The Curious Engineer

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Matt Hodges

matthodges.com

Matt Hodges is a political technologist and founder of Ilium Strategies, a consulting practice helping Democrats build, scale, and innovate with technology and AI. Former Director of Engineering for Biden 2020. Featured in The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, and The Economist.

AI / MLSociety / politics / economyDev tools / editors / IDEs

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
31 from 10 Nov 2020 to 19 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (10 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog

2026 7

  1. Bongard Problems There’s a blurry line between pattern matching and reasoning. 11 min 2026-08-19
  2. Posts by Matt Hodges
  3. A Magazine With One Subscriber How three AI agents turn the articles I save into a real printed magazine. 10 min 2026-07-12
  4. Surviving Hallucinations: AI Fault Tolerance for Campaigns Building AI workflows that campaigns can trust under pressure 17 min 2026-04-10
  5. The Feed Framed the Last Election and AI Answers Will Frame the Next Democrats need to start building for the AI answer layer. 5 min 2026-03-20
  6. Quick DataViz With Claude Code General-purpose agents for everyday data tasks 3 min 2026-01-20
  7. Campaigns Are Knowledge Workers and the Tools Just Caught Up Agentic AI can change campaign operations. The organizations that outlast November need to lead. 11 min 2026-01-07

2025 11

  1. My New Agentic Campaign Finance Sidekick Building a campaign finance analyzer using Claude’s Agent Skills 6 min 2025-12-19
  2. Claude in a Game Theory Tournament How Claude Code ran a competitive Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy 17 min 2025-12-14
  3. Dad I love my daughter so much. I love my wife so much. 2 min 2025-11-02
  4. The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII A 2020 MacBook Air can hash every North American phone number in four hours 5 min 2025-10-19
  5. Tracking Five Years Of Health Data A thousand rides, a stack of apps, and actual motivation to get in shape 6 min 2025-10-12
  6. Scraping the Federal Reserve with VisiData Big banks, small commands: a one-liner to wrangle the Fed’s bank list 2 min 2025-09-30
  7. ChatGPT Got Me Reading Plato Notes, Prompts, and Noble Lies: A New Way to Jump Into Old Philosophy 8 min 2025-09-23
  8. Music to Break Models By Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI 12 min 2025-08-26
  9. I Donated to Sherrod Brown via ChatGPT I let the LLM agent send money through ActBlue 2 min 2025-08-20
  10. Using LLM Embeddings to Normalize User Data How cosine similarity in embedding space can power high-quality normalization. 7 min 2025-08-02
  11. GPT Finally Jumps Out of the System OpenAI’s o4-mini-high Model Solves the MU Puzzle and Demonstrates Why 10 min 2025-04-21

2024 8

  1. Part 2: Austin Texas, Hot or Not? Confronting temperature vibes with graphs, because that tactic always works. 2 min 2024-12-26
  2. I Cracked And Modded the DNC Bracelet The Democratic National Convention lit up the United Center with bracelets. I wanted to light mine up at home. 6 min 2024-08-28
  3. ActBlue Isn’t Selling Your Data The campaign you donated to might be sharing your data. 6 min 2024-08-25
  4. CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good. I would simply use delimiter characters to delimit data. 6 min 2024-08-13
  5. Spline Versus PCHIP Sometimes you want a smooth curve. Sometimes you want a shape-preserving curve. 7 min 2024-08-08
  6. Austin, Texas: Hot or Not? This summer hasn’t felt as hot as last summer. I decided to find out if that was actually true. 9 min 2024-07-30
  7. How Did Skannerz Work? Only 90s kids are now adults who dig through patent filings to understand how their toys worked. 6 min 2024-07-23
  8. Amused Entirely To Death What if the imminent danger to our democracy isn’t just looming authoritarianism, but also our own insatiable appetite for distraction? Last week’s Republican National Convention provided a stark reminder of this unsettling threat. 6 min 2024-07-20

2023 2

  1. Language Models on the AI Executive Order Deploying text embeddings and Llama2 to answer questions about the Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence issued by President Biden 5 min 2023-11-01
  2. BIDEN: Binary Inference Dictionaries for Electoral NLP A compression-based binary classification technique that is fast at both training and inference on common CPU hardware in Python 5 min 2023-10-01

2022 2

  1. Building a Neural Network From Scratch with NumPy Let’s walk through creating a Neural Network from scratch, only using NumPy, and build a model that classifies the MNIST handwritten digit data set. 16 min 2022-08-06
  2. Exploring the Lambda Calculus with Python Some basic ideas of the Lambda Calculus, and how to use it to implement a computation system in Python 8 min 2022-07-17

2020 1

  1. Thank you. Working on the Biden Campaign was the opportunity of a lifetime. 1 min 2020-11-10