About this episode

In this episode, Gergely Orosz interviews Dex Horthy about context engineering and its implications for software development with LLMs.

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers. — Knowing how LLM contexts work and how to work around context limitations – aka “context engineering” – is becoming more important for software engineers working with LLMs. Let’s look into what works and what doesn’t, today. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with the CEO and cofounder of HumanLayer, Dex Horthy, who coined the term “context engineering”. We discuss the ideas behind this context engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, software factories, why his approach to AI-assisted software development has evolved, and how HumanLayer is helping engineering teams automate more of the software development lifecycle without sacrificing code quality. — Timestamps 00:00 Intro 03:35 Dex’s path into tech 05:36 Early work in platform engineering 07:30 Replicated 13:26 Metalytics 14:38 12-factor agents 20:29 Context…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Dex Horthy

Topics covered

• context engineering
• AI-assisted software development
• software development lifecycle
• automation
• engineering teams
• loop engineering
• software factories

Keywords

• context limitations
• harness engineering
• automation limits
• AI slop
• software factories
• token harder
• token smarter

Sponsors

Antithesis, Buildkite, Sentry

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: HumanLayer

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