ericdodds

Millennial who sounds boomer on X. Trying to fix that. Mostly a writer these days. I work in marketing @Vercel.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@KostasPardalis True to your philosophical heritage, you cut to the heart of the matter: what is slop?

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

No matter the process, you can tell when someone isn’t doing the work.

But it isn’t as simple as “AI slop or not.” There’s a spectrum of fully generated to assisted to “artisanal, homemade sentences.” If it’s generated and untouched, you notice quickly. Assisted pieces usually feel incongruent if the author phones it in on edits.

There are some interesting ideas around evals for writing, which is highly subjective, but I have no idea how we could create universally applicable benchmarks (current tools probably pattern match and use synthetic examples).

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

when you're reading a blog post, are you able to tell when it's ai generated? do you care?

i generally can tell within the first few paragraphs and it puts me off of reading it / overall what the content is about

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@KostasPardalis That’s the question. I see a lot of hand-wringing about AI slop in writing and some of it is obvious: long-tail SEO content and BDR outreach (these were always bad just amplified and more uniform), but vibes seems to be the primary eval.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@valleyfaraday go-gurt.md

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@samseely @cjbell_ Had a chance to work with these gentleman recently and it was probably the best experience I’ve had as a SaaS customer in years. Keep cooking, fellas.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@JayaGup10 This is a wonderful essay. As a writer, I would be fascinated to know 1) how long you thought about this and refined the ideas and 2) if and how you used AI in the writing process.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@paulitics_ @RhysSullivan I’m not going to install a random plugin, but this is interesting conceptually. Do you have a GitHub repo?

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@briantexts @RhysSullivan Ha, agreed. There was a lot of really bad code and really bad writing before AI.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@KostasPardalis Coming soon to a repo near you.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

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

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@simplydt I agree on consistency winning, but scaling the grind oversimplifies writing with AI in practice. Writing without AI is an exercise in thinking. When you add AI to the process, you can dramatically speed up the cycle of idea exploration, including drafting and editing.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@KostasPardalis Yup. “Using the exact same model, curate prompts, tools, skills, hooks for that Task” where the task is content generation. There are skills for various types of content (or sub-agents if I was raising money), and supplementary functions like research. Evals will be the fun part.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@dfeinition @AnthropicAI My relationship with Claude has significantly improved knowing that, in some theoretical sense, I'm also communicating with you all day (though your feedback was way more direct).

For real, though, Anthropic is lucky to have you and I can't wait to see what you ship.

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@sonofalli Threaded even

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

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

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

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

hot take :) The biggest and most productive people in the AI era are the folks who are already good at their jobs. AI as a multiplier, not an equalizer/democratizer

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

Here's the essay: https://t.co/kqesCQKGh6

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

One of my first projects @vercel was writing the first Workflow SDK announcement with @pranaygp for Ship AI last year.

100 million runs later, we ran it back for the GA launch, but the product did most of the talking this time.

[Vercel @vercel]

Vercel Workflows is GA.

Your code is the orchestrator. Ship agents, backends, or any long-running process without managing queues, retries, or workers. https://t.co/l9hZe79rNz

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

@itunpredictable Every time

[ericdodds @ericdodds]

Let it sink in.

“It’s since written every line of code I’ve shipped, including itself.”

[Nico Albanese @nicoalbanese10]

3 months ago I started building a coding agent that runs in the cloud.

It's since written every line of code I've shipped, including itself.

Today, I'm open sourcing it. Introducing Open Agents.