Developer Tea
Jonathan Cutrell
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.
With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: developertea@gmail.com
With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: developertea@gmail.com
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 6, 2026 • 26min
You're Wrong All the Time, But All You Need Are Better Explanations
A host grapples with finding a foundational book built on shaky research and uses that to explore how to update beliefs when facts change. Listeners get a plain explanation of the replication crisis and why failed studies are common. The conversation reframes beliefs as evolving calibrations, warns against ego-driven clinging to old ideas, and highlights progress through better explanations.
10 snips
Apr 29, 2026 • 31min
AI-Proofing Your Skillset - High-Meaning, High-Specifity Vocabulary is the Path to Growth
Practical advice on preserving your career as agentic coding rises. Learn the “Minecraft” idea: single words can pack huge shared meaning. Aim for vocabulary that is both compact and specific. See a concrete win with the strategy pattern for authorization. Get tactics for growing this high-leverage vocabulary through conversations and targeted LLM checks.
16 snips
Apr 22, 2026 • 30min
Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill
A reflection on why coding alone no longer defines your value. Discussion of overlooked strengths like systems thinking, domain expertise, organizational design, and relational skills. A three-part framework for choosing what to invest in: valuable, durable, and transferable. Practical prompt: inventory your skills to see which ones actually scale as you grow.
16 snips
Apr 15, 2026 • 21min
Chaos Doesn't Have to Win - Maintaining Order in the Midst of AI Change
A leader’s case for creating order amid rapid AI-driven change. The episode explains why human limits make repeated team rituals essential. It highlights prioritizing regular cadence over any single framework. Keeping core ceremonies steady lets teams experiment and spot anomalies more easily.
14 snips
Apr 8, 2026 • 34min
Mourning the Loss of Coding, Senior Tooling Mindset, and Shaping Your Environment
A reflection on the sense of loss engineers feel as tooling and cultures shift. A look at how your tools become your everyday environment and shape your behavior. Why tiny reductions in friction matter more than chasing speed. The value of making high-frequency tasks first-order accessible to improve workflow.
Apr 1, 2026 • 27min
Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics
They unpack how overanalysis can freeze decision-making and why quick heuristics often beat perfect reasoning. You hear why some simplified beliefs are strategically useful even if not literally true. Practical heuristics come up — from favoring tools you know to treating continual learning and hard work as action drivers. The takeaway: exploit mental shortcuts to move faster and build momentum.
4 snips
Mar 24, 2026 • 39min
Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making
The conversation explains how AI has shrunk the coding bottleneck and pushed decision-making upstream. It warns that sharing opinions spends social capital and should be used sparingly. Learn why waiting can be smarter than arguing and how to align your arguments with what decision-makers actually care about.
Mar 18, 2026 • 1h 6min
What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking
Physical checklists for repeatable work and clearer communication with humans and AI. Small organization upgrades like labels and 3D-printed tools that compound into big time savings. Changing environments to fix habit friction instead of relying on willpower. Books and reading that shape how to prioritize time and learning. Practical AI workflows: spec-driven agents, local automations, and agent-assisted 3D printing.
25 snips
Mar 10, 2026 • 21min
From Software Engineer to Agent Manager - How Work is Changing in A New Software Development Paradigm
The conversation explores how AI is reshaping software work and why engineers now write far less code. It digs into the chaos of rapid tool adoption and the new cognitive load from running parallel agents. The piece introduces managing agent workflows like a production line and emphasizes upfront specifications, spot checks, and limiting work-in-progress to reduce burnout.
14 snips
Mar 3, 2026 • 30min
AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?
AI is making coding much cheaper and shifting the main bottleneck to product, design, and decision-making. The conversation traces why heavy upfront QA used to be necessary and how continuous delivery changed that. It explores how organizations may favor throughput over risk and how consolidated, faster decision workflows could replace traditional handoffs.
