Greg Isenberg

By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

I hope I'm going to share some wisdom on how you can use the agents better.

There's a lot of information going on right now.

I disagree with most of it, and that's what we're going to talk about.

So at the end, whether you're building something, using an agent for some sort of work, you have the best output possible.

The first thing that I want to announce, previous episodes, we probably disagree with this point, but now what's true is the models are good.

The models are exceptionally good.

Opus 4.6 is amazing.

GPT 5.4 is amazing.

I know there's like two sets of camp where, especially when it comes to programming, people are like, oh, Opus is the better UI designer.

GPT 5.4 is a better backend.

Generally speaking, we've reached a point, we're not at AGI yet, where we reached a point where the models are good.

But context still matters.

And you have the power to steer the models in a direction where you can get quality or you can get slop.

And that's what I really want to talk about.

But before we get into all that, and feel free to cut me off because this topic excites me, we need to learn how context works.

And context is the model assembling information that it needs to execute an action.

And the way the context is assembled, let's say in a coding agent, but really in any sort of agent, is there's this general system prompt, usually by the model provider.

So for example, cloud code leaked recently.

And one of the cool things that, especially as a developer, I got to do is I got to read the system prompt.