{"podcast":{"title":"Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering","slug":"chain-of-thought-ai-agents","podcast_index_feed_id":7074333,"rss_url":"https://feeds.transistor.fm/chain-of-thought","website_url":"https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/","image_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Yf0B0akhfAtC-Ahrn6UylfgdusLiIKiLKXlMy29dfwI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:1400/h:1400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81YjBh/ODMzMTY3ZjQ0MjBj/YTE1ODMwYTZlNDgx/Mjc2Mi5qcGc.jpg","author":"Conor Bronsdon","episode_count":63,"summary":"AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Host Conor Bronsdon talks to the engineers, founders, and researchers building breakthrough AI systems about what it actually takes to ship AI in production, where the opportunities lie, and how leaders should think about the strategic bets ahead. Chain of Thought translates technical depth into actionable insights for builders and decision-makers. New episodes weekly. Conor Bronsdon is an angel investor in AI and dev tools, Technical Ecosystem Lead at Modular, and previously led growth at AI startups Galileo and LinearB. Disclaimer: All views, opinions and statements expressed on this account are solely my own and are made in my personal capacity. They do not reflect, and should not be construed as reflecting, the views, positions, or policies of Modular. This account is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Modular in any way.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-12T00:17:44.387836+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents"},"episode":{"title":"Context Poisoning Is Killing Your AI Agents: How to Stop It","slug":"context-poisoning-is-killing-your-ai-agents-how-to-stop-it","published_at":"2026-03-25T11:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/context-poisoning-is-killing-your-ai-agents-how-to-stop-it","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents","url":"https://share.transistor.fm/s/e9df3b6f","audio_url":"https://media.transistor.fm/e9df3b6f/ed763f48.mp3","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…","meta_description":"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…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2658,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"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","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/chain-of-thought-ai-agents/context-poisoning-is-killing-your-ai-agents-how-to-stop-it.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}