Better with Kent

Kent C. Dodds
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Solo episodes from Kent C. Dodds on durable skills for people who ship software: judgment, accountability, problem clarity, and what stays valuable as AI takes on more implementation. Kent teaches directly on camera — no guest, one idea at a time. Complements guest interviews on Become a Product Engineer (Chats with Kent). Episode 1 adapts The Last Software Engineer; later episodes cover traps like building the wrong thing faster and skills like making user pain visible. Subscribe for evergreen episodes as the series grows.

  1. 7 小時前 ·  影片

    Stop Reviewing Diffs. Start Reviewing Systems.

    Agent PRs are too big to read line by line. Kent shows a visual system recap in the PR description - classify what changed as composes, extends, or adds - so you review the architecture first, then the code that matters. (00:00) - Still reviewing git diffs? (00:25) - Spectrum: not every line, not zero review (00:43) - Review the system, not just the diff (00:51) - Steve's visual recap (Builder.io) (01:17) - Why I rolled my own (02:30) - System recap + PR #662 (adds) (05:08) - PR #686 (composes — low risk) (05:54) - Primitives playground callback (06:57) - Install kcd-skills visual-recap (07:35) - Homework + close Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software. Coding agents ship more code faster, and the review surface explodes. Some people say you have to read every line. Others say never look at the diff. The real answer is a spectrum - and the durable skill is reviewing how the system is changing, not only the syntax. Kent walks through a visual recap approach inspired by Steve at Builder.io, then shows his own kcd-skills version that needs no account, no deploy, and no inference token. The agent that worked the PR writes a system recap block; GitHub renders the mermaid. Live demos: PR #662 adding an MCP client-servers primitive (high risk) vs PR #686 composing onboarding (low risk). Same domain, different review questions. Homework: map your primitives, run visual recap on your next non-trivial PR, and decide whether you are reviewing an add, an extend, or a compose before you open the diff. Links kcd-skills / visual-recapPR #662 - adds mcp-client-serversPR #686 - composes onboardingSlides deckDesign Primitives Agents Can Actually UseBetter with Kent

    Stop Reviewing Diffs. Start Reviewing Systems.

  2. 5 天前 ·  影片

    My Agent Ships Across 6 Services Without Seeing a Secret

    Want the system from this episode? Check out Kody at https://heykody.dev/ Kent replays a real publish night — one Cursor conversation where the agent drove Notion, Canva, Kit, Transistor, Bluesky, and LinkedIn through Kody packages, with every secret kept out of the agent's reach. (00:00) - Stop copy-pasting between your agent and your services (01:25) - What we're learning today (01:49) - The real publish-night conversation (02:52) - Search: how the agent discovers capabilities (04:12) - The Notion pipeline board (04:42) - Execute: conversation id and memory context (05:50) - Agent-written code without exposing secrets (08:25) - Kody packages: a registry for your agent (09:43) - Token-efficient queries in a dynamic worker (11:53) - No package? Use the OpenAPI spec (Canva) (14:24) - Interruptions: publish date and square artwork (17:04) - Default square designs for every episode (18:15) - YouTube is live: Kit early-access broadcast (19:37) - Launch posts on LinkedIn and Bluesky (20:48) - I use this for everything (22:22) - Homework: wire your services once Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. If you're still copy-pasting context between services and your agent, you're missing the real unlock: wiring those services in once so the agent can compose them. Kent walks through an actual episode publish night, one Cursor conversation at a time — search to discover capabilities, execute to run agent-written code in a fast isolated worker, saved packages instead of raw fetch calls, and OpenAPI bindings when no package exists yet. Along the way: how Kody's memory context and conversation id keep token usage down, how secret templates make it impossible for the agent to ever see a bearer token, mid-task interruptions the agent absorbs without losing the thread, and the Kit, Transistor, Bluesky, and LinkedIn steps that end with a published episode. Links Watch on YouTubeKodyKody on GitHubThe chat walkthrough from this episodeYour Coding Agent Needs Better Primitives (the episode being published)Better with Kent

    My Agent Ships Across 6 Services Without Seeing a Secret

  3. 7月21日 ·  影片

    Fable nailed my production YOLO infra migration

    One orchestrator prompt, six platform swaps, and a real production cutover on kentcdodds.com — the workflow, the review loop, the perf scare, and where the agents were wrong. (00:00) - One prompt, 40,000 lines (00:44) - The site and why migrate (06:38) - PR #813 — 483 files (07:09) - Kickoff prompt anatomy (11:35) - Orchestrate with subagents (16:13) - Steering + scope expansion (21:33) - Three-layer review (23:22) - Kody closes the loop (25:24) - The performance scare (30:22) - Merge and cutover (33:51) - Cleanup waves (37:44) - Was 40k lines worth it? (39:40) - Homework: try orchestration Kent walks through how AI agents moved kentcdodds.com from fly.io to Cloudflare Workers — database, ORM, images, email, MDX pipeline, and more — from a single orchestrator prompt plus steering, subagent swarms, three-layer review, and Kody closing every loop. Includes the performance scare that almost killed the migration, the post-cutover cleanup waves, and an honest rollup of four agent-driven PRs (about 40,000 lines changed). Links PR #813 — migrationSlides deckkentcdodds.com

    Fable nailed my production YOLO infra migration

  4. 7月15日 ·  影片

    Your Coding Agent Needs Better Primitives

    If your coding agent keeps producing garbage, better prompting may not fix it. Kent shows how intentional system primitives make agents more reliable, efficient, composable, and auditable. (00:00) - Bad agent output starts in the system (00:37) - We are all tech leads now (01:28) - What is a primitive? (04:57) - Four moves: create, combine, delete, expand (06:01) - Create: role-based access control (07:59) - Combine: downshift and Kody packages (10:37) - Delete: Instagram and Kody email (12:22) - Expand: packages subscribe to events (13:51) - Why good primitives work (14:43) - Homework for your agent (15:32) - Keep evolving the system Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. If your coding agent keeps producing garbage, the model may not be the problem. Agents are only as effective as the system they work in: the UI components, APIs, data entities, platform tools, workflows, and trust boundaries they can reliably use. Kent explains four moves for improving that system: create missing primitives, combine overlapping ones, delete rigid or unused ones, and expand the primitives that should cover more. The examples come from real product work — Kody's role-based access control and event subscriptions, PayPal's three combobox implementations becoming downshift, and Instagram winning by deleting most of Burbn. The payoff is a smaller action space with less guessing, fewer brittle workarounds, and behavior you can actually audit. The episode closes with homework you can run in your own codebase today: ask your agent which primitives you should create, combine, delete, or expand. Links Better with KentKodydownshiftI built my own OpenClaw

    Your Coding Agent Needs Better Primitives

  5. 7月9日 ·  影片

    The Framework wars are over. Why no one dethroned React

    Kent reacts to Dax's question on X — why no framework dethroned React — and connects it to Jobs Theory, network effects, and why framework choice matters less when agents write the code. Chapters 00:00 — Why did nobody dethrone React?00:24 — Dax's question on X00:49 — React is the last UI library (2020)02:47 — Functional first, then social and emotional03:36 — What made React functionally better06:43 — Network effects and "nobody got fired for choosing React"07:38 — Why framework choice matters less with agents09:27 — Jobs Theory: apply this to everything you ship11:14 — Wrap-up Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. Every few years the internet declares the framework wars over — usually with React as the loser. Svelte was going to win. Then Solid. Vue had its moment. Angular never left. And somehow, after a decade of "React is dead" takes, React is still the default for an absurd amount of real product work. Kent's take: React won functionally first (state sync, composition, drop-in UI focus), then socially and emotionally once it hit critical mass. Challengers can still be "better" on paper — but once agents can use any capable stack, the throne fight stops mattering the way it used to. Links Dax (@thdxr) — why no framework dethroned ReactKent (2020) — React is the last UI library anyone needs to learnBetter with Kent — Practical Jobs TheoryWatch on YouTubeBetter with KentReactBecome an Epic Product Engineer

    The Framework wars are over. Why no one dethroned React

  6. 7月7日 ·  影片

    What the devil is a Factory Engineer?!

    Kent reacts to Zach Lloyd's Warp memo on "factory engineers" — where the software-factory vision is right, where it misses product context, and why factory work still comes back to users. Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. Warp CEO Zach Lloyd told his team they are now factory engineers, not product engineers. Kent reads the memo aloud and pressure-tests the framing: automated development, cloud software factories, agent workflows, and the metrics that can game you if you forget what users are paying for. He agrees with a lot of the direction — build the system agents work in, measure throughput, tighten the loop — but pushes back on anything that treats the product as optional. Internal tools still have users. Factory efficiency only matters when the right work goes in. And yes, the memo's last word is still product. If you're trying to make sense of agentic engineering without losing product judgment, this is the durable-skills read-through. Links Better with KentWarp — We are now factory engineers, not product engineersWarp software factory (build.warp.dev)Become an Epic Product Engineer

    What the devil is a Factory Engineer?!

  7. 7月2日 ·  影片

    I got attacked! - How I used my AI agent to fight back!

    Kent walks through a real bot/crawler flood against kentcdodds.com, how agentic tooling helped diagnose and mitigate the outage, and what he changed so anonymous traffic is cheaper next time. Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. Kent got a Sentry alert that kentcdodds.com was down. A bot or crawler flood had pushed his single Fly.io machine past its request limit, and the expensive parts of his dynamic blog pages made anonymous traffic hit harder than it should have. This episode walks through the incident response: asking a Cursor agent to investigate with repo context, Kody, Fly CLI access, Cloudflare context, and Grafana evidence; restarting and scaling the machine; blocking junk routes before they hit the origin; and identifying a DigitalOcean host driving a scripted high-concurrency crawl flood. The durable lesson is not "let AI run production." It is that agents become useful during incidents when they have the right context, observability, tools, and boundaries. The same agent that can read code can also connect symptoms to logs, infrastructure, and follow-up fixes. Links Better with KentSentryFly.ioCloudflareGrafana

    I got attacked! - How I used my AI agent to fight back!

  8. 6月30日 ·  影片

    I built my own OpenClaw

    Kent shows how Kody gives the coding agent he already uses search, execute, and saved packages so exploratory workflows can become durable personal automation. (00:00) - Kody handled the demo (00:41) - Why personal agents have not stuck (02:21) - Search and execute (04:31) - Kitchen glare walkthrough (06:47) - Turning one action into a package (08:48) - Scheduling deterministic workflows (10:24) - What I use Kody for today (13:25) - Connectors, capabilities, and packages (15:04) - Code Mode and MCP (16:59) - Augmenting existing software (18:24) - Integrations, OAuth, and secrets (20:53) - What should Kody become? Better with Kent — durable skills for people who ship software. Kent walks through Kody, the thin runtime layer that lets the coding agent he already uses discover capabilities, execute sandboxed code, and save useful workflows as packages. Instead of maintaining a separate personal assistant brain, Kody gives Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, and similar agents a way to connect to personal APIs, home automation, jobs, integrations, secrets, and reusable package exports. The episode uses an office-chaos cold open and a kitchen glare walkthrough to show the progression from one-off prompt, to executable code, to saved package, to scheduled workflow. Links KodyBetter with Kent

    I built my own OpenClaw
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簡介

Solo episodes from Kent C. Dodds on durable skills for people who ship software: judgment, accountability, problem clarity, and what stays valuable as AI takes on more implementation. Kent teaches directly on camera — no guest, one idea at a time. Complements guest interviews on Become a Product Engineer (Chats with Kent). Episode 1 adapts The Last Software Engineer; later episodes cover traps like building the wrong thing faster and skills like making user pain visible. Subscribe for evergreen episodes as the series grows.

資訊

  • 創作者
    Kent C. Dodds
  • 活躍年代
    2026年
  • 集數
    14
  • 年齡分級
    兒少適宜
  • 版權
    © 2026 Kent C. Dodds Tech LLC
  • 節目網站
    Better with Kent

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