Better with Kent

About 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.

Publisher

Kent C. Dodds

Category

education · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

22 May 2026

Latest episode

20 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

29 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Oct 2026

   The Future of Software is Invisible

   SaaS products are in serious trouble, and it's not because someone vibe coded Adobe in Rust. We're heading toward a world where billions of people create software without even realizing it, because their agents write it for them. I call it invisible software. Is your product ready for that? (00:00) - SaaS is in serious trouble (00:24) - Nobody wants to be a coder (00:40) - Agents are outgrowing the benchmarks (01:18) - Billions of people's agents (03:31) - Victoria's agent builds her an app (04:58) - Max forks it with a Book now button (06:55) - Victoria pulls in Max's change (08:17) - Walled gardens (and why I built Kody) (09:53) - Seven Adobe apps vibe coded in Rust (11:03) - Software engineering isn't going anywhere (11:54) - Make your software agent ready (12:34) - Is your site agent ready? (13:11) - Is your app ready for the next billion users? Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software. Thank you to Warp Build for sponsoring this episode: https://kcd.link/warpbuild (https://kcd.link/warpbuild) People don't want apps. They want their problems solved. Agents get better every month (we're running out of benchmarks hard enough to measure them), so more and more of those problems will be solved by software an agent writes on the spot. Not millions of developers writing code by hand at the speed of humans, but billions of people whose agents write, commit, and push code at the speed of AI. I call this invisible software. In this episode I walk through a demo with two barbers, Victoria and Max. A proactive agent builds Victoria a custom client app wired up to her Stripe and iMessage. Max forks it for his Square store and adds a Book now button. Victoria pulls his change back into her version. Then Max tries to switch agents and runs straight into a walled garden (which is a big part of why I'm building Kody). Software engineering isn't going anywhere. Banks, airlines, and infrastructure still need teams who own their systems. But how you solve problems for your users is going to change shape. If your product isn't easy for agents to use, your users' agents will go to your competitors. So, is your app ready for the next billion users? Links Warp Build (sponsor) (https://kcd.link/warpbuild) Kody (https://kody.codes/) Invisible software demo (https://kentcdodds.kody.run/packages/invisible-software/demo) ArtCraft: 7 Adobe apps vibe coded in Rust (https://x.com/echelon/status/2106387247234752762) Reverse Engineer Anything (https://github.com/morluto/rea) Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub (https://epoch.ai/benchmarks) METR time horizons (https://metr.org/time-horizons) Is It Agent Ready? (Cloudflare) (https://isagentready.com) is-agentic (Vercel) (https://is-agentic.com) Better with Kent (https://kentcdodds.com/better)

2. 

   13 Oct 2026

   How to Put Your Codebase on Autopilot

   I shipped 122 PRs in 24 hours straight out of my software factory, mostly while I was doing something else. Here's the system that lets agents file their own friction, make good PRs, catch their own mistakes, and keep the blast radius small. Here's what 122 PRs in one day looks like: https://github.com/kentcdodds/kody/releases/tag/v2026.10.11 (00:00) - 122 PRs in 24 hours (00:17) - Agent-filed friction, agent-shipped fix (00:51) - Agents work around friction (01:41) - The ship PR skill files friction (02:43) - Lauren Tan: 2,500 PRs a month (03:43) - Three pillars of confidence (04:19) - Sponsor: Devin (05:35) - Good PRs: decisions directory (06:06) - Primitives catalog (07:11) - control Kody CLI for self-verification (08:24) - System recap on every PR (09:24) - Catch mistakes: the ship PR package (10:00) - AI reviewers: Bugbot, CodeRabbit, Devin (11:07) - Merge, watch deploy, Discord report (12:19) - Limit blast radius: feature flags (13:46) - Disaster recovery (14:33) - Cleanup: agents don't love deleting code (15:28) - Dogfooding and product decisions (16:31) - Pipe signals in: Sentry, errors, feedback (18:00) - Nightly and weekly agents (18:35) - Recap Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software. Thank you to Devin (Cognition) for sponsoring this episode: https://10xn.link/kcd-cognition (https://10xn.link/kcd-cognition) Agents don't fix friction. They work around it, and those workarounds compound across every agent touching your codebase. The fix is to turn your agents into complainers: the ship PR skill ends every merge by filing friction, and other agents come through and fix it - sometimes while you sleep. Kent walks the three pillars that make that safe: (1) good PRs in the first place (a decisions directory, a primitives catalog, the control Kody CLI for self-verification, and a system recap on every PR), (2) catch mistakes before prod (the ship PR package, CI, CodeRabbit, Cursor Bugbot, Devin AI review, preview deploys), and (3) limit the blast radius (feature flags with success metrics, disaster recovery with restore tests). Then cleanup, dogfooding, and signal pipelines from Sentry, runtime errors, user feedback, and nightly/weekly agents. Agents handle polish, code quality, and implementation. The product vision stays with you. Links Devin (sponsor) (https://10xn.link/kcd-cognition) Kody (https://kody.codes/) Better with Kent (https://kentcdodds.com/better)

3. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Steal My App (I'll Show You How)

   Self-hosting Kody off Cloudflare used to sound thermonuclear. Deno Celld changed the math — and Kent's Grok bot handed the experiment to Devin. Then docker compose up actually worked. (00:00) - Cold open: Kody running in Docker (00:10) - Better with Kent (00:16) - Self-hosted Kody is real — here's the path (00:58) - Ask: self-host Kody off Cloudflare (01:10) - Clarify: Kody, not Jev (01:42) - Thermonuclear — tied to Cloudflare (02:02) - Own Cloudflare account is fine under OSS (02:33) - Deno Celld — hard, not thermonuclear (04:23) - Revised difficulty: hard is OK for agents (04:37) - Hand the experiment to Devin via Kody (06:16) - Devin launches on Ultra (06:46) - Prompt, auth gaps, and Kody unsticks Devin (08:15) - Inspect the Celld repo and fill gaps (08:57) - Ship-PR loop until main is green (10:41) - Rebuild the UI to match official Kody (12:38) - Make it tryable: public image + README (14:09) - Follow the README ourselves (14:56) - docker compose up — it works (15:27) - Create account on localhost:8080 (16:33) - Connect Cursor MCP (and fix public URL) (17:45) - Connected — memory + dad-joke package (19:23) - Success: first run without reading the code (20:02) - What's still missing — contribute if you care (20:56) - Homework: self-host or use kody.codes (21:24) - Close Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software. Kent asks his Grok bot how hard it is to self-host Kody off Cloudflare. First answer: thermonuclear rewrite. Then Deno Celld (Workers + Durable Objects on your machines, S3-compatible state) revises that to hard — and hard is fine when you hand it to an agent. Kody briefs Devin Cloud to build a Celld-based self-hosted Kody. Auth hiccups, gap fills, ship-PR loops, GHCR image, from-zero smoke. Kent follows the README, docker compose up, creates an account, connects Cursor MCP, saves a memory, and ships a dad-joke package — first run without looking at the code. Homework: if you want self-hosted Kody, contribute. If not, use kody.codes and let hosted handle the edge. Links Kody (https://kody.codes/) Better with Kent (https://kentcdodds.com/better)

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