Context engineering with Dex Horthy

2026-07-15

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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” –...

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.

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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.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:33 Dex’s path into tech

03:34 Early work in platform engineering

05:28 Replicated

11:24 Metalytics

12:36 12-factor agents

18:27 Context engineering

23:38 Harness engineering

26:11 Context overload

30:45 Loop engineering