From Slop Code to Software Factories

Two people, one tandem bike, and a lot of near misses along Amsterdam’s canals. Dexter Horthy, CEO and co-founder of HumanLayer and the person who coined “context engineering,” climbs on the back to talk about a problem every AI-heavy engineering team eventually hits: code that runs today that nobody understands three months later.

The ride starts with an old joke from the Claude 3.7 days: ship the slop, it’ll be GPT 7’s problem. That joke is aging badly now that GPT 6 is out and still can’t design clean abstractions. From there it becomes a tour of how agents are actually used right now. Computer use checks in for flights and books government appointments. Two hours of raw footage became a rough but promising product demo through Opus 4.8 and the Palmier MCP while Dex was out for a run. And the best MCP tools turn out to be the ones that mirror what Claude Code and Codex were trained to call.

Off the bike, over pour-over coffee, the questions get bigger. Are browser agents a bandaid until everything goes headless? What happens to ad-funded websites and upsells when an agent does the shopping? Why does chat still feel like such a low-bandwidth way to work with models? And why is every principal engineer quietly building their own software factory, then getting buried in the sync, streaming and approval plumbing that HumanLayer wants to turn into building blocks, the way GitHub Actions did for CI?

Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm

Dexter Horthy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dexterihorthy

Timestamps

[00:00] Intro

[01:38] The GPT 7 will fix it joke

[03:03] GPT 6 still writes spaghetti

[06:21] If it runs, does it matter

[07:28] Computer use that fills out your forms

[11:57] Editing a demo with Palmier MCP

[13:16] Why most MCP servers are bad

[14:32] Mirror the tools models were trained on

[16:57] Hill climbing a demo while out running

[23:49] Are browser agents a band-aid

[32:23] Why chat needs richer interfaces

[40:30] Every engineer is building a software factory

[45:13] The GitHub Actions moment for agents