Can Claude help with technical decisions?+
It can reason through options well, but it will not raise the two questions that actually settle most of them. The first is reversibility: ask it about your log format and your data model in the same session and you get two equally confident answers, though one is changeable on a Tuesday and the other outlives everyone who chose it. The second is operability: it does not know who is on call. Ask it to sort the decision by what undoing it costs before you ask it which option, and put your team in the prompt as a hard constraint.
What is a one-way door decision?+
Amazon's 2015 shareholder letter frames it as decisions that are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible, which must be made methodically, carefully and slowly with great deliberation and consultation. Most decisions are not like that: they are changeable, two-way doors, and those can and should be made quickly by high-judgement individuals or small groups. The practical value for a tech lead is spotting when a team is applying one-way-door process to a two-way-door decision, which is where most of the slowness comes from.
Why does AI recommend architecture my team cannot run?+
Because it optimises for what is technically good, and the material it learned from was written largely by people at companies with a platform team. It does not know who is on call, what they have operated before, what they will be paged for, or how many of them will still be there in eighteen months. Give it those facts as constraints and ask for two rankings: the technically best answer and the one this team can actually run. Where they differ is the interesting part.
Is AI good at code review?+
It is good at finding candidates and bad at weighting them. The default output is a flat list where a naming preference, a missing test and a race condition all appear at the same size in the same confident tone, which is exhausting to receive and teaches nothing. Two fixes: impose a budget of at most three must-fix items so it has to choose, and supply your conventions while forbidding it from asserting any standard you did not give it. Otherwise it will tell a junior their code breaks a rule that is not your rule.
Will it invent numbers in a tech-debt business case?+
Yes. Ask it to make the case for paying down debt and you get percentages of incidents avoided and engineering hours saved that you never supplied. Forbid any figure you did not give it, with a placeholder instead. The better use is to point it the other way entirely: ask it to write the strongest refusal a competent director would give, in their vocabulary. That tells you what you actually have to answer, and models are good at it when asked and bad at noticing it needs doing.
How do I unblock an engineer without doing the work for them?+
Do not paste their problem in and hand back the answer. It takes ninety seconds and it makes you a slow API in front of a fast one, while the engineer learns nothing and comes to you sooner next time. Ask the model for the three questions to ask, in order, with what a yes and a no would each rule out, and forbid it from hinting at the cause. Then ask what the engineer would need to already know for the first question to land - if they do not know it, the gap is the thing to teach and the debugging session is the wrong intervention.
Is it safe to paste work code into an AI chat?+
That is a policy question rather than a technical one, and as a tech lead you are usually the person who sets it or models it. Source code, customer data, credentials and internal architecture are governed by your employment agreement, your company's policy and often a customer contract, and the answer depends on your tier and account. Settle it in writing before it becomes a habit. Practices that hold regardless: reason about the shape of a problem rather than pasting the file, redact identifiers and secrets, keep customer data out, and remember a small snippet plus your public repo can identify the codebase.
How do I install the Dante skill?+
The download is a ZIP with SKILL.md at the root of the archive rather than inside a nested folder, which is the usual reason an upload fails. In the Claude desktop app open Customize, then Skills, upload the ZIP and toggle it on. Skills need code execution enabled, under Settings then Capabilities. Anthropic's help centre currently lists Skills on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, while its Academy tutorial lists Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, so if you are on the free plan check Settings then Capabilities for your own account rather than trusting either page. In ChatGPT or Gemini there is no upload step, so open SKILL.md, copy the contents and paste them into custom instructions.
