Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit
episodePreviously titled “Patrick Dubois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 13, 2026
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Why does Patrick Debois say “context is the new code” for AI agents?
With AI it was interesting because everybody said like, but now I can do all these things myself. That was the first reaction, kind of, I can do this solo, this solopreneur, I need less people on kind of my company to do certain things. And that kind of scared a lot of people. But what we now see is indeed the agent strive if it would give it the right context and the right information. And to do that, we actually have to have a consensus, not only between the human and the agent, but the agent is actually forcing us to talk to other colleagues to have the same context. And so while the agent is almost like failing at things, let's discuss that. Like how can we help the agent? It's almost like agent enablement but kind of developer enablement.
Saying like we're all gonna end up solo, kind of coding with our brain. We're not, like it's not happening.
Right, it's still gonna take that cross collaboration.
I'm Nathaniel Barnes, Portfolio CTO at HG. And my guest today coined a term that became the way an entire industry works. In 2009, Patrick Dubois was a frustrated Belgian consultant on a government data center migration, watching developers and operations team talk past each other. His response was to organize a small conference in Ghent called DevOps Days. That conference became a global movement. The term Patrick coined, DevOps, reshaped how software gets built and shipped. Patrick co-authored the DevOps Handbook. Over the 17 years since, he's watched version control, code review, CI-CD pipelines, and observability go from fringe practices to baseline hygiene. Now he's watching it happen again. But this time, the thing that needs the rigor isn't code, it's context.
Welcome to the show, Patrick. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. So you talked a little bit in your talk earlier about the parallels that you draw over time and talked about what if ops was like dev in 2009. And now in 2026, we're starting to ask, what if context was like code? What made that first leap a step change? How did you know it was happening? And how do you draw that parallel out to today?
Yeah, so the, it was already mentioned in the industry, you get a little bit frustrated, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm an engineer, so I like to then do things a little bit more structural and kind of have some pride of the things that I do. And with DevOps, that was kind of the whole pride about like, hey, I want to be proud at that time how I run the systems and how useful, how well it's performing to the customers. And then it frustrated me how we kind of hand off kind of the way we did at that time as well. And that kind of grew into there must be a better way. And then I found other people kind of coming into, hey, we're doing this, we're doing testing, we're doing kind of more canary ploys.
There's a whole set of practices. But then I always look also for people there's a lot of tooling that kind of overcomes a certain problem and I kind of give it like a new direction. But then the tooling has a set of practices that kind of change the way you work. And so I'm interested in both kind of like, you know, making sure that like the change is actually also in the organization and that kind of, led to a transformation where some technology actually, some people stay at the technology level with containers, but that kind of is a fascinating field to be in. And now with AI, obviously the game changer was new technology AI. And people, especially now, maybe since more of a year in the coding field, which is near and dear to obviously the previous field of kind of building and delivering software, kind of caught on.
And now we're looking what this practice could be and that's kind of where led me to that similar thinking.
Do you see ways that we're grappling with the same kinds of problems as we move forward into the agentic coding or that we're grappling with them in the same ways? You talked about that proliferation of tooling and I
know we
see that everywhere right now
in
the same way that we did during the DevOps
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why does Patrick Debois say “context is the new code” for AI agents?
0:05–6:19
2
How did the original DevOps movement shape today’s AI‑driven workflows?
6:19–12:44
3
What are the four phases of the Context Development Lifecycle (generate, evaluate, distribute, observe)?
12:44–17:51
4
Why is CI/CD maturity the best predictor of a company’s ability to adopt AI?
17:51–24:37
5
How do AI agents force cross‑team consensus and break down silos?
24:37–29:36
6
What is “vibe coding” and how can customers co‑create features with AI?
29:36–30:50
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