Rob Ocel sits down with Minko Gechev to unpack one of the fastest-evolving areas in AI-assisted development: skills, agent workflows, and the growing complexity of AI harnesses.Explore AI skills, how they differ from rules and MCPs, and why developers are increasingly treating skills as structured, executable instructions rather than traditional documentation. Minko explains how modern agents operate under the hood, how skills are lazy-loaded into context windows, and why poorly designed skills can create context rot, unnecessary token usage, and degraded performance over time.

Rob and Minko also dig into one of the most important but misunderstood topics in AI engineering today: evals. They break down how teams can evaluate AI workflows, measure pass rates, test deterministic versus non-deterministic outputs, and optimize skills for reliability, token efficiency, and execution quality across evolving models and harnesses. Also learn about prompt structure, workflow orchestration, context compression, state-machine agents, React loops, and why many teams are accumulating rules and skills faster than they are pruning them.

What you will learn:

• Learn how engineering teams are moving AI beyond isolated experiments into repeatable workflows

• Explore strategies for improving reliability, testing, and validation in AI-assisted development

• Hear practical approaches to scaling AI adoption across engineering organizations

• Understand how leaders are thinking about automation, CI/CD, and operational maturity in the age of AI

• Connect with technology leaders discussing the challenges and opportunities shaping modern software delivery

Rob Ocel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robocel/

Minko Gechev on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgechev/

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