Foundations, feedback, and agents — Dillon Mulroy on product at Cloudflare
Kent talks with **Dillon Mulroy**, Principal Engineer at **Cloudflare**, about **Agent Experience** and dogfooding AI platform work: how Cloudflare closes the loop between builders and customers, why **observability** and support are product superpowers, and how to stay disciplined when agents tempt you to ship huge diffs overnight. They go deep on watching users work, **firehose** social feedback, partnering with support, and why "make pain painful" aligns incentives for better software.
Chats with Kent C. Dodds · Kent C. Dodds, Dillon Mulroy
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Show Notes
Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment.
You'll hear practical parallels with episodes on delighters and onboarding tension, plus why reviewing agent-written code still matters for system intuition when things break at 2 a.m.
Homework
- Try hard and care a lot; more practically, focus on foundations and primitives.
- Put good feedback systems in place so you know what's going on with your product and where it doesn't feel good-alerting and metrics, customer journey signals, or customer interviews.
- If you have a customer support team, sit with them and watch them triage cases for your product; get to know support-they're sitting on a gold mine of product signal-and empathize with them like you do with users.
- Kent's shorthand for the mindset Dillon agreed with: make pain painful-if your users are hurting, you should feel it too.
Resources
Guest: Dillon Mulroy
- Company: Cloudflare
- GitHub: @dmmulroy
- X: @dillon_mulroy
Host: Kent C. Dodds
- Website: kentcdodds.com
- X: @kentcdodds
- GitHub: @kentcdodds
- Youtube: Kent C. Dodds