Context engineering with Dex Horthy
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 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 • Are AI agents actually slowing us down? • AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026 • Vibe Coding as a software engineer • How Claude Code is built • AI Engineering in the real world • The AI Engineering Stack • How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths • The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read" — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe