Dex Horthy, founder and CEO of HumanLayer, explains the divide between public hype frameworks and how top engineers actually build reliable enterprise AI agents.
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Horthy: Skilled Context Engineers Matched Opus 4.5 Output on Opus 4.0
“When Opus 4.5 came out, they're like, oh, This is good enough. This is a big change, and I saw the things that they were shipping, and I was like, okay, but I know a bunch of engineers who got really good at context engineering, and they were getting the same …”
Insight
Horthy: Great AI Products Are Built at Boundary of Model Capabilities
“There will always be a thing that the model can like only kind of get right reliably. Like you find a thing that's right on the boundary of the model's capabilities, and you figure out how to get it right over and over and over again.”
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Horthy: Software engineers will orchestrate rather than manually write code
“I don't believe the like software engineering is dead and there'll be more, no more coders. I think the way I would describe it is like the role of the software engineer will change from like write working code to like produce working code. Or like cause worki…”
Insight
Horthy: AI demos work at 80% accuracy, enterprise software needs far more
“I think there's a difference between, like, people who want to build, like, Reliable software and people who want to build a cool demo. I think that's the core. The incentives are different. Yeah. The incentives are of like, okay, if this is right, 80% of the …”
Insight
Horthy: Beginners should compact LLM context at 40% of window capacity
“If you don't know what you're doing, and you don't really know what the AI model is capable of, and you don't have a lot of experience, like, you know, training wheels is like, when you get to 40%, start thinking about wrapping it up, or like doing a, like, yo…”
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Horthy: AI has not solved shipping and maintaining production software
“Shipping is like getting it into prod, fixing the things that are broken, maintaining it over time and like continuing to make it better. And like that part is not quite solved by AI yet.”