# Matt Hodges

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

## Posts

- [Thank you.](https://matthodges.com/posts/2020-11-10-thank-you/index.md): Working on the Biden Campaign was the opportunity of a lifetime.
- [Exploring the Lambda Calculus with Python](https://matthodges.com/posts/2022-07-17-exploring-lambda-calculus-python/index.md): Some basic ideas of the Lambda Calculus, and how to use it to implement a computation system in Python
- [Building a Neural Network From Scratch with NumPy](https://matthodges.com/posts/2022-08-06-neural-network-from-scratch-python-numpy/index.md): 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.
- [BIDEN: Binary Inference Dictionaries for Electoral NLP](https://matthodges.com/posts/2023-10-01-BIDEN-binary-inference-dictionaries-for-electoral-nlp/index.md): A compression-based binary classification technique that is fast at both training and inference on common CPU hardware in Python
- [Language Models on the AI Executive Order](https://matthodges.com/posts/2023-11-01-language-models-ai-executive-order/index.md): Deploying text embeddings and Llama2 to answer questions about the Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence issued by President Biden
- [Amused Entirely To Death](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-07-20-amused-entirely-to-death/index.md): 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.
- [How Did Skannerz Work?](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-07-23-how-did-skannerz-work/index.md): Only 90s kids are now adults who dig through patent filings to understand how their toys worked.
- [Austin, Texas: Hot or Not?](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-07-30-austin-hot-or-not/index.md): This summer hasn't felt as hot as last summer. I decided to find out if that was actually true.
- [Spline Versus PCHIP](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-08-spline-pchip/index.md): Sometimes you want a smooth curve. Sometimes you want a shape-preserving curve.
- [CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good.](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-12-csv-bad-dsv-good/index.md): I would simply use delimiter characters to delimit data.
- [ActBlue Isn't Selling Your Data](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-25-actblue-isnt-selling-your-data/index.md): The campaign you donated to might be sharing your data.
- [I Cracked And Modded the DNC Bracelet](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-08-28-cracking-modding-dnc-bracelet/index.md): The Democratic National Convention lit up the United Center with bracelets. I wanted to light mine up at home.
- [Part 2: Austin Texas, Hot or Not?](https://matthodges.com/posts/2024-12-26-austin-hot-or-not-part-2/index.md): Confronting temperature vibes with graphs, because that tactic always works.
- [GPT Finally Jumps Out of the System](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-04-21-openai-o4-mini-high-mu-puzzle/index.md): OpenAI’s o4-mini-high Model Solves the MU Puzzle and Demonstrates Why
- [Using LLM Embeddings to Normalize User Data](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-02-language-model-embeddings-campaign-donors/index.md): How cosine similarity in embedding space can power high-quality normalization.
- [I Donated to Sherrod Brown via ChatGPT](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-20-chatgpt-agent-political-donation/index.md): I let the LLM agent send money through ActBlue
- [Music to Break Models By](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-models-by/index.md): Gödelian limits of prompt-safe AI
- [ChatGPT Got Me Reading Plato](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-23-chatgpt-plato-republic/index.md): Notes, Prompts, and Noble Lies: A New Way to Jump Into Old Philosophy
- [Scraping the Federal Reserve with VisiData](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/index.md): Big banks, small commands: a one-liner to wrangle the Fed's bank list
- [Tracking Five Years Of Health Data](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-12-five-years-of-health-data/index.md): A thousand rides, a stack of apps, and actual motivation to get in shape
- [The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-19-privacy-theater-pii-phone-numbers/index.md): A 2020 MacBook Air can hash every North American phone number in four hours
- [Dad](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-11-02-dad/index.md): I love my daughter so much. I love my wife so much.
- [Claude in a Game Theory Tournament](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-12-14-claude-axelrod-prisoners-dilemma/index.md): How Claude Code ran a competitive Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma strategy
- [My New Agentic Campaign Finance Sidekick](https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-12-19-ai-agent-fec/index.md): Building a campaign finance analyzer using Claude’s Agent Skills
- [Campaigns Are Knowledge Workers and the Tools Just Caught Up](https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-01-07-ai-agents-campaigns/index.md): Agentic AI can change campaign operations. The organizations that outlast November need to lead.
- [Quick DataViz With Claude Code](https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-01-20-quick-dataviz-claude-code/index.md): General-purpose agents for everyday data tasks
- [The Feed Framed the Last Election and AI Answers Will Frame the Next](https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-03-20-democrats-answer-layer/index.md): Democrats need to start building for the AI answer layer.
- [Surviving Hallucinations: AI Fault Tolerance for Campaigns](https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-04-10-ai-politics-fault-tolerance/index.md): Building AI workflows that campaigns can trust under pressure