Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

What breaks when agents become the customer? Most of the integration layer, APIs, SDKs and webhooks alike, was built for human developers and for servers that are always listening. Agents are neither.
Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/78-what-breaks-when-agents-become-the-customer-svix-ceo-tom-hacohen/
When an agent runs on a laptop, closing the lid takes down the tunnel its webhooks come through. When the lid opens, it gets a storm of retries from 12 hours earlier. Svix founder and CEO Tom Hacohen's answer is to let the agent poll for what it missed.
Svix delivers webhooks for companies like Clerk and Resend, and it created Standard Webhooks, the spec OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini have adopted. In this episode of Chain of Thought, Tom joins Conor Bronsdon to talk through designing APIs for agents that adapt, whether agents still need SDKs, and why he wants less code even when agents write it. He also introduces Poke, Svix's new spec for making event-driven APIs work for agents.
This episode is sponsored by Svix.
We cover:
Why events are harder for agents than API calls: the sender controls them, and they arrive outside the agent's session
How polling endpoints and Svix's plugins for Hermes and OpenClaw let an agent pick up where it left off
Why Tom calls JSON an abomination and webhooks duct tape, and why worse is better anyway
Why Svix created Standard Webhooks when everyone implemented webhooks differently, and how the spec let Kong and ngrok add webhook verification
Whether agents still need SDKs, and why Svix's skills work like a solutions engineer while its docs stay written for humans
Why Tom wants less code even when agents write it, and what piling patches on patches costs
Poke, Svix's early spec for letting agents subscribe to and trigger events across services, released so feedback can shape it while it's still malleable
Chapters:
(0:00) Duct tape, retry storms and the case for simplicity
(1:19) Why integrations got easier and harder at once
(2:59) How EteSync's webhook requests led to Svix
(5:22) Worse is better: why webhooks persist
(7:15) What changes when an agent receives the event
(9:07) What happens when the laptop closes
(11:08) Hermes, OpenClaw and agents that poll
(13:03) Letting agents choose their own subscriptions
(14:42) The long tail of the web without APIs
(18:38) Why Svix created Standard Webhooks
(24:17) How Standard Webhooks is governed
(26:16) Following real usage, including MCP
(28:17) Designing APIs for agents that adapt
(30:38) Do agents still need SDKs?
(31:25) Skills as documentation for agents
(34:52) Less code, even when agents write it
(36:19) Agentic development and the offshoring analogy
(37:34) Software factories and the plumbing underneath
(40:57) Keeping up while the standards change
(44:18) What Svix is launching with Poke
(46:39) Why Svix released the Poke spec early
(47:58) Building for your customers' customers
(49:38) Clerk, Resend and webhooks in the background
(52:22) Where to follow Tom
Links from the episode:
Svix: https://link.svix.com/cot
Poke: https://www.svix.com/poke/
Standard Webhooks: https://www.standardwebhooks.com
Standard Webhooks on GitHub: https://github.com/standard-webhooks/standard-webhooks
EteSync: https://www.etesync.com
ssot-check: https://github.com/conorbronsdon/ssot-check
Most of the Web Will Never Get APIs for AI Agents | Dhruv Batra: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/63-most-of-the-web-will-never-get-apis-for-ai-agents-dhruv-batra/
Connect with Tom Hacohen:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhacohen/
X: https://x.com/TomHacohen
Svix: https://link.svix.com/cot
Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
Newsletter: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/ConorBronsdon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon
More episodes: https://chainofthought.show
Thanks to Svix, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Svix delivers billions of reliable webhooks for startups and the Fortune 500. Get started at https://link.svix.com/cot. Qualified startups will get $12,000 in credits, $50,000 for YC companies.

If your agent's memory lives inside one model provider, switching models or harnesses means starting over. You need portable memory - yet when switching agent memory between models, you can swing accuracy by thirteen points or more, depending on which model reads them back.
Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/77-switching-models-shouldnt-mean-starting-over-walrus-protocols-kimberly-logan/
Kimberly Logan, Head of Product at the Walrus Foundation, where she builds Walrus Memory, joins Chain of Thought to discuss how to build portable and verifiable memory for AI agents - and why Walrus's decentralized storage network has proved an apt primitive. She and host Conor Bronsdon get into why model lock-in is a memory problem, what people use agent memory for beyond coding, how you prove what happened to your data, and why Walrus doesn't publish memory quality benchmarks, plus more. This episode is sponsored by Walrus.
We cover:
Why longer context windows don't help once you switch models or harnesses, and why an import function only fixes one point in time
Why Kimberly doesn't benchmark Walrus Memory against memory startups, and why she sees the opportunity as bigger than memory alone
What people build with Walrus Memory besides coding agents, which Walrus puts at maybe 30% of usage: long-running study aids, trading agents, and security teams comparing production snapshots with code changes
Walrus's figure that almost 85% of the memories written are read back more than 30 days later
How attestations on the blockchain and a delegate key you control let you show what happened to your data, and why unchanged data still isn't proof that it's accurate
Why Kimberly treats recall quality and latency as table stakes, and how a knowledge graph keeps recall on the freshest memories
Why she left almost 20 years in traditional software, including seven at Google, for a blockchain company, and where shared memory across companies and trust boundaries goes next
Walrus Console, announced this week: one place to manage agent memories and files through an interface or an MCP connection, without knowing how the storage underneath is configured
Connect with Kimberly Logan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krlgn/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/kimblgn
Walrus: https://walrus.xyz/cot
Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
Newsletter: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/ConorBronsdon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon
🔗 More episodes: https://chainofthought.show
Chapters:
(0:00) Why agent memory has to move with you
(1:25) Context windows don't follow you to a new model
(4:41) Why an import function doesn't fix lock-in
(6:38) Why Walrus isn't competing head-on with memory startups
(8:39) Where Walrus Memory goes next
(10:38) Trading agents and security snapshots on Walrus Memory
(14:44) Verifiability: answering what happened to your data
(17:21) Fresh recall, and why Walrus doesn't publish memory benchmarks
(20:22) From traditional software to a blockchain company
(24:40) A record other companies and regulators can check
(25:42) What Walrus Console is for
(29:09) Use agent memory beyond coding agents
(30:52) Plugging in your own agent stack
(31:41) Memory across companies and trust boundaries
(35:48) Closing thoughts
Thanks to Walrus, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Walrus Memory gives AI agents portable, verifiable memory that carries context across apps, sessions, and other agents. Get started at https://walrus.xyz/cot
#AI #AIAgents #AgentMemory #SoftwareEngineering #DevTools

Andrea Malagodi is CTO at Sonar, which builds AI code verification and governance tools. When finance asked about the size of his team's AI bills, he calculated cost per PR. At one extreme was an engineer with more than 500 PRs in a short period and a low cost per PR. At the other was an engineer with very high spend and very few PRs.
Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/76-your-best-ai-engineer-might-have-the-worst-metrics-sonar-cto-andrea-malagodi/
Judged on cost alone, the first engineer wins and the second looks like a problem. Malagodi looked closer. The first had built a personal agent factory, with specification, design review, documentation records, coding, verification and functional testing, and about two-thirds of the output was tests and validations. The second was working on a hard problem that needed the AI to reason through long, multi-turn sessions and didn't reduce to a line count.
Numbers alone tell you something, but not which engineer was doing the more valuable work.
We cover:
Why cost per PR is becoming the industry's standard AI spend metric, and how Malagodi's 500-PR engineer and high-spend engineer broke it
The history of bad proxies, from lines of code to story points to token leaderboards, and why Malagodi says the people who removed code were often the most important
Sonar's guide, verify, solve loop: Vortex for codebase context, algorithmic plus LLM-based PR analysis, a remediation agent for legacy debt, and the Hunter agent for security vulnerabilities
Why Malagodi breaks agent work into small pieces, and why a five-day session that produces 400,000 lines of code leaves you with no idea what is in your codebase
Setting up disagreement between agents with an orchestrator and personas for engineering, product management and quality, plus Conor Bronsdon's cross-model-family review setup
Rolling AI tools out at enterprise scale: one cost view for finance, up to 30% savings from cutting repeated context reads, and why budgets as small as $50 a week are hard to work with
Rotating a triage duty to protect deep work, including how Sonar's teams built skills to sort through hundreds of reported CVEs, a number of them likely false positives
New episodes, the ideas behind them and Conor's essays land in the Chain of Thought newsletter first. Subscribe: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
Chapters:
(0:00) Human reviewers rubber-stamp big AI changes
(2:43) Learning the craft alongside AI tools
(9:09) From lines of code to PR counts
(12:17) Spreading top engineers' setups org-wide
(16:50) The guide, verify, solve agent loop
(22:51) Specialized agent lanes and multitasking limits
(26:51) Clear asks and guardrails for agent coordination
(30:29) Building disagreement between agents
(34:59) Mixing models instead of picking one
(39:46) Rolling out AI tooling at enterprise scale
(46:19) Defense in depth for AI-written code
(50:52) Protecting time for incident investigations
(54:08) Personalized software for teams and individuals
Links from the episode:
Sonar Vortex research: https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/cut-your-coding-agents-cost-with-sonar-semantic-code-navigation/
SonarQube Hunter Agent: https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarqube/hunter-agent/
Connect with Andrea Malagodi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malagodia/
Sonar: https://www.sonar.com/
Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
Newsletter: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/ConorBronsdon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon
More episodes: https://chainofthought.show

Thanks to Svix, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Svix delivers billions of reliable webhooks for startups and the Fortune 500. Get started at https://link.svix.com/cot. Qualified startups get $12,000 in credits, and YC companies get $50,000.
Thanks to Walrus, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Walrus Memory gives AI agents portable, verifiable memory that carries context across apps, sessions, and other agents. Get started at https://walrus.xyz/cot

Thanks to Inngest, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Agents in production run long - they call models and wait on APIs and people. But the longer agents run, the more they break. Inngest handles that with durable execution. You build your agent as steps in TypeScript, Python, or Go. When a step fails, Inngest retries it with exponential backoff, and completed steps are saved and skipped. Try it out: https://inngest.link/cot-pod
Thanks to G2i for sponsoring this episode - for over a decade, they vetted and placed engineers at other companies, from startups to FAANG. Two years ago, they turned that same judgment inward, building their own bench to review RL environments, evals, and training data that models are trained on. Get access: https://fandf.co/3SFxVm6

An AI agent answering questions about your business needs to understand how that business works. How do you calculate churn? When does your fiscal year end? Who has the authority to change those definitions? Connecting a model to company data leaves those questions unresolved.
Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/75-why-context-alone-isnt-enough-for-enterprise-ai-agents-wisdomai-cpo-kapil-chhabra/
That’s the work of context engineering: giving agents the business definitions, instructions and examples they need to interpret your data. But that context changes as the business evolves, and someone has to keep it accurate.
In this episode of Chain of Thought, WisdomAI co-founder and CPO Kapil Chhabra joins Conor Bronsdon to explain how his team approaches that challenge. We explore how companies maintain shared context, why data teams are taking on the role of AI context engineers, and how a specialized harness plans queries, checks results and repairs errors before returning an answer.
Recorded at WisdomAI’s San Mateo office, this episode is sponsored by WisdomAI.
We cover:
Why the context layer is broader than a semantic layer or catalog, and how it differs from memory
How context drifts, and why a subject-matter expert has to approve changes to shared definitions
Why Kapil sees an AI context engineer role emerging, and why data teams are moving from providing insights to providing context
How WisdomAI's harness decomposes a question, federates queries across data sources and repairs errors, including a customer that replaced a $5M-a-year analytics pipeline
The four ingredients of a trustworthy AI answer: accuracy, consistency, governance and explainability
Live Apps: governed analytics apps built from a single prompt, and what keeps them live
Why your context is your IP and should stay portable
Chapters:
(0:00) Do your agents have the right context?
(1:56) The four ingredients of trust
(5:13) The criticality and impact 2x2
(8:12) Data, context, harness: the hospital analogy
(11:12) What the context layer actually means
(11:48) Specialized harnesses: legal, support, analytics
(13:17) Why only 7% of data leaders have scaled AI
(15:46) What models can't guess: ARR, churn, fiscal years
(16:45) The data stack collapses into the context layer
(20:55) Memory vs. context
(25:26) Are agents the new users of software?
(27:19) Where humans should spend their time
(28:14) Commissioning an AI agent, and who verifies it
(31:28) Context drift and the learning loop
(34:04) Context is a multiplayer game
(35:12) Decompose, query, verify, repair
(38:47) Replacing a $5M analytics pipeline with federation
(42:04) The context development life cycle
(43:29) The AI context engineer
(46:02) Jobs are changing, not disappearing
(46:59) Product, people and process
(51:20) Who decides? Why FDEs can't own your context
(52:22) Data context vs. business context
(54:11) The benchmark: specialized harness vs. general agent
(56:08) Meeting users in ChatGPT, Claude and Slack
(58:48) Static vs. runtime context
(1:00:08) Harness engineering as models change
(1:01:44) Right-sizing AI and Live Apps
(1:04:42) The boring parts: governance, security, caching
(1:06:18) 1,000 dashboards, 50 human-years
(1:08:08) What "live" means
(1:09:19) Are dashboards going away?
(1:12:08) A pipeline app built on a weekend walk
(1:15:53) Who owns the apps?
(1:17:27) Data teams now provide context, not insights
(1:18:56) Building with the WisdomAI MCP
(1:19:43) Your context is your IP
(1:20:48) Closing thoughts: none of that work goes to waste
Links from the episode:
Meet the Modern Data Team (WisdomAI CDO report)
AI Context Engineer (ACE) certification
Live Apps
WisdomAI in ChatGPT Work
Avoid AI Writing
ssot-check
I Paid an AI Agent $8 to Write About its 'Life'
Slack Wants to Be the Context Harness for Code | CPO Jaime DeLanghe
The AI Framework Era Is Over: Why Context Is the Moat | Jerry Liu
Connect with Kapil Chhabra:
LinkedIn
WisdomAI
WisdomAI on X
Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
Newsletter
Twitter/X
LinkedIn
YouTube
More episodes: https://chainofthought.show
Thanks to WisdomAI for sponsoring this episode. WisdomAI is the agentic analytics platform for trusted enterprise intelligence: governed context, an analytics harness that makes every answer consistent and verifiable, and Live Apps built from a single prompt. Try Live Apps: https://wisdom.ai/liveapps

Laurie Voss co-founded npm - now head of developer relations at Arize, he argues that engineers will increasingly earn their keep as 'product engineers': understanding what users need and directing AI agents to build it.
Full transcript and chapters: https://chainofthought.show/podcast/74-ai-codes-product-engineers-decide-what-to-build-laurie-voss/
One example: a bakery owner who knows how to make a croissant but has no interest in building software. Someone still has to turn that owner's needs into requirements. Laurie sees that work becoming central to product engineering, with cheaper code making software for narrower industries more viable.
We discuss where he still sees a need for human code review and operational knowledge, what he would look for in a computer science course if he were starting out today (and what he wouldn't do), and why he compares AI today to the web in 1997. He is optimistic about the technology and skeptical of the valuations, while leaving one question unresolved: how do junior engineers learn the judgment this work demands?
We cover:
Why the "aha moment" of solving a problem survives even when agents type the code
Where Laurie still sees a need for human code review, operations, and tacit knowledge
Whether a $15,000 coding bootcamp or a theory-heavy CS degree is still worth it
Why AI in 2026 looks like the web in 1997, and what that says about the bubble
How AI-generated pull requests burden open source maintainers, and why Laurie expects cheaper code to pressure closed-source business models
Why the systems analyst returns as the product engineer, and why that means niche software for bakeries and auto parts
Why Laurie predicts open-model competition and diminishing returns could compress frontier-model margins
How apprenticeships could help junior engineers develop product judgment
Chapters:
(0:00) The shift in software jobs
(0:44) Why Laurie is optimistic about the code generation explosion
(3:06) The aha moment moves from typing code to thinking
(5:49) Where agents still need human review and operational knowledge
(8:51) Is college still worth it?
(9:54) Bootcamps versus theory-heavy CS courses
(13:04) We are all product engineers now
(15:55) AI is the web in 1997
(18:19) Exponential growth, the labs' pause, and npm's ten-year curve
(20:07) Barring AGI, AI is a normal technology
(21:48) Block's layoffs and companies staying smaller
(23:14) What the labor data shows: fewer people, more capital
(26:29) Open source as the canary: drowning in AI pull requests
(28:11) AI reimplementations and the pressure on software moats
(30:26) Personal software and the kill-my-SaaS hackathon
(32:32) The bakery and the return of the systems analyst
(34:09) Niche software for specific industries
(35:36) Bootstrapping and the DevTools opportunity
(37:13) What this means for the model companies
(38:20) Frontier-model margins and open-model competition
(39:53) How the bubble pops: scaling laws and diminishing returns
(43:24) Staying private and the trough of disappointment
(45:51) Get good at a domain, not the technology
(50:44) The missing junior ladder is the question of our time
(53:32) Closing thoughts: it's 1997, you can retrain
Connect with Laurie Voss:
Blog: https://seldo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seldo/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/seldo
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/seldo.com
Arize: https://arize.com/
Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:
Newsletter: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/ConorBronsdon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon
More episodes: https://chainofthought.show
Thanks to Svix, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Svix delivers billions of reliable webhooks for startups and the Fortune 500. Get started at https://link.svix.com/cot. Qualified startups get $12,000 in credits, and YC companies get $50,000.
Thanks to Walrus, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Walrus Memory gives AI agents portable, verifiable memory that carries context across apps, sessions, and other agents. Get started at https://walrus.xyz/cot
Thanks to G2i for sponsoring this episode - for over a decade, they vetted and placed engineers at other companies, from startups to FAANG. Two years ago, they turned that same judgment inward, building their own bench to review RL environments, evals, and training data that models are trained on. Get access: https://fandf.co/3SFxVm6
Thanks to Inngest, presenting sponsor of season four of Chain of Thought. Agents in production run long - they call models and wait on APIs and people. But the longer agents run, the more they break. Inngest handles that with durable execution. You build your agent as steps in TypeScript, Python, or Go. When a step fails, Inngest retries it with exponential backoff, and completed steps are saved and skipped. Try it out: https://inngest.link/cot-pod
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