Better with Kent

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 X 00:49 — React is the last UI library (2020) 02:47 — Functional first, then social and emotional 03:36 — What made React functionally bett...

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: a...

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 th...

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) -...

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) - Human-drive...

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 questions...

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 24, 2026...

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. Chapters 0:00 The backlog fight 1:39 What type of feature is this? 2:15 Basics (Must-be) 3:47 Performance needs 5:38 Delighters 6:32 GPS lifecycle reveal 7:56 Why silence misleads teams 10:00 Cannot d...

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 first (0...

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 mistake is...