Eric Dodds Notebook

One of the great surprises in work is when it becomes apparent that someone extremely talented is not a first-principles thinker.

Skill can mask clear thinking for a long time.

This is also why great thinkers can successfully manage people with more raw skill than they have.

Perhaps the most potent combination of professional ingredients is:

• First principles thinking
• Mastery in a specific skillset
• Being a student of human psychology and behavior

In the best case, the third results in humility, and those people leave a mark.

In my last job I moved into product because I love working with engineers. They possess a unique combination of creativity and clarity.

Working with Lars Grammel on this piece was a true joy. It's an incredible system, built with an incredible amount of thought and care.

Discuss on social: X

‪I run a content agent in a local harness, and if you don't pay attention to how your terminal client handles shell sessions, things can get wonky fast.

Coding harnesses are great at sorting things out when you back everything with git, but ‬worktrees are a great way keep project workflows isolated.

Discuss on social: X

"Go through this session (including pre-compaction) and print your response to every prompt where I corrected you, pushed back on your output, or replaced your draft with my own rewrite."

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

Not too long ago I thought to myself, "It seems crazy that there isn't a cross-harness plugin spec." Just a few weeks later I was tapped in to work on the Agent Plugins launch with Jonathan Hefner and Andrew Qu.

This was a fun one, and a great picture of what it's like to work at Vercel: shortly after you feel friction, product ships to remove it.

Discuss on social: X

I use and build AI agents, and write about using and building AI agents, all day at work.

Personal AI assistants can be genuinely useful, and I've built or used those too, but these days the last thing I feel like doing on my personal time is texting with another agent.

AI is capable of some wildly complex tasks, but I often find myself most delighted in the simple things it can do, like cleaning up my desktop.

Discuss on social: X

Justin is a talented writer. Every talented writer I work with who uses AI as part of their process:

1. Understands its power and
2. Is constantly frustrated and underwhelmed by it

AI for code can feel like magic, but you can't write tests for a great blog post in the same way you can for a feature. More importantly, in writing, words are the final product, where code is a means to a product end, and that's one of the reasons writers feel these sharp edges more acutely.

Discuss on social: X

"The most important skill in prompting is expertise in the domain you’re prompting for."

@sjgoedecke is right, and this is why even though many perceive AI as "good at writing," it doesn't make people good writers. https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/

Discuss on social: X

It's likely I will produce my best writing using AI, but that's because I practice writing without AI every day.

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

This is true in my personal experience and observing my peers.

9 months ago, after rapidly tackling a gnarly project with Cursor, I wrote that AI would create a socioeconomic gap, not raise the tide for all knowledge workers.

Discuss on social: X

AI will unleash human creativity in unprecedented ways, but I'm starting to believe that it will make people worse at writing, not better. The promise is quality output with less work, but that makes the learning curve for actual writing skill steeper, and the discipline to improve was already rare.

At a minimum, writing will deviate to a homogenous mean—something people are already starting to notice.

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

My wife appreciated the bottle of Louis Jadot, aged Gruyère, apricots and local honey.

But the Blue Heat Takis didn't seem to land as hard.

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

I'm the type of person who likes to have a perfect yard.

I'm also the type of person who has young kids.

Which means my grass is the type of grass that lies to my neighbors about who I really am.

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

One of [Mark] Twain's most consequential literary friendships started in August of 1889 when a twenty-three-year-old reporter named Rudyard Kipling made a 14,000-mile pilgrimage from India to track down his hero in Elmira [New York]."

This account from Ron Chernow's biography on Twain stopped me in my tracks. What stranger-heroes do I have that I would travel 14,000 miles to meet?

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

Me: "AI is so great but writing is still really hard."

Successful professional writer: "Writing is hell and also my favorite thing. But also hell."

Discuss on social: X, LinkedIn

It's been 599 days since I posted on X. I've only posted once since it was renamed from Twitter.

I figured I'd break the dry spell before I hit 600 and before April Fools Day.

So, howdy, everyone.

Discuss on social: X

Publishing a note in prod to troubleshoot the API POST to Typefully.

One of my goals this year is to post on social media more often.

I wanted to figure out a way to maintain ownership of the content (platforms don't last forever) and make publishing on mobile easy, so I built a simple system to do just that.

The pipeline is:

• GitHub issues as the backend (CMS)
• Next.js ISR on my site to render the issues as noted
• API push to Typefully as a draft that I can edit and post on social.

The mobile app is GitHub, and the interface for issue creation is clean and stable.

It's a nifty setup so far, but this is the first post so we'll see how it goes on the highway.