Chaos Doesn't Have to Win - Maintaining Order in the Midst of AI Change

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1. 

   E1299 · 24 May 2026 · 20 min

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

   If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. For many of us, this career has always been engaging for deeply creative and intellectual reasons—and that excitement is still here. But our mental models of what it means to be a good engineer, and what it means to keep improving, have gone a little stale. In today's episode, I want to talk about a distinction that I believe will become the cornerstone…

2. 

   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.

3. 

   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.

4. 

   E1296 · 29 Apr 2026 · 31 min

   AI-Proofing Your Skillset - High-Meaning, High-Specifity Vocabulary is the Path to Growth

   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**.

5. 

   E1295 · 22 Apr 2026 · 30 min

   Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill

   Many engineers have built their careers on the belief that coding is their primary value — the flagship skill, the gate opener, the reason they get paid. But if AI can do a large slice of that implementation work, then coding-as-your-core-value leaves you in a very narrow place. In today's episode, I want to reframe how you think about your skills, and give you a simple three-part framework for deciding which skills are actually worth investing in as the industry shifts.

6. 

   E1293 · 8 Apr 2026 · 34 min

   Mourning the Loss of Coding, Senior Tooling Mindset, and Shaping Your Environment

   Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it or not. In today's episode, I explore two principles that senior engineers consistently apply to their workflows, regardless of which specific tools they're using. As our industry goes through one of the most rapid periods of change in the last 20 years, the engineers who thrive won't be the ones chasing every new tool — they'll be the ones who obsess over reducing friction in the work they do most often.

7. 

   E1292 · 1 Apr 2026 · 27 min

   Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics

   Most software engineers believe that having the best thinking — the most complete, most nuanced analysis — is what drives career success. Early on, that belief probably helped you invest in yourself and improve. But at some point, the habit of overanalyzing starts to work against you. In today's episode, I explore why the most useful beliefs in your career aren't necessarily the most accurate ones, and how deliberately leaning into "useful illusions" — heuristics that are technically incomplete but directionally correct — can make you more decisive, more action-oriented, and less likely to…

8. 

   E1291 · 24 Mar 2026 · 39 min

   Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making

   As coding becomes cheaper and faster through agentic tools, the bottleneck in software development is shifting upstream — away from writing code and toward the decisions that determine what gets built and why. In today's episode, I explore why decision-making is rapidly becoming the central activity of your job as a software engineer, and I walk through two common traps that even senior engineers fall into when they start participating more in collaborative, organizational decisions.

9. 

   E1290 · 18 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

   What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking

   If you're a software engineer right now, your feeds are probably overloaded with AI hot takes, tool announcements, and advice about how far behind you are. In today's episode, I take a different approach. Instead of prescribing what you should be doing, I open up about what I'm actually doing — from physical checklists and label makers to agentic workflows and 3D modeling with AI. This is a snapshot of one engineering manager's life in the spring of 2026, covering the small personal interventions, the books, the media, and the AI tooling that's shaping how I work and think right now.

10. 

    E1289 · 10 Mar 2026 · 21 min

    From Software Engineer to Agent Manager - How Work is Changing in A New Software Development Paradigm

    If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. However, the rapid introduction of new tools can slide quickly from exciting to purely chaotic, leaving you feeling like you are falling behind. In today's episode, I explore how this changes the nature of our day-to-day work, and why the key to surviving this transition is shifting your mindset from a traditional "Software Engineer" to an "Agent Manager".