Matt Pocock

I've just finished filming the most ambitious course of my career. It starts November 9th, and runs for 2 weeks. It's everything you need to build your company's software factory. Everyone's talking about how to go FASTER with agents. That's really, really easy. Loops, YOLO mode, dark factory. That's a recipe for a slop cannon. No serious organisation is going to trust a factory like that. So, you need to slow down to speed up. What's the first pedal your driving instructor showed you? Not the accelerator. Once you put the brakes on your agent - to constrain it and increase its output quality - you can start to trust it. The best brakes? Good ol' software fundamentals. Here's what we cover: - Automated Review - Codebase Design - DDD & Ubiquitous Language - Mutation Testing - Feedback Loops From there, the course accelerates. We show you a working factory and build your system design skills. We even plan your infra with you. You'll walk out with a software factory spec, ready to hand to an agent. And you won't be learning alone. You'll have a massive community with you, learning along. We actually opened sales on Monday. It's already on track to be BY FAR the biggest course of my career. Want to join in? Here's the link below: aihero.dev/s/wS5YtK

Don't tell me /pr is in the model weights already

This is the most 2026 PR I've ever merged Literally fixed a bug with an adjective github.com/mattpocock/skills…

Just shipped an important skill fix for Codex users. Codex was biasing most of its subagents to inherit its context window from the parent agent. I.e. forking it. This has a big negative impact on a lot of my skills, that rely on a clean context window (for code review, implement-spec etc) So, a fix: github.com/mattpocock/skills…

There is an absolutely WILD story in this @GergelyOrosz podcast episode 1. An unnamed CTO of a cash-flow-negative company was debating doing layoffs. AI 2. He says "I don't want to hurt morale like that, I won't do it" 3. A few months later, he says to @GergelyOrosz that he's cash flow positive. WTF. How? 4. The company had been licensing a component from a licensing company that was critical for their business. 5. One day, a dev thinks "what if we got an agent to build our own?" 6. The agent does so well that they produce a BETTER, FASTER version of the component they were licensing. 7. They debate open-sourcing it, and they ask the licensing company about it 8. The licensing company panics, and says "we will pay you NOT to open-source this" 9. They also say "we'll also pay you extra so we can re-license it" 10. So a big outlay became a recurring windfall, thanks to the ingenuity of a dev asking the right question. Individual contributors have never been more powerful. Think bigger. youtu.be/mQu0zN4IvSI?si=P_v9…

Debating just straight-up banning useState in my React apps Push the agent into the black hole of success

We used to talk about a "pit of success". Humans would be dragged towards writing the right code by well-designed API's, a good test suite, sensible lint rules. You couldn't make the pit too steep, otherwise the humans would get annoyed. There was a social contract. Feels like what we need now is a black hole of success. An inescapable event horizon agents cannot cross. Agents don't feel annoyed, so you can crank up the pressure to infinity. There is no social contract to break. In other words, increase the forces on agents to the maximum. Make great code inevitable.

I feel like I need a word for the type of task that agents are really good at I.e. where it has 100% of the data, it can run experiments, verify independently, and hill-climb towards its destination On these tasks my trust level is totally maxed-out and the results are incredible Just need a word for them

An absolutely GOATed example of domain knowledge being important I'm working on my video editor. I know enough about phonetics to know that certain consonants can fiddle around with silence detection. I tell my agent that. The word 'fricative' is enough for it to start busting out full IPA (international phonetic alphabet) and we brainstorm which consonants are the most troublesome. Turns out, knowing things is really fucking valuable.

Every so often folks ask me "do you still get nervous doing talks" I have done hundreds of them, and used to be a voice coach and public speaking coach. So you think I'd be used to them by now. Absolutely not - here is my heart rate data during a 20-minute talk that started at 9:15AM, audience ~600 people. I brick it beforehand, then peak right as I step onto the stage. I have a Q&A which chills me out (the blue). Then I'm off-stage to chat to folks and answer followup questions. I doubt this adrenaline response will ever go away. Just got to keep breathing through it.

Prompt of the day: Split this "one-way door" PR into two: 1. A PR that implements everything, except it can be easily reverted (a two-way door) 2. A followup PR (stacked on top) that actually goes through the one-way door AKA expand/contract. Use feature flags as needed. --- Lets you de-risk a huge PR by testing large chunks of it in production first.

One of my favourite things about the new course is the final section: - I show you a basic software factory, entirely on GitHub Actions - I name every part of it and show you how GitHub is hiding a lot of complexity - We brainstorm how YOU are going to build your own factory, with infra recommendations (and a new skill!) - We sketch out 5 different tasks on YOUR infra, each testing different system design principles By the end of the course you'll have felt what a software factory is with a concrete example, know what infra you're going to provision, and what you're going to use it for. Also: mutation testing, /wayfinder, DDD, codebase design, automated review, human review (it's a big course)