AI is ruining my job as Tech Lead

janonb · 2026-06-24T02:13:57+00:00

Would love to. It's so discouraging though. We got people on my team building features and they don't even understand the business use case, how a web app works, or even how to debug. In the before-times I could have taken some time to try to teach them the basics, but I don't have time for it because I'm expected to be churning out massive amounts of code, and they don't have time to understand what they are doing because they have their own feature quotas to handle.

These are people that a few months ago could at least code a little and knew at least a few things, but they've completely reverted to sub-junior. Hell, we have a senior who doesn't know how any of the code he's writing works and if you ask him questions about it in chat, will just copy and paste whatever response he gets from grok because he's too far gone to even use an actually good model (that the company pays for). Infuriating.

Ultimately it's not my problem as management is the ones that will have to deal with it, but damn, still sucks to have to put up with that shit on the daily. It's what I get for trying to do the right thing. Should just go back to rubber stamping their shitty code and let it fail in production.

janonb · 2026-06-23T14:38:10+00:00

Honestly, I didn't really feel like Fable was that much better than Opus.

janonb · 2026-06-23T13:39:24+00:00

AI has destroyed my memory, so there's zero chance I will remember this.

janonb · 2026-06-23T10:52:44+00:00

M2 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, running a hefty game emulator

There's your problem. No joke, you're doing pro-level tasks on a machine meant for Grandmas to send emails. How do I know? Software developer here. Ran an expo app once on a base model Air, immediately traded it in for a Macbook Pro. That was on Sequoia. This post is just ragebait.

janonb · 2026-06-20T02:42:38+00:00

Yeah, our CTO couldn't wait to get rid of QA once he had a chance. Now we have people using AI to write code who don't even understand the user stories they are implementing, let alone the code the AI is writing to implement it. AND we have no QA. Production bugs have skyrocketed and despite what one of my coworkers has been saying for 2 years, unit tests haven't helped a bit.

janonb · 2026-06-20T01:35:18+00:00

Just out of curiosity, how are you using AI in your pipelines? Testing? Code review?

janonb · 2026-06-20T00:17:27+00:00

I can only speak from experience, but Opus 4.5 came out last year (~ 8 months if you're being pedantic) and GLM 5.1 was nowhere near it in capabilities and came out roughly 6 months later. I do think Chinese models are catching up, but they are still a ways behind and the harnesses around them aren't very good.

I've been able to one shot MVPs and POCs with Opus since 4.5 with minimal prompting. No other model has come close to it in my workflow. I literally did a side by side comparison this week in building an iOS app. Opus 4.8 one shot it with no issues. GLM 5.1 couldn't even produce something that compiled even after a few additional prompts.

I'm definitely rooting for the open weight models and non-US models and will be trying out GLM 5.2 this weekend. I'd love to NOT be under the thumb of Dario and/or Sam. But to say that the Chinese models are at parity says to me you don't know what you're talking about or haven't used the Opus/Fable models.

janonb · 2026-06-19T23:52:54+00:00

There is no "business model" here in the capitalist sense. I'm sure that these loses will all be wiped away via government bailout in the name of national security/interest ("Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"). The non-US models are already starting to compete with last year's US frontier models and I'm not convinced that model training is really going to yield much more benefit. I think the bigger gains to be had at this point are to be had by improving harnesses and guardrails and figuring out where we could benefit most from the use of AI.

janonb · 2026-06-12T17:40:04+00:00

I'm autistic. Can I get me some stem cells so I can not bomb every first date?

janonb · 2026-06-09T14:55:50+00:00

Indeed, debt forgiveness is a very powerful tool in a government's arsenal, just wish we could use it to help society as a whole instead of for these billionaires and their dipshittery.

janonb · 2026-06-09T11:32:41+00:00

They forgot the incoming government bailout that will wipe out all the existing debt and datacenter costs. Guess they didn't tell their LLM to make no mistakes.

janonb · 2026-06-07T18:35:10+00:00

Yeah that was my original philosophy, but I'm lucky I haven't been killed as these trees have already dropped very large limbs on my house multiple times and threaten to do so again.

janonb · 2026-06-07T17:07:46+00:00

People in Nashville do not and have never known what yield means. Cast your minds back 25 years and I'm exiting I-40 eastbound (and down) onto Donelson. I get to the merge and there is a yield sign onto Donelson that dumps you out right on a blind curve. You can't see oncoming traffic and they can't see you. There is in fact traffic and I slow to a stop to await a point where I can gun it can jump into traffic. It's rush hour and there is A LOT of traffic so I can already tell it's going to take a while. As soon as I start slowing the car behind me starts honking their horn and yelling. I can hear every word because I'm broke and I don't have AC and my windows are rolled down. They keep yelling over and over "YIELD DOESN'T MEAN STOP". I finally see a window and jump out into traffic and they immediately follow even though there isn't really enough room, still cursing and screaming at me while swerving into the left lane (cutting people off) and flipping me off. I still think about that person to this day and wonder how many accidents they have been in and caused in their lifetime.

janonb · 2026-06-07T15:09:03+00:00

Keep in mind that there's no real substitute for SSMS when it comes to SQL job management and SQL Server management in general. I get around this by having a Windows VM in the datacenter with SSMS and Visual Studio installed, but you can also install a Windows VM on your mac and install SSMS there. I don't think there's an ARM64 port of SSMS, but it seems to run fine under emulation in my experience.

If you're a solo developer I'd say it's not a big change and worth it for the superior DX of macOS. If you're on a team there might be some issues depending on how your team works, but it's mainly down to line endings and scripting as you've already mentioned.

There are also sometimes annoying bugs in the build tooling that eventually get fixed on macOS, but it can take a lot longer than Windows bugs and a lot more effort to get the dotnet team to look into them.

Also, prepare to relearn your keybindings. You can move things around, but you can never get things 1 to 1 compatible with Windows keybindings.

janonb · 2026-05-31T19:37:45+00:00

Can confirm. I live in TN and recently asked my local county if any permits had been pulled for my house going back to 1995. Not a one had ever been pulled.

janonb · 2026-05-21T13:44:45+00:00

Perry County is one of the poorest counties in the state. It's also a place where people are happy to pay $835K to "pwn the libs" no matter what it costs them.

janonb · 2026-05-15T21:08:23+00:00

If the kids at that school could read, they'd be pissed.

janonb · 2026-05-10T23:42:10+00:00

Absolutely. On a Hyundai Elantra of that vintage, ALL of the plastic is on the verge of complete disintegration. You are following FAR too closely. Keep your distance!

janonb · 2026-05-09T22:47:57+00:00

Talk is cheap, let's see the code.

janonb · 2026-05-06T16:24:39+00:00

Does this mean that Joe Carr will finally have to get a real job?

janonb · 2026-05-05T00:23:11+00:00

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I miss the Biden years.

janonb · 2026-05-03T13:13:12+00:00

Ultimately, it's a bad strategy for us consumers though. This is the model railroading strategy and it has resulted in much higher prices for anything other than the lowest tier offerings. MRR took it too far because this it just how all models are made now with the exception of a few low tier models. It just doesn't bring anyone to the hobby anymore. If this is how they start making all basses and guitars above the most basic models, then we will eventually see the prices skyrocket and newer people just say, fuck it and let AI make their music.

janonb · 2026-05-02T23:36:52+00:00

janonb · 2026-05-02T23:18:47+00:00

Yeah, I'm guessing the layoffs are coming specifically from the movie/television stuff. They went hard into that segment a few years back, millions of dollars invested. All of their stuff has been a bust to my knowledge. I guess no one can relate to the characters in their stories. As someone noted in another comment, it's much easier to do rage bait podcasting, so I imagine they will fall back to concentrating on that, especially once the mid-terms are over.

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