Coding agent reliability isn't a model problem, it's a gates problem. Ran Aroussi, creator of yfinance and founder of Automaze, argues that an "agentic workflow" is a contradiction in terms, and that the only thing standing between you and full autonomy is deciding where a human still signs off. He also thinks you stopped needing junior developers for their coding skills about a year ago, and that hiring them anyway is the only way the industry gets its next generation of architects.

What we cover:
– Why "agentic workflow" is a contradiction, and when agentic coding is the wrong tool for the job
– Where a human still has to sign off, and what coding agent reliability actually depends on
– What a software factory changed about delivery times, pricing and the client backlog
– Why you no longer need juniors for their coding skills, and why you should hire them anyway
– Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge, and the experience agents cannot compress
– The law firm model: why dev agencies may end up looking more like Kirkland & Ellis than a SaaS startup

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:05 - yfinance, open source and 30 million downloads a month
00:06:03 - Automaze and the MUXI agent application server
00:10:42 - Where to draw the line on agent autonomy
00:15:12 - Software factories and fully autonomous merges
00:22:25 - The architect archetype and the four-phase ladder
00:28:11 - Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge
00:30:14 - What agents did to delivery times and pricing
00:37:03 - Why "agentic workflow" is an oxymoron
00:41:08 - Anthropic, OpenClaw and the end of flat subscriptions

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/vut

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Where's your gate? Tell us in the comments where you still refuse to let a coding agent merge without a human looking.

The software factory that put up 850 pull requests in a week, with 85 to 90% of them handled by agents end to end. Tessl's Head of Product Dru Knox on how it actually got built, why it started with skills rather than automation, and the two things nobody expects a factory to change. Guy Podjarny digs into the skills-to-loops-to-factory path, and what breaks when you skip a step.

What we cover:
– What a software factory actually is, and how it differs from a pile of disconnected automations
– Loop engineering: turning a skill into something that gets better every time it runs
– Why context engineering has to come before automation, and what stalls when it doesn't
– The two gains nobody forecasts from extra agent capacity: quality and fungibility
– Verifiers and evals, or how you enforce a standard that agents are free to ignore
– Context-driven code review, and why a general-purpose reviewer plateaus

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:23 - Kikimora: Tessl's own dark factory
00:04:45 - Skills, loops and factories, defined
00:09:09 - 850 PRs a week, and the road to it
00:11:27 - The surprises: quality and fungibility
00:13:16 - Why a factory has to be context centric
00:16:40 - Context-driven code review and the wall teams hit
00:22:51 - Skills inventory across your whole code estate
00:28:38 - Verifiers, evals and enforcing what you wrote down
00:37:30 - Loops, automations and owning your software factory

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/coi

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If you've hit the plateau Dru describes, tell us where it stopped compounding for you.

Lada Kesseler's approach to loop engineering is brutally simple: give the agent one step, make it write the result to a file, then read it back and go again. She calls it a centrifuge. Spin fast enough and the stupid comes out.

The Logic20/20 principal engineer has spent the last year and a half building the ground rules, skills and refinement loops that fight the defaults coding agents ship with, starting with an instruction to stop trying to please her. Along the way she explains why she trusts AI-written tests less than AI-written code, why the description field in an agent skill was never meant for humans, and why most teams chasing a software factory are about to drown in garbage.

What we cover:
– Why agent ground rules have to give the model a mission to disagree with you
– The refinement loop that gets to quality when the first attempt never does
– Why an agent harness only works if it does one thing at a time
– Sketch prototypes: replacing your code with a markdown file and an agent
– Why AI-generated tests are more dangerous than AI-generated code
– Software factories, and what happens when you try to switch into one overnight

*AI DevCon is coming back to New York this November*
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https://tessl.io/devcon#tickets

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:38 - Using AI for everything, not just code
00:06:15 - Ground rules: fixing the defaults agents ship with
00:10:02 - Agent skills and why the description isn't for humans
00:13:09 - Loop engineering: how you actually get to quality
00:16:03 - The biggest misconception about coding agents
00:20:43 - Sketch prototypes and the limits of AI architecture
00:27:48 - Reverse direction: you are the decider
00:31:58 - Why she trusts AI tests less than AI code
00:35:00 - Software factories, or drowning in garbage

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/k2t

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Where are you on the loop engineering curve, still hoping for a good first try or already spinning? Tell us in the comments.

Turning every repo into a software factory sounds like marketing until you see the machinery underneath. Don Syme, Principal Researcher at GitHub, breaks down continuous AI and GitHub Agentic Workflows, now in public preview. The short version: the agents are the easy part, the quality gates and guardrails are the work.

Watch Don's AI DevCon Talk here: https://youtu.be/kbvqRWY-bUs

What we cover:
– What continuous AI is, and why it sits beside CI/CD rather than inside it
– Why bounding the context is what stops automated agents going off the rails
– Whether the repo is really the right unit for a software factory, and where monorepos break it
– One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control, scheduling and model exams
– Quality gates, human review, and equipping the reviewer instead of drowning them

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:52 - What is continuous AI?
00:07:33 - From single player to multiplayer automation
00:09:42 - Bounding the context so agents don't go off the rails
00:12:57 - Software factories, loops and harnesses
00:18:44 - Inside GitHub Agentic Workflows
00:25:19 - Why the repo became the unit of production
00:37:11 - What belongs in the repo, and what doesn't
00:45:07 - One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control in the factory
00:52:01 - Quality gates, human review and equipping the reviewer

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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If you're building a software factory of your own, tell us in the comments where your bottleneck actually sits.

The thing that makes an agent useful is the exact thing that makes it dangerous. Keycard co-founder Ian Livingstone breaks down why non-determinism is both the feature and the bug, and why identity, not model quality, is what really gates how much autonomy you can hand an agent. If you have ever clicked "always allow" without reading it, this one is about you.

What we cover:
– Why authentication was enough in the cloud era and stops being enough with agents
– The background check you can't run on an agent, and what has to replace it
– Mission identity: who is acting, on whose behalf, and for what purpose
– Cross App Access, Agent Auth and the protocols trying to fix OAuth
– Consent fatigue, LLM as a judge, and where hard boundaries still belong
– Why MCP ships with an auth story and CLI tools don't

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:43 - Why every wave of computing rewrites identity
00:04:50 - The feature and the bug are the same thing
00:10:23 - Why shared secrets break for agents
00:13:36 - The background check you can't run on an agent
00:19:42 - Chargebacks, delegation and proving intent
00:22:16 - Mission identity: a new layer
00:28:07 - Cross App Access, Agent Auth and emerging protocols
00:33:02 - MCP vs CLI, and how Keycard works
00:43:22 - Identity three years from now

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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Where do you draw the hard line for your own agents? Tell us in the comments.

Datadog's Language Foundations team deleted an entire folder of AI context files that had been carefully written and maintained for over a year, expecting a performance hit. Instead, their evals got better. Simon Boudrias, who runs Language Foundations at Datadog, walks Guy through what that taught his team about context rot, and the full journey of scaling AI coding agents to 4,000 engineers.

What we cover:
– How Datadog scaled Cursor and Claude Code to 4,000 engineers in under a year
– Why Datadog deleted all of its AI context files, and what happened to eval scores
– Building an eval-driven code review system that replays old PRs to catch real incidents
– Where open-weight models like GLM 5.2 stand against the frontier
– Rethinking hiring and career ladders now that AI can run a real codebase interview

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:19 - Simon's role and Datadog's 4,000-engineer org
00:04:31 - The Cursor rollout that took off overnight
00:07:53 - How Claude Code entered the picture
00:10:51 - Building dedicated Signals and Flows teams
00:11:58 - Why Datadog bet early on evals
00:33:44 - Deleting all their AI context and getting better evals
00:47:51 - Where open-weight models stand today
00:51:45 - Rethinking hiring and career ladders for AI
00:59:24 - The real prize: better decisions, not just productivity

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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What's the oldest file in your AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md that you're afraid to delete? Tell us in the comments.

At Tessl, 95% of the code shipped by their internal "Dark Factory" has never been looked at by a human, and the team still ships hundreds of pull requests a week, including through entire weekends. Rob Willoughby, who leads AI engineering at Tessl, joins Simon to open up the hood on how it actually works: the orchestrator, the verification layers, and the failures that forced the team to rebuild trust from scratch.

What we cover:
– How Tessl routes 65-70% of its own pull requests through an autonomous "Dark Factory"
– Why context in the repo matters more to output quality than which model you use
– How natural language "verifiers" turn code review taste into fast, cheap checks agents can pass or fail
– The queue bug that took dozens of pull requests to fix, and the from-scratch Elixir rewrite that stress-tested the whole system
– How to start building your own software factory, one verification layer at a time

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:01:44 - Rob Willoughby joins: Tessl's PR numbers
00:04:01 - Live demo: kicking off two pull requests
00:14:03 - Building the Dark Factory: orchestrator vs. context
00:19:01 - Code review layers: Code Rabbit, Tessl Change Verify, and verifiers
00:29:58 - Earning trust: accountability in an autonomous system
00:33:20 - What broke: the queue bug and the Elixir rewrite experiment
00:39:56 - Onboarding new engineers into the factory
00:42:58 - Advice for teams starting their own software factory
00:52:03 - Back to the demo, and the road to 100% adoption

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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What would your own verification layer catch, and where would it break? Let us know in the comments.

One Snyk developer's AI skill quietly handed their coding agent production credentials, and the security team found out the hard way. Krzysztof Huszcza, who leads AI security incubation at Snyk, joins this special Tessl and Snyk live stream to unpack the ToxicSkills research that uncovered 76 malicious agent skills in the wild, and what it actually takes to run coding agents safely at scale.

What we cover:
– How Snyk's security team found 76 malicious skills hiding inside a popular open agent skill repository
– Why skills have become the go-to way developers hand context to their coding agents
– The internal incident at Snyk where a developer's skill exposed production credentials to an agent
– How the Tessl and Snyk integration scans every skill and MCP server for risk before you install it
– What's coming next with Snyk's new Evo product for governing coding agents at scale

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:01:33 - Chris's role: AI security incubation at Snyk
00:02:16 - Snyk's roots as a developer-first security company
00:03:58 - New security challenges from AI coding agents
00:06:26 - Skills: the new way to give agents context
00:07:35 - Inside Snyk's ToxicSkills research: malware and prompt injection
00:11:35 - How developers can vet skills before installing them
00:14:38 - A real incident: exposed production credentials at Snyk
00:17:45 - Building a secure-by-default agent stack
00:23:35 - What's next: Snyk's new coding agent security product

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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What's the riskiest skill you've installed without checking it first? Let us know in the comments.

An engineer builds an AI agent to manage his own life, decides an unrestricted "does everything" agent is too dangerous to trust, and ends up creating the internal agent platform that now runs 30 agents across his entire company. 

Ori Shoshan, tech lead at Cyera, walks through the guardrails, citation system, and knowledge graph that turned "let the agent do anything" into "let the agent do exactly what it's supposed to, and nothing else."

What we cover:
– Why one engineer built his own AI agent in his living room, and how it grew into Cyera's internal agent platform
– Whitelisting tools instead of blacklisting them, plus the "escape hatch" that keeps agents honest
– Backing every claim with a citation and using a second model to catch hallucinations before they reach a human
– Trading RAG for a knowledge graph the agent can walk like a wiki
– Turning "use this platform" into "build your own agent" to drive adoption across an entire engineering org
– Running agents on confidential data that can investigate everything but can only ever say what's been cleared

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:04 - Meet Ori Shoshan and what Cyera does
00:06:50 - The living-room spark: why Ori built his own agent
00:11:09 - Whitelisting tools instead of blacklisting them
00:12:55 - Why every claim needs a citation
00:15:35 - Reducing hallucinations with clean-context verification
00:21:04 - Taking Borg to Slack: the first agents at work
00:25:33 - Why naming your agent drives adoption
00:39:53 - Knowledge graphs over RAG
00:52:00 - The AI Captains: scaling adoption with carrots, not sticks

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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Have you built guardrails like this into your own agents? Let us know what's worked (or blown up) for you in the comments.

After DevOps, Patrick Debois has a new map. The godfather of DevOps returns to walk through his AI patterns research: how he tracks where AI-native development is heading by mining social signals instead of surveys, why the stack is settling into patterns worth learning, and why your AI budget problem is really an optimization problem.

What we cover:
– Inside the AI patterns site at Tessl.io/patterns and how it's auto-generated
– The four layers of AI enablement: agent, team, platform, and organization
– Solo, shared, and multiplayer modes: the compounding effect of shared context
– Managing agent costs: budgets as a forcing function for optimization
– Scaling adoption: find the success story, don't fight the skeptics
– Hiring system thinkers instead of elegant coders

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:28 - Why AI grips Patrick Debois
00:04:33 - Agent, team, platform and org enablement
00:06:36 - Is AI-native development maturing?
00:11:19 - Inside the AI patterns site
00:18:14 - Quality, security and the IDE as review interface
00:22:45 - Changing roles and harness engineering
00:26:32 - Hiring in the AI era
00:30:31 - Scaling adoption across the org
00:42:03 - Cost management and ROI

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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Where is your organization on the maturity curve? Drop your take in the comments.