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.
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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 the expensive parts of his dynamic blog pages made anonymous traffic hit harder than it should have.
This episode walks through the incident response: asking a Cursor agent to investigate with repo context, Kody, Fly CLI access, Cloudflare context, and Grafana evidence; restarting and scaling the machine; blocking junk routes before they hit the origin; and identifying a DigitalOcean host driving a scripted high-concurrency crawl flood.
The durable lesson is not "let AI run production." It is that agents become useful during incidents when they have the right context, observability, tools, and boundaries. The same agent that can read code can also connect symptoms to logs, infrastructure, and follow-up fixes.
Links
](https://res.cloudinary.com/kentcdodds-com/image/upload/c_fill,w_955,ar_3:4,q_auto,f_auto,b_rgb:e6e9ee/unsplash/photo-1555861496-0666c8981751 "Common mistakes with React Testing Library")
](https://res.cloudinary.com/kentcdodds-com/image/upload/c_fill,w_955,ar_3:4,q_auto,f_auto,b_rgb:e6e9ee/kentcdodds.com/content/blog/compose-render-props/banner "Compose Render Props")
](https://res.cloudinary.com/kentcdodds-com/image/upload/c_fill,w_955,ar_3:4,q_auto,f_auto,b_rgb:e6e9ee/unsplash/photo-1472494731104-3ba69e52845b "Improve test error messages of your abstractions")