The AI Tools I Actually Use as a Tech Lead (2026 Edition)
Every week there’s a new “100 AI Tools You NEED” thread on Twitter. Most of them are demos pretending to be products. I lead an engineering team doing real-time data processing. Here are the tools that actually survived more than a week in my workflow. 1. Claude Code — Daily Driver for Everything What it does: Coding assistant that runs in your terminal. How I actually use it: Pre-screen code reviews before I look at PRs Generate test cases from specs Debug production issues by pasting stack traces Write documentation that people actually read Why it wins: It handles large context windows well. I can paste an entire file and ask specific questions about it. GPT-4 and Gemini are good too, but Claude Code’s terminal integration makes it frictionless. ...