Dexter Horthy ("Dex")¶
Builds AI coding agents at humanlayer. Authored the April 2025 essay 12 Factor Agents, widely credited with coining Context Engineering. Prior work on APIs for agent orchestration and human-in-the-loop systems.
Grounded thesis (Coding Agents Conference 2026)¶
Research-Plan-Implement (RPI) was right in spirit but broken in practice. His update — QRSPI: Question → Research → Spec → Plan → Implement — inserts an explicit questions/outline phase and forces humans to read the code, not the plan file.
Grounded quotes¶
- "There is no magic prompt. Do not outsource the thinking. You the engineer are an important part of this process and seek leverage." (quoting Jake from Netflix)
- "I don't think it's okay to not read the code. I also don't think you should read really long plan files. Those two are related."
- "Even if the plan is a thousand lines and the code is 1,000 lines, your design discussion might only be 200 lines. And you get a lot of opportunities to resteer in that moment."
- On control flow: "Don't use prompts for control flow if you can use control flow for control flow. Like the if statement is really really powerful and LMs are really good at classifying things."
- On the dumb-zone: "around 40% on average depending on what you're doing… shoot to keep it under 40 and if you get up to 60, like think about wrapping it up."
- Static-asset-first workflow: "we don't use the built-in compaction because everything that matters is going into static assets and so you can always resume from where you left off."