Kent talks with Dax Raad about building OpenCode in a crowded coding-agent market: why dev tools are still a consumer-style product, how fast shipping can make good products feel worse, and what "product skill" actually looks like when agents remove friction from implementation.
They dig into onboarding, progressive disclosure, listening across many user requests for the real pattern, and why slowing down can be the right move—even when competitors ship faster.
Dax has spent years building tools developers actually use; on OpenCode he's thinking hard about product process while the space moves at breakneck speed. This episode is a practical look at product deterioration (not just code rot), bottom-up adoption for dev tools, and how coding agents change who decides what gets built—without replacing the need for taste, restraint, and clarity about what problem you're solving.
You'll hear concrete examples from OpenCode's terminal UI and onboarding, parallels to Kent's Epic Workshop app, and a grounded take on inference pricing, hype, and when "ship messy and fix later" does and doesn't hold up.
Homework
Convince yourself that getting good at product really matters—Dax says there's a lot in the culture that tries to tell you it doesn't, and you need that commitment because the belief will be challenged.
If you don't already believe it, figure out how to make yourself believe it matters (Kent's recap of the guest's action).
Guests
Transcript
Kent C. Dodds (00:01)
Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Kent C. Dodds and with me is my buddy Dax. How are you doing Dax? Super, it's good to chat with you. So this, in this season of the Chats with Kent podcast, we are talking about product engineering and becoming a product engineer. ⁓ So Dax, you have ⁓ some really awesome takes on that you post actively on X.
Dax (00:07)
Good, how are you?
Kent C. Dodds (00:26)
that frankly is a large reason why I decided that this is the right direction for us to go as software developers is developing some product sense. ⁓ And so to load up our context window, I guess, bad joke, ⁓ on all of this, I think it would be useful for people to get to know a little bit about your background and what you're actively working on and why this matters so much to you, why you care about this.
Dax (00:41)
You
Yeah, so like I said, my name is Dax. ⁓ I've been building products and companies for most of my career. ⁓ The past year or so I've been working on a project called OpenCode. It is a coding agent that spans from your terminal to a web app to a desktop app. ⁓ quite a lot of product surface that we can cover also in a space that is moving quickly with lots of competitors, kind of different
directions that we could go in. the idea of like the product process is definitely top of mind for us.
Kent C. Dodds (01:29)
Yeah. you have some of the most picky customers, which are developers and you're working in ⁓ probably the hardest part ⁓ with developers and that is developer workflow, ⁓ which like really, really difficult to get people to try a new workflow and like figure out what the right workflow is. And there are probably, there are certainly people using open code who have a different idea of how that workflow should be or what workflow works for them.
Dax (01:33)
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Kent C. Dodds (01:58)
⁓ How does that complicate what you're trying to do?
Dax (02:03)
Yeah, I think ⁓ that is difficult, but I would say the flip side is we've bought out the flip side, just we've been in the dev tool space for a while. and I think me personally, it's been five or six years where I've been trying to build stuff that, developers use. The thing that we've learned the most is it's really a consumer business. You kind of have to look at it as though you're building a consumer product.