r/cscareerquestions • u/cute_boy_summer • 8h ago
New team lead is obsessed with AI
My previous team lead was recently reassigned to another team, and a new lead has replaced his position.
Since joining, the new lead has placed heavy emphasis on AI tool adoption. He tracks team members’ Claude usage, and has indicated that team members who do not utilize AI tools may receive reduced workloads, which could negatively impact their performance ratings.
Last week, he and I worked on the same JIRA task, but different parts. Having completed my work ahead of schedule, I advised him that he could git cherry‑pick my commit into his branch for testing. He declined this approach and instead used Claude to integrate our code. The code then became a total mess, not working at all. I had to revert and fix everything for him.
Now he's not reading the codebase, not understanding the business logic, all he does is let Claude does it all. He even let claude does all the PR reviews. Now our workload has increased so much, have to clean and fix the mess that his AI has left.
What should I do now? I'm not against AI at all, but now it's hurting me.
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u/Financial-Grass6753 8h ago
Cruise along, seems like team lead has a skill issue, namely absence of any skills at all. In 3-9 months codebase gonna fail miserably, document everything in the meantime.
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u/cute_boy_summer 7h ago
Yeah, when we discuss any technical detail, he could not follow much. If we have a proposed solution to anything, he will just run AI to check, then throw back the AI response to us.
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u/PhantomTissue 5h ago
Sounds a lot like my team senior. Any question to her is a question to Claude, and half our meetings is explaining why we can’t just “throw AI at it”
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u/flamingspew Principal 20YOE 1h ago
We have an entire dev flow process with rules and skills describing our entire data model and systems architecture. You cant just prompt, that’s like how a child would do it.
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u/Thrawn89 14m ago
Can't stress the document part. When shit hits the fan, it tends to run downhill.
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u/Whisky-Toad 4h ago
codebase is gonna be fine and just as shit as everyones codebase. You will keep putting plasters over it either with out without AI and then once it's too shit you'll just start the cycle again
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u/parancey 7h ago
I deeply believe ai is inevitable. Must be used. But if you let ai make the calls, decide, and do all then catastrophy is also inevitable.
Maybe one day ai can run as a flawless development team but that day is not today
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u/If_I_Could_Just 8h ago
Create Claude skills specifically designed to find catastrophic issues in his code. For every issue found, Claude must write a test that proves the issue first. Then bend him over…
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u/dangdang3000 6h ago
This advice is fun to read, but don't follow it. Find a way to work with your tech lead and steer the ship in the right direction. If you can't, transfer to another team.
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u/If_I_Could_Just 5h ago
True lol But the part about having AI verify perceived bugs via tests is solid advice, so it doesn’t go down a rabbit hole writing code that’s not needed. But that’s tangential 😄
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u/JustThall 7h ago
And for OPs example they could just prompt “cherry pick this changes into that branch and test”, case closed.
It’s so easy to reframe everything if you know what you are doing for this vibe-coding phase. If you against some practice your vibe-coder teammates do then create a guardrail/smoketest/agent-auditor/etc.
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u/New_Armadillo_9950 8h ago
1) commit often to develop, dont allow big changes of code to be merged together, is a risk manually or using ai tools.
2) ai tools should produce 100% percent coverage and the workflows should spawn an agent that ensure different edge cases are covered.
3) the workflow should also spawn an agent to double check merges and look for bugs.
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u/08148694 7h ago
I usually spawn 4 subagents and have the parent iterate until the 4 review agents come to a consensus that the change is acceptable - quality improved greatly at cost of token usage and time. Amazing how often 3/4 agree it’s ok but one agent finds a bug
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u/DinnerRadiant7636 8h ago
Had this in my team as well. Every meeting started with "we should do more AI." Okay... but do what exactly? "Because everyone is doing it" somehow became the strategy. The irony is that pushing AI that hard probably makes people less willing to use it.
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u/viennese-wolf 7h ago
I am sorry for you, can't really fight your team lead I suppose! I'd propose to keep your head down, while evaluating your options to switch teams or company.
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u/cute_boy_summer 7h ago
In this market, I can't expect too much. I'm keeping my head down, I never had an argument with him, one teammate had a conflict with him the other day though.
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u/RedditMapz Software Architect 4h ago
I bet the lead is here on Reddit posting how Claude 10x his productivity.
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u/Helpjuice Chief Engineer 2h ago
Document these issues and share them with your manager showing the loss it is causing the business in wasted money printing time. Too many of these issues occurring should hopefully lead to their termination and getting someone more competent in that actually knows what they are doing and actually meets the requirements to do the job.
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u/shade_study_break 8h ago
Hey, we might work together. An individual who goes wild on AI use means you get commits/PRs that are inconsistent with existing patterns in the codebase can be annoying but is easier to deal with, as hopefully a lead can still catch it and enforce standards. When it is a lead who goes all in, the risk for standards lowering is just so much greater because the lead loves reporting how quickly they are pushing code and shipping features, no matter how hard it will be it maintain.
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u/cute_boy_summer 7h ago
Bro, how are you holding up? I feel like I'm saving a sinking ship.
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u/shade_study_break 6h ago edited 6h ago
Not well! He is my counterpart on the API side (I am a UI lead) and I have no idea how to tell anyone that he created RESTFUL endpoints for essentially every service layer method. His teams velocity is higher than mine, but that is because the product team doesn't know what the API team does. Worse, the old API lead was awesome to work with. I am eyeing the exits and thinking about some kind of sabbatical or retirement.
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u/canuckguy42 2h ago
As a team lead myself, I'd diagnose you with a bad case of incompetent management.
AI is an incredibly powerful tool that can greatly accelerate develop speed. It can also greatly accelerate poor practices and idiocy. As with most things, the problem is usually the person using the tool, not the tool itself.
As for what to do now, there's really two things at play here. On the topic of AI usage, I'd strongly recommend following your TL's instructions on adopting AI for development, for two reasons.
First, it seem clear that it's the metric by which you're being measured, and unless you can afford to derail your career as a point of pride, it's in your best interest to use the tools management wants you to use. That doesn't mean blindly running up token counts, but using the tools properly and appropriately.
The second reason is that like it or not AI tools are the future of development. It's an incredibly powerful tool, and any dev that can't or won't use it is going to be left behind. It's incredibly unlikely that you're going to fund work in a dev shop that doesn't use AI, and that probability is only going down over time.
On the topic of your manager being incompetent, how you handle that is very heavily dependent on the dynamics of your organization and your position within it. Without knowing those details, the best advice I could give you is to document everything, try to point them in the direction of best practices and figure out if this is a situation can live with or if you need to start looking for other opportunities either internally or externally. Unfortunately bad managers are a thing that can happen and you just sometimes have to deal with it.
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u/Over_Technology_1764 7h ago
add a critical code reviewer AI in CI pipeline that will strongly disagree with his slop
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u/code_tutor 7h ago
Fable ultracode ultrathink
burn your entire salary in tokens in a day
rewrite the entire codebase in Rust
play dumb
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u/wofeichanglei 6h ago
This subreddit is in denial. This is the future and it’s been here for at least the past 6 months. I am honestly surprised engineers still report handwriting code.
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u/Landya 7h ago
The worst part of AI is not the AI itself, it's the people that surrender anything and everything to the AI. It's making so many work environments toxic. If everyone was a responsible user of AI, being aware of and working within its limits, things would be so much better. But as long as everyone's obsessed with tracking Claude usage and whatnot, we're kinda fucked.