Episode
Context Poisoning Is Killing Your AI Agents: How to Stop It
- Published
- Mar 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2658
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/e9df3b6f
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/episodes/context-poisoning-is-killing-your-ai-agents-how-to-stop-it/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/context-poisoning-is-killing-your-ai-agents-how-to-stop-it.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Michel Tricot co-founded Airbyte, the open source data integration platform with 600+ free connectors that hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Now he's building the company's next product: an agent engine, currently in public beta. His thesis is that agents don't fail because models are bad. They fail because the data feeding them is wrong: context poisoning is killing them. Michel demos this live. A simple Gong query through raw API calls burned 30,000 extra tokens and took three minutes. The same query through Airbyte's context store ran in one minute and used a fraction of the context window. Conor and Michel dig into why RAG alone won't cut it, what a "context engineer" actually does, how Airbyte tracks entities across Salesforce, Zendesk, and Gong without embeddings, and whether the SaaS apocalypse playing out in public markets is overblown. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:20 Meet Michel Tricot, CEO of Airbyte 2:27 Data Got Us to the Information Age. Context Gets Us to Intelligence. 4:48 How Context Poisoning Breaks Agents 7:49 Why Airbyte Customers Stopped Loading Into Warehouses 10:12 Live Demo: Context Store vs Raw API Calls 10:38 What Does a Context Engineer Actually Do? 14:14 RAG Isn't Dead, But How We Build It Will Die 16:41 30K Wasted Tokens Without Proper Context 22:22 Cross-System Joins: Zendesk, Gong, and Salesforce 26:12 The Open Source Agent Connector SDK 29:45 The SaaS Apocalypse Is Overblown 36:09 From Data Pipes to Agent Infrastructure 38:51 What Agents Need to Get Right by Summer 40:48 Memory Is Just Another Form of Context 43:07 Outro About the Guest: Michel Tricot is the CEO and co-founder of Airbyte, the open source data integration platform used by thousands of companies to move data between systems. Before Airbyte, he led data ingestion and distribution engi…