Why Context Beats Every Prompt You'll Ever Write

Why Context Beats Every Prompt You'll Ever Write

Author: Tessl February 17, 2026 Duration: 31:17
Most teams think agentic dev is about writing better prompts. It's not. Guy Podjarny and Simon Maple explain why managing context, not crafting prompts, is what separates teams that scale with agents from teams that don't. They walk through a practical framework for building, evaluating, and distributing the context your agents actually need. In this episode: • Why agents fail without structured context about your internal platform • The 3 context layers: policies, platform docs, and applic...

Hosted by Guy Podjarny and Simon Maple, The AI Native Dev-from Copilot today to AI Native Software Development tomorrow is a conversation about the profound shift happening right now in how software is created. This isn't just another tech show about using the latest AI tool; it's a deep, ongoing exploration of what it means to build software in an age where artificial intelligence is a fundamental partner. Each episode unpacks the practical realities and the long-term implications of this transition, moving beyond today's assistive copilots to imagine the workflows, team structures, and architectural decisions of a fully AI-native future. For developers and engineering leaders who feel both the excitement and the uncertainty of this moment, the podcast offers grounded discussions, expert insights, and forward-thinking analysis. You'll hear concrete examples of AI's current impact on coding practices alongside speculative, thoughtful debates about where this all might lead. The dialogue is shaped by a genuine curiosity about how we can actively guide this transformation rather than just react to it. Tune in for a nuanced perspective that treats AI not as a simple productivity hack, but as the core of a new development paradigm that is still being written. This Tessl production provides a essential space for anyone invested in the craft of building software to understand and help shape what comes next.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

The AI Native Dev - from Copilot today to AI Native Software Development tomorrow
Podcast Episodes
Everything 100 Episodes Revealed About AI Native Dev [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:14
When did writing code stop being the job and start being the hobby? One hundred episodes in, Guy Podjarny and Simon Maple pull the clips, check the predictions, and trace the through line across conversations with guests…
How DeepSeek leveraged Qwen and Llama to build its model in $5M [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:12
Meta’s Llama might not actually be open source AI, and the developers building on it have no idea. In this episode of AI Native Dev, Simon Maple sits down with Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, to break down what open source…
Why Every Developer needs to know about WebMCP Now [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:06
An agent cannot read your website. And that needs to change. In this episode of AI Native Dev, Guy Podjarny sits down with Maximiliano Firtman, 30-year web developer and author of 14 books, to talk about what building fo…
Stop Maintaining Your Code. Start Replacing It [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:18
"The code that we have is a liability. The system is the asset we're building." Chad Fowler, VC at Blue Yard Capital and former CTO at Wunderlist, sits down with Guy Podjarny to discuss the Phoenix Architecture: software…
We Scanned 3,984 Skills — 1 in 7 Can Hack Your Machine [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:24
Most developers install skills without reading what's inside them. But that's exactly what attackers are counting on. Simon Maple sits down with Brian Vermeer from Snyk at DevNexus to get into the security risk hiding in…
The Greatest Time to Build a Startup (The AI-Native Advantage) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:05
The best agentic developers throw away their agent's work without guilt, run three agents at once and only use one, and treat their AI like a junior developer they genuinely dislike. It sounds wrong. It works. Daniel Jon…
Why Your Agent Needs Memory, Not Just Context [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:31
Not onboarding your agent is on you. Richmond Alake, Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle, joins Simon Maple to make the case that most agent failures come down to one thing: memory. Not the model, not the infra…
Cisco Principal Engineer's Fix for AI Code Security [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:10
Your AI coding agent learned from millions of lines of code, including insecure ones. That means by default, it can write vulnerable code too. So how do you fix that? John Groetzinger, Principal Engineer at Cisco, built…
From IBM Acquisition to AI-Native Observability | Dash0 CEO [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:38
"Charts are good for users, not good for agents. Agents look at the underlying data and do deep analysis." Mirko Novakovic built Instana, sold it to IBM, and now he's building Dash0, rethinking observability for agents,…