New TT faculty seeking career advice

Hello I am new computer science TT faculty. I work at a R2 university but the teaching load is pretty high, I teach 3 courses a semester and we don’t have TAs. Teaching and random things have taken a lot of my time and energy. I thought I was pretty good at research during my PhD studies but now I don’t have a lot of time to focus on it.

Research here heavily rely on undergraduate students. To get them ready for doing meaningful work would take a lot of extra effort. Especially when I use Linux and C++. The logic here is to find a good student when they are freshman and sophomore, apply small internal and external grants to support the student and faculty to work for a semester. Then gradually prepare the student to work with you.

I don’t think it’s a good plan for many reasons. First of all undergrad students don’t really have a lot of time for research; secondly to prepare them for meaningful work both students and faculty have to put great effort in; and in this logic students are basically doing foundational work to get involved in research, but not necessarily meaningful work. I think my life would be much easier if I work solo with AI agents. I don’t want to say things in an extreme way but I basically need to be a 1 on 1 tutor to teach them how to use Linux and compile code.

Other things around here is also a mess. I have to deal with a lot of things that I never knew could be a problem. I know it’s super hard to find TT jobs recently, sometimes I would rather to work in a much better r1 or r2 university as a lecturer. But not sure if it is a good idea to leave TT position for a teaching position. But I don’t want to lock myself here with tenure.

I would appreciate your comments and suggestions!