The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast sponsors and ad reads

This is where I need to mention our presenting sponsor, Antisys. Antisysys verifies your system of correctness by running your whole system in hostile simulation and finding bugs. It does this by using an approach called deterministic simulation testing, or DST, which ADW's distinguished engineer Mark Brooker and Ankur Desai have described as lightweight formal methods. Setting aside Intisys for a minute, if you as an engineer want to get more serious in verifying that your system works as intended, your best bet would be to use lightweight formal methods. Now back to Intisys. Intisys turbocharges testing by running your whole system under aggressive fault injection. Imagine Intisysys as hundreds or thousands of versions of the Mario game running, each instance aggressively trying to break the game with increasingly weird input combinations. With Antithesis, you can specify properties at the whole system level, and Antithesis will actively try to disprove them. So you can be confident that if your system holds up in Antithesis, it will hold up in production. There's good reason teams like Janestreet, Fly.io, and the etcd community rely on Antithesis. Head to antithesis.com slash pragmatic to learn more.

And this is where I need to mention our seasoned sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building any SaaS, especially an AI product, you'll need Auth for apps and agents. This is the layer where close enough is just not good enough. So don't let this layer get improvised by AI. WorkOS gives you the proven implementation, SSO, skim, and fine-grade authorization built for how agents operate and in a way that's easy for them to integrate with an implementation that you can trust. Check it out at workwise.com.

I also want to talk about our season sponsor, Turbo Puffer. But this time, I don't want to talk about how they are fast, cheap, and extremely scalable search engine built on object storage. Instead, I'd like to talk about their team. I interviewed Simon, the co-founder and CEO on stage at AI Injury World Fair, and also hung out with their team for a few days in person. Here's a few of the interesting things I learned about them. The company is full remote yet feels pretty connected. They have a Slack-first culture. For example, all of their customers have a dedicated Slack channel and engineers are in these channels seeing feedback from these customers, often fixing their bugs. The team gets together for annual summits at least twice a year and campfires form several times a month anytime several remote employees gather in the same city. Simon describes their engineering culture as hardcore and whimsical. They focus on solving difficult problems but also try to have fun. A good example is the Pragmatic Engineering landing page that they built. We agreed to have a custom landing page and then their team decided to build a cool logo that animates on mouse movement. Another interesting thing is their team composition. Pretty much everyone currently working at the company has 10-15 years of experience. For a startup, they are an unusually seasoned team. Finally, I really appreciate how pragmatic their engineering philosophy is. Simon and the team strongly believe in how simplicity scales and this is the reason that object storage is TurboPuffer's only dependency. The team do seemingly silly things like build their job queue in a single file on object storage because they understand their core primitives and they know how they scale. To check out the whimsical animation, or if you're building AI products, head to turbopuffer.com slash pragmatic.

Today's episode is brought to you by Buildkite, the CI orchestration platform trusted by OpenAI, Entropic, Cursor, NVIDIA, Uber, Canva, and more. Today we're talking about pushing the right context into models so that they write better code. Right after that starts working, your agents will write more code, a lot more. Trusting that code avalanche is where many teams face the challenge today. Every change that an agent makes still has to be built, tested, and proven safe before it ships. worked on my machine is not enough, so you obviously need CI. But when agents are pushing 5, 10, or 50 times the commit volume to your pipelines, faster CI runners won't save you. Shaving 30 seconds off a single build is meaningless when a queue is 100 plus jobs deep. What you really want is a CI system that gets faster as the volume grows and CI that offers instant parallelization to give you unlimited concurrency and to intelligently route changes at runtime. This is what BuildKite does and why global software leaders continue to rely on it. The same architecture that observed the scale of Shopify and Uber a decade ago now runs about 1.4 billion job minutes a week across Cursor, Meta, Reddit, and Snowflake. While the rest of the CI world are cracking under the weight of re-architecting their platform, BuildKite continues to reliably grow. Agents running on your infrastructure are BuildKite, Any cloud, any chip, your secrets, your skill. Every artifact and log is captured, so when something fails, either you or your agents have immediate insight for why. As you're engineering the context you'll give to your agents, think about how you'll verify what they hand back. If your system is buckling under the increased volume, head to buildkite.com slash pragmatic. 30-day all-access trial, no credit card, and an actual human engineer on standby. His name's Ola, and he's very helpful.

Thanks to Antithesis for being our presenting sponsor. With Antithesis, you can verify your system's correctness without human review or traditional interrogation tests and avoid bugs or outages. With this, let's jump in.

This episode is presented by Antithesis. If you work with agents, your job is no longer just writing code, it's specifying and testing it. Antithesis is the most effective method of verifying agentic code today.

This episode is presented by Antithesis. Antithesis runs your whole system in a hostile simulation and finds every bug before your users do. It sounds like science fiction, but it's actually hardcore engineering. Understand how at antithesis.com/pragmatic.