"Every New Claude Is a Downgrade" - Alem Tuzlak | Talking Tech #4
Alem Tuzlak maintains the devtools half the React ecosystem depends on: TanStack AI, TanStack DevTools, and the devtools for Remix and React Router. He builds AI tooling for a living at CopilotKit. And he thinks the newest AI models are getting worse. We talk about why every Claude release since Opus 4.5 has felt like a downgrade to him, the experiment where two coding agents worked 30 hours and finished 6 of 20 tasks while a third finished the rest in 6, and the creepier problem underneath it all: the AI that gave his doctor wife a wrong answer, got corrected, and replied "you're right, I was supposed to tell you this." We also get into what makes someone a developer when anyone can subscribe for $200 a month, why that $200 is half the minimum wage in his country, how he runs six agents at once without losing his mind, and why he gave up on coding tutorials entirely. Chapters 00:00 — Welcome and how a grandfather's memory led to open source 01:55 — Call of Duty 4, design skills, and becoming a developer 04:55 — "I'm gonna lose my job": first impressions of AI and what it did to outsourcing 07:00 — Agent software factories, the OpenCode hype cycle, and what excites him in 2026 09:05 — Maintaining TanStack AI: community vs roadmap, and AI slop PRs 11:50 — Generative UI, Jarvis, and CopilotKit's bet 17:00 — What separates a developer from a $200 subscription 18:00 — The ChatGPT diet plan that was wrong on purpose 20:15 — His wife is a doctor. The AI said "I was supposed to tell you this." 22:40 — How TanStack AI is architected: middleware everywhere and talking to 20 agent frameworks 27:30 — Forge 42, Code Forge, fatherhood, and the story behind the "I need a job" tweet 30:10 — The 30-hour experiment: Claude Code and Codex vs the new contender 35:15 — Why Opus 4.5 was the peak: downgrades and the intelligence plateau 37:30 — His actual workflow: the grill-me skill, writing his own skills, and Kira.dev 41:10 — Local AI and the parts of the world a $200 plan leaves behind 45:10 — Coding tutorials are dead (the watch-time data says so) 47:20 — Nobody knows about your project? It doesn't matter: marketing for maintainers 49:15 — New in TanStack AI: WebSockets, generic interrupts, sandbox snapshotting 51:05 — AI content, putting a face on it, and the slop economy 55:20 — If everything he built disappeared: his 30-second message to the world
