The Pragmatic Engineer AMA

Context engineering with Dex Horthy

Brought to You By: • Antithesis [https://antithesis.com/pragmatic] – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Buildkite [http://buildkite.com/pragmatic] – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. • Sentry [https://sentry.io/pragmatic] – 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 [https://www.humanlayer.dev/] 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 engineering 25:40 Harness engineering 28:13 Context overload 32:47 Loop engineering 46:36 Software factories before and after AI 52:35 Automation limits 57:20 Three options for automating 1:01:02 RPI framework 1:06:18 Intentional compaction 1:13:50 Token harder vs. token smarter 1:18:46 AI slop 1:21:17 HumanLayer 1:31:11 Book recommendation — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • How Uber uses AI for development: inside look [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development] • Are AI agents actually slowing us down? [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us] • AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026 [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tooling-2026] • Vibe Coding as a software engineer [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/vibe-coding-as-a-software-engineer] • How Claude Code is built [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built] • AI Engineering in the real world [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineering-in-the-real-world] • The AI Engineering Stack [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-ai-engineering-stack] • How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software-engineering] • The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read" [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code] — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://penname.co/]https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Pragmatic Engineer AMA

Brought to You By: • Antithesis [https://antithesis.com/pragmatic] – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. — In this special “ask me anything” episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I am in the hot seat facing questions sent in by subscribers that are read out by guest Volodymyr Giginiak, CTO and cofounder of Wordsmith AI [https://wordsmith.ai/], a legal tech startup (note: I’m an investor [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/investing/]). I tackle your questions on the software industry, AI, hiring, engineering organizations, career growth, the business model of the Pragmatic Engineer, and more. We also discuss where software engineering is headed, and I offer advice on some specific situations. Thanks to everyone who sent questions! — Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:56 From Uber to writing 09:22 AI-native SDLC 14:00 AI and hiring 19:06 Engineers currently thriving 22:18 Junior roles 24:44 Meta’s war mode 27:54 AI at Big Tech vs. startups 36:46 Tech debt 41:36 Types of engineering managers 44:40 Measuring AI productivity 48:30 The value of CS degrees 50:53 AI at Pragmatic Engineer 56:09 Future-proofing your career 1:01:36 The EU job market 1:03:55 Making money as a creator 1:08:20 What’s next for The Pragmatic Engineer 1:09:27 Bunq and Pollen 1:13:38 Spotting trends 1:14:33 Book updates 1:15:20 Favorite books & tech products 1:17:13 What won’t change in engineering — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • State of the software engineering job market in 2026 [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-job-market-2026] • The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends. [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-impact-of-ai-on-software-engineers-2026]  • How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-ai-dev-tools]  • The reality of tech interviews [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-of-tech-interviews] — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://penname.co/]https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry

Brought to You By: • Antithesis [https://antithesis.com/pragmatic] – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer [https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic] – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS [https://workos.com/] – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Few have made as big an impact on software engineering as this week’s guest on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent Beck. He created Extreme Programming, pioneered test-driven development (TDD), co-created JUnit, and is one of the authors of the famous ‘Agile Manifesto’. But these days, he's re-examining many ideas for the age of AI, and says we’re failing to accumulate trust during this new era at the same high rate as new code is being accumulated. In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent and I dig into his journey from discovering Smalltalk in the early days of personal computing, to helping define modern software engineering practices. We explore the origins of TDD, design patterns, Extreme Programming, and Agile – along with some lessons learned at Apple and Facebook. Kent explains why he believes software engineering is about far more than writing code, why no one yet knows exactly how engineers should work alongside AI agents, and how his "explore, expand, extract" framework can help engineers navigate major technology shifts. — Timestamps 00:00 Intro 03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away 08:00 Kent's path into tech 13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies 17:21 Kent’s first programming job 18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk 27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham 37:36 Design patterns 44:05 Working at Apple 51:08 CRC Cards 59:29 Testing tools in the language 1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler 1:09:54 Extreme Programming 1:16:25 Developing TDD 1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto 1:30:00 Agile’s impact 1:32:40 Agile’s downside 1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust 1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook 1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook 2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn 2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration 2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract 2:22:33 What Kent is excited about — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity] – co-written with Kent Beck • TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-agents-and-coding-with-kent] • Paying down tech debt [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt] • The past and future of modern backend practices [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices] — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://penname.co/]https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Tech interviews with NeetCode

Brought to You By: • Antithesis [https://antithesis.com/pragmatic] – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry [https://sentry.io/pragmatic] – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • Google Cloud Run [https://cloud.google.com/run?e=48754805&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=the_pragmatic_engineer] – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra. — Navdeep Singh – oftentimes better known as NeetCode – is the creator of NeetCode.io [http://NeetCode.io], one of the most popular coding interview preparation platforms and YouTube channels for software engineers. Before building NeetCode full-time, he worked as a software engineer at Amazon and Google. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Neet to discuss his path from Amazon and Google to building his own startup, why he left Amazon after just two months, what he learned at Google, and the decision to leave a stable engineering career to bet on himself. We also discuss what coding interview preparation teaches beyond passing interviews, the value of going deep on difficult problems, and why systems thinking and domain expertise remain essential engineering skills in the age of AI. Throughout the conversation, NeetCode makes the case that learning hard things is one of the single best investments an engineer can make, helping build the judgment and expertise that remain valuable no matter how the tools change. — Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:57 Neet’s take on coding interviews 06:41 Getting into tech 08:56 Why Neet isn't a fan of the CAP theorem 13:12 Quitting Amazon after two months 18:22 Google vs Amazon 22:26 The origins of NeetCode 25:27 Leaving Google to go all in on NeetCode 32:02 Why Neet doesn't fix every bug 39:26 The value of coding interview prep 42:57 Systems thinking and domain expertise 47:28 Hiring at Big Tech 52:15 Tech stack at Neetcode 57:57 The NeetCode  redesign contest 1:01:46 The future of software engineers 1:09:04 Hot takes: AGI, AI skill erosion, personality traits 1:22:49 “Maybe some people should just give up” 1:24:39 How to be a standout engineer 1:27:55 Book recommendation — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/learnings-from-conducting-1000-interviews] • How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-to-get-unstuck-during-coding-interviews] • The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025 [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-of-tech-interviews] • Tech hiring: is this an inflection point? [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hiring-inflection-point] • AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers] — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://penname.co/]https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

CI/CD with Robert Erez

Brought to You By: • Antithesis [https://antithesis.com/pragmatic] – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS [https://workos.com/] – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • turbopuffer [https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic] – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — Robert Erez is a principal engineer at Octopus Deploy, and a longtime expert in CI/CD, deployment systems, and software delivery. Rob and I were also once colleagues on the Skype web team, working on large-scale deployments and release processes. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Rob to discuss how teams deploy software safely and efficiently at scale. We cover Kubernetes, GitOps, platform engineering, progressive delivery, feature flags, cloud development environments, and the growing role of AI in CI/CD workflows. We also get into the tradeoffs in different deployment approaches, why self-hosted software still matters for some organizations, and the recent evolution of software delivery practices. — Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:09 Canary deployments at Skype 05:01 Joining at Octopus Deploy 06:15 Continuous deployment 10:26 Why Kubernetes won 15:51 Kubernetes on-prem 18:50 How GitOps works 25:00 The uses and limitations of GitOps 31:04 The rise of platform teams 35:51 How AI is changing CI/CD 39:49 Progressive delivery explained 47:31 Rollbacks and roll-forwards 50:14 Feature flags 54:32 How development environments are evolving 57:40 Cloud development environments (CDEs) 1:03:45 Self-hosting CI/CD 1:09:25 Getting started with progressive delivery 1:11:15 Book recommendations — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Kubernetes and retiring at the top [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/kubernetes-and-retiring-at-the-top] with Kelsey Hightower • The past and future of modern backend practices [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices] • Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools] • How Kubernetes is built [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-kubernetes-is-built-with-kat] with Kat Cosgrove • How Linux is built [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah] with Greg KH — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://penname.co/]https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]