The NYT’s ‘Coding After Coders’ piece made a lot of engineers defensive. As a Tech Lead managing a small engineering team, I read it twice — what they nailed, what they completely missed, and why the real story is more complicated than either side admits.
I use this code review checklist for tech leads to reduce false confidence and catch production-grade bugs: idempotency, timeout propagation, auth boundaries, and unsafe retries.
I ran the same 612-line TypeScript PR through five AI review agents to see which ones actually reduce reviewer workload. Two were consistently useful, two were mostly noisy, and one missed the highest-risk issue entirely. If you’re a tech lead choosing review tooling, this is the practical tradeoff breakdown.
AI isn’t just for writing code. Here’s how I use it for 1:1s, planning, documentation, and the other 60% of a tech lead’s job.
Not a listicle of 50 tools you’ll never try. These are the 7 AI tools I use daily as a Tech Lead managing engineers and data scientists.