Advanced Context Engineering for Agents

Dexter Horthy, the founder of Human Layer, discusses context engineering for AI coding agents, emphasizing how to maximize the utility of today's AI models. He shares his experiences with spec-first development and introduces a workflow centered around context management, including research, planning, and implementation phases, to maintain context utilization under 40%. Dexter highlights the importance of mental alignment and shared understanding within a team and illustrates the effectiveness of this approach through real-world examples, including fixing a bug in a 300,000-line Rust codebase and adding WASM support to a programming language. He suggests that while coding agents may become commoditized, the key challenge lies in team and workflow transformation to effectively utilize AI in complex coding tasks.