"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.Chapters00:00 — 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