Tag: tech-lead
Posts with tag tech-lead
I Stopped Checking If You Know the Answer
A candidate repeated my question back to me, waited a beat, and recited a definition word for word. The questions did not change. What they measure did.
Instructions Aren't Contracts
The rules are written down. The agent reads them on every prompt. They still do not make it into the code, and nothing is broken enough for the bot to report. A rules file is not configuration. It is a suggestion with an unknown success rate.
Review Is Infrastructure. Your AI Rollout Forgot to Build It.
AI adoption doubled our code output. Nobody budgeted for the reading. Telemetry from 22,000 developers shows the bill: 5x longer review, tripled incidents, and 31% more PRs merged with no review at all. This is what treating review as infrastructure actually means.
AI code isn't dangerous at random
I almost shipped a vulnerability to production because the model handed it to me with full confidence. Then I checked the numbers — the 2026 ones, not the two-year-old ones. Models hallucinate less, but picking a model stopped helping, and the attack surface is now shared by all of them.
The Most Important AI Work Doesn't Show Up in Any Metric
Every company brags about their model's stats. Nobody tells you what you have to set up, and what you have to prompt, to actually hit those numbers. The hardest part of working with AI is the part no benchmark measures.
AI Made Me Fluent in Backend. It Didn't Make Me a Backend Engineer.
AI equalized the part of the job that was never the hard part — writing the code. The hard part was always knowing what to ask. That part it can't hand you, and worse, it hides the fact that you don't have it.
We Don't Trust AI's Code. We Also Don't Read It.
I committed code I hadn't read, felt the guilt, and almost filed it as a discipline problem. It wasn't. The gap between not trusting AI's code and not reading it is the clearest signal we have that the valuable part of the job moved downstream — from writing to reading.
The Line Doesn't Defend Itself
I wrote about the decisions I won't hand to AI. That post quietly assumed I'm the one standing at the door. On a team of ten, I'm not — and the line that lives only in my head is the first thing AI erases.
AI Isn't Burning Us Out. The Narrative Around AI Is
Simon Willison says coding agents leave him wiped out by 11am. Engineers at every major shop are publishing essays about AI fatigue. I run a frontend team and use AI across my entire workflow — and I think we are blaming the wrong thing. It is not the model that exhausts us. It is the story we keep telling ourselves about the model.
What I Won't Let AI Touch
I run a nine-agent code review system in production. I still won't hand AI five decisions — not despite knowing these tools, but because I do. The ones you can't cheaply reverse stay mine: the decisions that compound.
The Four Phases of Mentoring Juniors With AI
If AI can't replace what juniors used to learn from, what do we actually do? A four-phase framework for onboarding juniors when AI is in the stack — no skipping, no shortcuts. Part 3 of a series on mentoring juniors in the AI era.
What AI Won't Teach a Junior
AI will teach a junior almost everything mechanical. But there are skills you used to get for free, just by writing the boilerplate. That free ride is over. Part 2 of a series on mentoring juniors when execution is cheap and decisions are everything.
The Junior Paradox in the AI Era
AI eliminated the tasks juniors used to learn on. The role didn't go away — but the runway did. Part 1 of a series on mentoring juniors when execution is cheap and decisions are everything.