As AI coding agents become more capable, context is starting to matter as much as code. Yet while code has version control, review, testing, CI/CD, and production observability, the prompts, rules, and memory that drive agents are still often managed like ad hoc hacks.

Patrick argues that context needs its own engineering discipline. He introduces the Context Development Lifecycle: Generate, Evaluate, Distribute, and Observe, along with the team practices that make context a shared, repeatable, and improvable part of software delivery. The session also explores the larger context flywheel, where better context leads to better agent output, which creates better observations, which in turn improves context again.

Speaker info:
- https://x.com/patrickdebois
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickdebois/

Context Is the New Code — Patrick Debois, Tessl