Practice Isn't Enough for Senior Engineers - Adaptation Is a Key Skill in an AI-First Industry

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   The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripping away the labels we attach to tools, roles, and even ourselves to see what something actually does at its core. It's the difference between handing your coding off to an agent and rethinking your entire workflow around what these new materials are truly capable of.

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   E1301 · 3 Jun 2026 · 28 min

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3. 

   E1300 · 27 May 2026 · 27 min

   Rebuilding Your Mental Models In the Midst Of an AI Tech Revolution

   If you're a software engineer right now, the questions you're asking about your career probably feel existential. We've been spending a lot of time on this show preparing for the changing industry—what skills matter, what mindset works—and one answer keeps surfacing: your ability to update your mental models is itself the critical skill. In today's episode, I push on that idea directly. Some of the thinking models that defined good software engineering for the last decade deserve real scrutiny now, and a few of them may deserve to be thrown out entirely. This is an uncomfortable ask,…

4. 

   E1298 · 14 May 2026 · 29 min

   Senior Skills to Maintain Employment Through the AI Wave

   If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In today's episode, I unpack what that shift _actually_ means — it's closer to a tech lead or architect mindset — and zoom in on a specific interviewing and on-the-job skill that will help you stay employable: how you think about, talk about, and take ownership of failure.

5. 

   E1297 · 6 May 2026 · 26 min

   You're Wrong All the Time, But All You Need Are Better Explanations

   What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slow*, and I use it as a springboard to talk about a much bigger skill: knowing how to update your beliefs when reality shifts underneath you. This isn't about throwing out science or losing trust in your heroes. It's about developing the muscle to replace old explanations with better ones — a skill that has never been more important for software engineers.

6. 

   E1296 · 29 Apr 2026 · 31 min

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   If you've felt like the show has leaned hard into agentic coding lately, today's episode opens with why: the realistic future of software engineering includes these tools, and pretending otherwise makes this show less useful to you. From there, I want to give you something practical — a transferable skill that will compound in value as LLMs get more capable, and that also makes you a stronger communicator with humans. The skill is learning to speak in **meaning-rich, high-specificity abstractions**.

7. 

   E1313 · 30 Sep 2026 · 17 min

   How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering

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8. 

   E1311 · 21 Sep 2026 · 13 min

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   Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — and why they matter more than ever in a profession where abstraction moves faster than almost anywhere else. If you feel like you can't keep up with every new framework, model, or tool release, the answer isn't to read faster. It's to step up a level.

9. 

   E1310 · 5 Sep 2026 · 16 min

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10. 

    E1308 · 21 Aug 2026 · 15 min

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    As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, accept certain risks, and reduce the surface area they're responsible for — and what drives that shift underneath the surface. Understanding the reasons behind the trend is what lets you get there on purpose instead of waiting a decade to arrive there accidentally.

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