u/CaptainIndependent90

I recently joined a small team, about four developers and a tech lead, with around 3 years of experience under my belt. The team dynamic has been a bit rough from the start and I am trying to figure out how to handle a situation that keeps getting worse.

We have a contractor who grabs every ticket the moment it gets created. By the time anyone else even sees the task, he has already claimed it. The rest of the team ends up with barely anything meaningful to work on. To make things worse, one of the other developers is strictly frontend and wants nothing to do with backend work, so it just this guy.... I mean I get it, everyone wants the bag, it's tough...

My bigger concern though is the quality of what is being shipped. This contractor regularly finishes large tasks in a single day and submits thousands of lines of code. I caught one PR for an S3 event integration that was basically just boilerplate templates that did not actually work. I refused to approve it, flagged the issues, and ended up coordinating directly with the infra team to get things properly provisioned. The frustrating part is that the tech lead had already approved the PR the moment it was opened, no actual review. And before anyone else could even look at it, the contractor had already moved on to the next ticket.

This is not a one off thing. It happens consistently.

The code has a heavy AI generated feel to it and there are no real review gates in place. The tech lead auto approves almost everything and recently asked me to be the one reviewing all PRs, which feels like an unreasonable ask and honestly puts me in a weird spot given the whole situation.

And it is not just the code. When someone asks him a technical question he literally pastes an AI response back at them. I mean I get it, you can just ask the AI yourself at that point.

My manager doesn't have an idea I guess with the current situation. Which makes the whole thing feel even more frustrating because it seems like no one above me sees this as a problem worth addressing.

Has anyone navigated something like this? How do you turn it into a process conversation without it looking like you are just targeting one person? Seem like the TL like this contractor too since he is really really proactive.

I've been on GitHub Copilot CLI and Copilot Chat in VS Code for a while now, coming from a background as a Claude user (my org hasn't adopted Claude yet, so here I am).

One thing I keep noticing: skills seem to actively hurt response latency rather than help it. Has anyone else experienced this? Specifically:

- **Copilot Chat** responses feel drawn out and sluggish when certain skills like Superpower or Gem-team are active

- **Copilot CLI** (subagent mode especially) frequently dead-hangs, just sitting there waiting for a subagent response that takes forever or never comes

I'm not sure if these skills are doing something computationally expensive under the hood or if there's just poor orchestration between the subagents, but the net result is that using Copilot with skills feels slower and less reliable than without them.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing or if I'm missing a configuration that improves this.