setup is the most underrated upskilling strategy.

About the guest<br>Frances Coronel<br>Senior Software Engineer

Frances Coronel is a senior software engineer on the agentic SDLC team at Slack, where she helps enable both engineers and non-engineers with anything AI-driven, under the DevXP pillar within Core Infrastructure. She builds AI-powered developer tooling, speaks at conferences, and mentors engineers at all levels, with a particular focus on making technical leadership more accessible for Latinas and underrepresented engineers in tech.

Show more<br>Enabling Non-Engineers to Contribute Code<br>Everyone is trying to optimize for how people can work in this new agentic era. Non-engineers also need to learn what features these harnesses offer for agents. The DevXP team at Slack supports numerous internal tools, but non-engineers aren't as familiar with things like a CLI. They haven't had the need to use a terminal or an IDE before, but now they're getting more comfortable, partly because we've worked really hard to enable them to that level. That's becoming a story for many companies, because now the roles have blurred.<br>There is a lot of tension from engineers that comes with enabling non-developers to contribute code. I think it's okay to talk about that out loud. The future is changing rapidly, and it's akin to a roller coaster — it can feel really fun, also a little scary, but it's happening.

Internal and External Tooling Converging<br>The DevXP team is collaborating with the product team more and more. The two sides used to be siloed; now they're converging. Anything we release externally, we test and dogfood it first.

We have product engineers now collaborating with DevXP engineers on what something looks like internally, and we want to hill-climb the experience with incremental improvements before it goes out into the world.

Sharing Custom Setups<br>Just dropping new models or features from AI companies with a note ‘Here’s some YouTube videos’ is not helpful at all for knowledge sharing.

What is more valuable is people sharing their customized setup. We would see, for example, someone on the growth product team really cooking with Claude, and we can see in our dashboards what Skills or MPCs they’re using, but we want them to share directly how they're using it.

People sharing their custom setups internally is very helpful, almost like word of mouth. When you see your peers adopting something, you get FOMO: Wow, I didn't know I could do it like this. That was something I did myself very early on, because you just don't know what you don't know. Most people think that whatever they're doing probably isn't that impressive. We really had to tell people not to think that way and just share.<br>Sharing is caring in this new world because so much is happening at an unprecedented rate, so everyone is continuously catching up. That's a new mental shift we're getting ourselves used to.<br>Building Slack’s Internal Dashboard<br>In January, when Opus 4.6 dropped, there was a huge shift in energy where people realized these models are really capable of doing quite a lot. I was a product engineer on the sidebar team at the time and starting to get really cooking with Claude and feeling overwhelmed by all the updates that teams were sharing across multiple channels. I wanted a central location for all of it in one place.<br>I started with a website, created an MVP, and shared it. Consolidation is very powerful — I think that's part of why Slack is so successful — and I was trying to consolidate all this information into one place.<br>That evolved to include not just the internal tools we had approval to use, the internal MCP servers we'd built, and external ones we recommended, but also metrics, so that everything was in one central place. That made it even more powerful, because people could tie usage of a specific plugin to actual numbers, since all our telemetry was being tracked in the dashboard too.<br>The dashboard is also the main way for people to discover tools. We also have integrations with Slackbot for our internal MCPs — Slackbot is basically your 24/7 AI assistant inside Slack, integrating with all our custom tools and features.

Sharing Over Tokenmaxxing<br>We do track usage and token spend in our dashboard, but we intentionally don't surface it prominently — it's one of the columns in a table, not something we highlight. We try to...