Developer Tea

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

The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, and Daniel Kahneman's Noise, I've been experimenting with printed, physical checklists for repetitive tasks — from producing this show to running one-on-ones. The rigor of writing precise procedures carries over into clearer communication with both humans and AI agents. Small Interventions, Big Returns: A Brother P-Touch label maker. Reorganizing scattered hobby gear. 3D printing organizational tools with a new Bambu Labs P1S. None of these are revolutionary on their own, but the compounding effect of better organization — essentially building a fast index for your physical life — pays back over and over. Context Shapes Focus: Switching from a home gym to working out at Planet Fitness with my brother-in-law was one of the best focus interventions I've made. The change in environment eliminated the procrastination and context-blending that came from being steps away from my computer. If you're struggling with a habit, sometimes the environment is the variable to change, not your willpower. The Reading List: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt (and its follow-up The Crux), The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay (a great framework for thinking about agentic workflows), How to Know a Person by David Brooks, and my top recommendation: 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — a book that will help you stop looking for the productivity hack that fixes everything and start thinking about what actually matters. Learning as a Habit: Right now I'm learning to drive a stick shift on a 1983 Bronco. The point isn't the skill itself — it's staying in the beginner's seat. Intentional practice, setting small goals, refining through repetition. Keeping this habit alive is more important than ever when the industry demands rapid adaptation. How I'm Actually Using AI: Claude Code for one-shotting tools with clear boundaries, local environment improvements, and terminal troubleshooting. OpenClaw for experimental agents like a personalized trip planner and Home Assistant automations via YAML. Claude Co-Work for file system management and screenshot organization. Obsidian as the connective tissue — a markdown knowledge base that gives AI agents personal context to work with. And at work, spec-driven development is showing real promise for shaping agent output quality. A Framework for Thinking About AI's Role: I break AI use cases into categories: automating existing workflows (where most gains are today), operational restructuring (what happens when you free humans from a task), execution of complex technical work (agents on the front lines), iterative consulting on intent and goals, and the emerging frontier of exploratory connections and strategic synthesis. What You Should Actually Do: Be action-oriented — the cat is out of the bag. Invest heavily in planning and specification before sending agents off to work. But more importantly, invest in mindful change: understand your own values, figure out who you want to be when you look back on this moment in 10 years, and let that guide your decisions about adoption, learning, and career direction. 🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi If you're building an application that needs real-time search data — whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker — SerpApi handles it for you. Make an API call, get back clean JSON. They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier at serpapi.com. 📮 Ask a Question If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com. 📮 Join the Discord If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today! 🗞️ Subscribe to The Tea Break We are developing a brand new newsletter called The Tea Break! You can be the first in line to receive it by entering your email directly over at developertea.com. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review!

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". The Illusion of Velocity vs. Actual Chaos: While the big-picture promise of AI is that the software development pipeline will move exponentially faster, the reality on the ground often feels like unadulterated chaos. Trying to adopt every new tool while spinning up multiple agents to work on parallel tickets introduces a massive new cognitive burden. The Context-Switching Trap: Understand why parallelizing agent workflows fundamentally changes your context-switching overhead. You are no longer just reloading context to build something yourself; you are reloading it to manage, review, and validate a building agent, which rapidly drains your cognitive ability and leads to burnout. The "Agent Manager" Mindset: Treating AI as just a "smart autocomplete" while you try to do the same old job will not work. You need to start viewing your role more like assembly line or process management, focusing on facilitating the system rather than typing every line of syntax. Adopt Old-School Quality Control Tactics: Discover how traditional management methods are becoming essential for individual contributors. Just like a factory manager doesn't inspect every single item off the line, you must develop methods for spot checks, anomaly detection, and standardizing outputs to evaluate the quality and quantity of your agents' work. Shift Your Work Upfront: Recognize that your core effort must move to the specification and planning phases. Your job is increasingly about setting the context, defining the prompt, and establishing strict guardrails before the agent begins its work. Redefining Your Work in Progress (WIP): Proven principles like limiting WIP and focusing on finishing rather than starting are more important than ever to reduce cognitive burden. However, you must adapt these principles to fit a workflow where you are managing processes rather than manually coding. Episode Homework: Take a step back and ask yourself: "What is my true work in progress? Am I actually manually doing these tickets, or am I managing the processes that produce quality ticket work?". 🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi No matter what you're building, SerpApi is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data—whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker—SerpApi handles it for you. ● Make an API call and get back clean JSON. ● They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. ● They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. ● If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier to build and test your application before you commit. Go to serpapi.com. 📮 Ask a Question If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com. 📮 Join the Discord If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today! 🗞️ Subscribe to The Tea Break We are developing a brand new newsletter called The Tea Break! You can be the first in line to receive it by entering your email directly over at developertea.com. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review!

AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?

AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how you can use your systems-thinking engineering mindset to adapt and thrive in this new era. 🎧 Episode Notes: The Engineering Bottleneck Shift For years, the software development pipeline was designed around one core assumption: engineering is the most expensive and restrictive bottleneck. Because of this, organizations optimized heavily for upstream risk mitigation to ensure we only built what was absolutely necessary. But AI is changing that math, making the act of coding significantly cheaper and faster. Here is what happens when that bottleneck breaks: The Historical Cost of Bugs: I look back at the Windows 95 era, where physical software delivery meant post-release bugs were incredibly expensive, demanding massive upfront QA. The Continuous Delivery Precedent: Discover how the internet made software updates cheap, which fundamentally changed the ROI of risk mitigation and enabled fast, iterative soft releases. The Upstream Shift: Understand why, as engineering throughput increases by 50% to 100% due to AI, the new organizational bottlenecks will rapidly shift upstream to product, design, and decision-making. Optimizing for Speed Over Risk: Learn why companies will likely begin to lessen their focus on risk mitigation (outside of catastrophic data breaches) to prioritize higher volume throughput and decision speed. The New Iterative Workflows: Explore the potential for consolidated roles where engineers, PMs, and designers use AI to make rapid, on-the-fly product decisions together without traditional hand-offs. Your Core Engineering Value: Remember that punching cards or manually managing memory didn't define engineers in the past, and manually typing code doesn't define you now. Your true value is your ability to approach problems with a systems-thinking mindset. 🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked Your coding agents have access to your codebase, but access doesn't directly translate into context. Agents often lack the reasoning to understand your architectural decisions, team patterns, or why an API is shaped the way it is—leading to bad outputs and wasted tokens. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack messages, and Jira issues into organizational context that agents actually understand so they write higher-quality code with fewer correction loops. Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/developertea. 📮 Ask a Question If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com. 📮 Join the Discord If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Listener Question - Abdul Asks About How to Balance Career Strategy Between Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions

Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work. We are diving into a fantastic listener question from Abdul, a front-end engineer with 10 years of experience who has hit a salary ceiling. He is trying to figure out how to pivot into higher-paying domains like backend or AI without making a risky leap that forces him to start over at the bottom rung. 🎧 Episode Notes: Balancing Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions When you hit a wall in your career, it often feels like you have to trade away the work you love just to achieve your financial goals. In this coaching-style episode, we break down Abdul's situation to help you rethink how you navigate financial constraints and career transitions. • Question Your Assumptions About Money: Discover why "making more money" isn't inherently a bad or vague goal. If your intent is to provide for your family, help elderly parents, and build a risk-mitigating financial buffer, your goal is actually highly instructive and values-driven. • The Illusion of Static Roles: Learn why job descriptions exist primarily as "skill buckets" to help companies hire. Once you are inside the company, your role is not concrete—it is a fluid spectrum that can shift as you adapt to new technologies. • Grow Where You Are Planted: Instead of making a massive, unrealistic leap to a completely new role, learn how to organically expand your skill set. Talk to your manager about taking on backend or AI tickets, or trading tasks with coworkers to build new skills without uprooting your career. • Redefining Financial Necessity: Understand how to evaluate the timeline and "shape" of your financial constraints. If financial necessity is your absolute dominant constraint, you must optimize your strategy specifically for stability and risk mitigation. 📮 Ask a Question If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com. 📮 Join the If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting developertea.com/discord today!. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keeps us focused on what matters to you.

AI-Era Employability and Job Security for Software Engineers - Mental Models for Finding a Competitive Advantage Without Selling Out

I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators.In this episode, I don't offer false guarantees about job security. Instead, I frame the problem through the lens of microeconomics and rational incentives to help you understand how to remain employable. We discuss why you must separate your ego from your current skill set and how to position yourself not as a competitor to AI, but as a force multiplier.• The Hard Truth: I explain why the "abstinence" approach—hoping the industry rejects AI or that it turns out to be a bubble—is a high-risk gamble that is unlikely to succeed.• Ego vs. Employability: We discuss the difficult mental shift required to disconnect your self-worth from the act of writing code manually, allowing you to adopt new tools without feeling like you are losing your identity.• The Microeconomics of Your Job: Understand the cold reality that a rational market only pays you if you generate more value than you cost; if AI can do the same task with less risk or cost, the market will choose AI.• The Non-Zero Sum Game: Learn why the economy isn't a fixed pie. The goal isn't just to survive, but to recognize that the combination of Human + AI can generate more total value than either can alone.• Multiplicative Value: I challenge you to stop thinking about linear skill acquisition and start thinking like a manager: how can you use AI to multiply your output and become indispensable?• Accepting Atrophy: We confront the reality that your core coding skills may degrade over time as you rely on AI, and why accepting this trade-off might be necessary for your career survival.🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by:If you are building an application that needs real-time search results—especially if you are working with LLMs—you know that stale data is a problem. SerpApi is the live web search API for your application.• Get real-time search results fast, directly in your app as JSON.• Bridge the gap for LLMs that are locked to a training date.• Trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. Get started with a free tier to build your full integration before you commit. Go to serpapi.com📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join theIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review!