Better with Kent
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.
Episodes
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,
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
(
Pragmatic Loop Engineering for AI Coding Agents
Kent shows how he closes agentic loops in real Cursor workflows: manual testing, PR review loops, Cursor Automations, and the stop conditions that keep humans in the right place.(00:00) - Loop engineering before the name
(00:11) - Boris on loops
(00:33) - Better with Kent
(01:01) - What the loop is
(02:59) - Tests were already a loop
(03:24) - Browser mode and manual testing
(05:35) - Hum
Stop Taking Tickets, Start Applying Jobs Theory
Kent walks Clay Christensen's jobs-to-be-done lens on a food-delivery shared-cart ticket — three questions that turn a solution into a job statement, plus Wayne Allan's Australia flop and Aaron D. Francis on deciphering feature requests.(00:00) - Your backlog is full of solutions
(01:27) - Jobs to Be Done
(03:12) - Shared cart ticket
(04:04) - When it goes wrong — Wayne
(06:01) - Three qu
How an AI Agent Deleted PocketOS Production in 9 Seconds
When an AI coding agent guessed its way through bad permissions and deleted months of PocketOS production data in nine seconds — and what durable skills would have stopped it.(00:00) - Cold open — car rental
(01:49) - Today's story
(10:29) - Railway recovery
(14:57) - Three questions
(16:29) - Close
Better with Kent — durable skills through story.Episode 3 is a cautionary tale: on April 2
How to Prioritize Software Tasks
Kent walks the Kano model on a real food-delivery backlog: Must-be, Performance, and Delighter — why GPS was a wow in 2015 and a basic today, and why you cannot delight your way out of broken basics.Chapters0:00 The backlog fight1:39 What type of feature is this?2:15 Basics (Must-be)3:47 Performance needs5:38 Delighters6:32 GPS lifecycle reveal7:56 Why silence misleads teams10:00 Cannot d
What Software Engineers Need in 2026
Kent maps the durable skills that stay valuable as agents take more implementation: clarity, judgment, empathy, feedback loops, systems thinking, agent fluency, and ownership — with practical homework for each cluster.(00:00) - Intro: Google stat and durable skills
(00:20) - Why now
(01:08) - Durable skills map
(01:25) - Clarity & judgment
(03:40) - Wayne Allan: build the right thing
Introducing Better with Kent
AI is accelerating change for software engineers. Kent introduces Better with Kent — solo episodes on durable skills, judgment, and knowing what to build — plus Chats with Kent guest interviews on Become an Epic Product Engineer.Better with Kent — Durable skills for people who ship software.The landscape is moving fast. Agents can implement more every month, which means the expensive mist
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