Today's guest is Dennis Pilarinos, who is the founder and CEO of Unblocked and a long-time developer tools expert, having founded BodyBuild and having served as a director at Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

With Dennis, we talked about the latest trends in software development. We discussed why more tokens are not translating into more productivity, how to guarantee code quality with AI and what's the role of context in making your agents succeed. And we also explored how the Unblocked team is doing it, navigating their setup and a few use cases about how their shipping features in production.

(00:00) Episode start

(03:50) Introducing Dennis Pilarinos

(04:40) Token spend is exploding

(09:03) Measuring developer productivity is still unsolved

(12:31) Code review is the new bottleneck

(18:01) Code quality depends on context, not skill alone

(21:07) The content curation trap: why markdown files go stale

(26:40) What sources to plug into your context engine

(33:47) How the Unblocked team ships: risk assessment and auto-merge

(43:29) Releasing faster: skip design partners, ship to everyone

(49:20) Remote agents and the future of context-powered coding

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Today's episode is brought to you by Notion.

Learn more about Notion’s Developer Platform today at https://ntn.so/refactoring

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Making AI agents work in your team 🤖 — with Dennis Pilarinos

Refactoring Podcast

Making AI agents work in your team 🤖 — with Dennis Pilarinos