Context engineering with Dex Horthy

Stream the latest episode Listen and watch now on YouTube , Spotify , and Apple . See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom. Brought to You by • Antithesis — with Antithesis, you can use AI agents to work on critical systems without worrying about correctness. Going far beyond code review, you can run your complete system in a hostile environment, analyze its behavior, and reproduce every issue perfectly. Teams like Jane Street, Fly.io , and the etcd community use Antithesis to ship better code, faster. Learn more. • Buildkite — the CI platform trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Meta, Uber, Ramp, Nvidia, Airbnb and many more. Buildkite was stress-tested at the largest scale inside companies solving some of the hardest engineering problems. It’s built to reliably manage whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue, today, next year and beyond. Learn more. • Sentry – application monitoring software built by developers, for developers. Sentry’s Seer AI agent is one of their new, neat tools, as a way to debug errors faster. Same with Sentry’s MCP server. Check out Sentry . In this episode 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. Key observations from Dex Here are 12 useful points Dex made in our conversation: 1. Dex talked with ~100 “real” AI Engineers and…