u/ReasonableSet1162

Need advice!

I’m a woman working as a Tech Lead at a startup. The overall company culture is slightly negative, but I can manage it as long as it doesn’t directly affect me.

There are four people on my team. One has roughly the same level of experience as me, while the other three are freshers. Ever since I joined, I’ve had a difficult working relationship with one of the freshers.

She joined the company two months before me, and I feel she had started seeing herself as the person responsible for managing the team. However, I joined as the Tech Lead, and management specifically asked me to take updates from the team and communicate them to leadership.

Initially, she would disagree with almost everything I suggested. For example, when I introduced a daily stand-up, I created a poll with options such as 10:00, 10:30, and 11:00 a.m. She refused all of them, and we eventually had to schedule the meeting at 3:00 p.m. because of her availability.

There have been many similar incidents where I eventually had to involve my lead, and he had to intervene. She also struggles technically, frequently misses deadlines despite multiple reminders, and has had conflicts with another colleague as well.

Her behaviour has improved slightly now, but I still notice attitude-related issues. Because of everything that has happened, we barely speak unless it is related to work or project updates.

The main problem is that this situation is now taking up too much of my mental space. I don’t want to keep thinking about her, but her presence affects my entire day at the office. When I see her, I immediately feel angry and find it difficult to focus on my work. I know that may sound dramatic, but it is genuinely affecting me.

The overall team environment also doesn’t feel healthy, and small groups have formed within the team. I’m emotionally exhausted and unsure how to handle this professionally without letting it affect my peace of mind.

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? What would be the best way to handle this as a Tech Lead?

Need advice!

I’m a woman working as a Tech Lead at a startup. The overall company culture is slightly negative, but I can manage it as long as it doesn’t directly affect me.

There are four people on my team. One has roughly the same level of experience as me, while the other three are freshers. Ever since I joined, I’ve had a difficult working relationship with one of the freshers.

She joined the company two months before me, and I feel she had started seeing herself as the person responsible for managing the team. However, I joined as the Tech Lead, and management specifically asked me to take updates from the team and communicate them to leadership.

Initially, she would disagree with almost everything I suggested. For example, when I introduced a daily stand-up, I created a poll with options such as 10:00, 10:30, and 11:00 a.m. She refused all of them, and we eventually had to schedule the meeting at 3:00 p.m. because of her availability.

There have been many similar incidents where I eventually had to involve my lead, and he had to intervene. She also struggles technically, frequently misses deadlines despite multiple reminders, and has had conflicts with another colleague as well.

Her behaviour has improved slightly now, but I still notice attitude-related issues. Because of everything that has happened, we barely speak unless it is related to work or project updates.

The main problem is that this situation is now taking up too much of my mental space. I don’t want to keep thinking about her, but her presence affects my entire day at the office. When I see her, I immediately feel angry and find it difficult to focus on my work. I know that may sound dramatic, but it is genuinely affecting me.

The overall team environment also doesn’t feel healthy, and small groups have formed within the team. I’m emotionally exhausted and unsure how to handle this professionally without letting it affect my peace of mind.

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? What would be the best way to handle this as a Tech Lead?

Need some genuine advice.
At my company, we’re limited to $300 worth of AI tokens per month. Earlier, we had an option to extend the limit, but that’s no longer available, so we have to manage within the $300 budget.
I’m a full-stack developer, and AI has become a major part of my development workflow — understanding the codebase, implementing features, debugging, writing/refactoring code, reviewing PRs, etc. With the amount of work we have, going back to writing everything manually would be extremely difficult.
I’m looking for good alternatives once the company-provided AI quota is exhausted. I’m also okay with paying from my own pocket, as long as it’s reasonably priced. Ideally, I’d prefer something with very high or no practical usage limits.
I tried a Codex subscription, but since I had to log in using my personal account on my office machine/repository, I wasn’t comfortable using it for company code, so I stopped.
What are other developers in a similar situation using?
I’m open to:
Local LLMs
Paid coding assistants
API-based solutions
VS Code extensions/agents
Any other setup that works well for full-stack development
My main requirements are good coding capability, high usage limits, reasonable cost, and preferably something that can be used safely with company code.
Would really appreciate genuine recommendations from people who have actually used these tools.

Need some genuine advice.
At my company, we’re limited to $300 worth of AI tokens per month of Github copilot. We have only github copilot option in company. Earlier, we had an option to extend the limit, but that’s no longer available, so we have to manage within the $300 budget.
I’m a full-stack developer, and AI has become a major part of my development workflow — understanding the codebase, implementing features, debugging, writing/refactoring code, reviewing PRs, etc. With the amount of work we have, going back to writing everything manually would be extremely difficult.
I’m looking for good alternatives once the company-provided AI quota is exhausted. I’m also okay with paying from my own pocket, as long as it’s reasonably priced. Ideally, I’d prefer something with very high or no practical usage limits.
I tried a Codex subscription, but since I had to log in using my personal account on my office machine/repository, I wasn’t comfortable using it for company code, so I stopped.
What are other developers in a similar situation using?
I’m open to:
Local LLMs
Paid coding assistants
API-based solutions
VS Code extensions/agents
Any other setup that works well for full-stack development
My main requirements are good coding capability, high usage limits, reasonable cost, and preferably something that can be used safely with company code.
Would really appreciate genuine recommendations from people who have actually used these tools.

Note : iIf you guys are not using any AI For coding and manually doing it , that’s great. But please don’t advise to stop using AI as it is not possible for us to stop using it.

I am a frontend developer having around 10 years of experience. From last years I have started using copilot and since then I have not l done any coding by myself. All my team is doing vibe coding and getting things done from copilot.
Because of this , I always feel guilty and feel I am useless.

1. Is it normal? Is everyone doing the same in the industry ?
2. Our projec

t has

1. now become so AI heavy that even for debugging it would be difficult for us to manually debug anything.
2. I want realistic suggestions/help.
3. Like is this guilt normal and should I continue to vibe code?
4. If I want to completely understand my codebase how should I do it?

In our company, we used to get 30k tokens per month and we could also increase the budget. 30k tokens were not at all sufficient for us as we heavily use github copilot. But now they have told that only 30k tokens will be given and you won’t be able to increase the limit. I am afraid because all of us finish 30k tokens by first 15 days of the month. And our codebase is huge and so dependent on AI that we cannot go back to writing our own code. So I want genuine suggestions on what to do? Are there any free models that I can integrate in vscode? Please help!!