Patrick Debois

Patrick Debois, founder of Tessl and co-founder of DevOps in 2009, published two articles in February 2026 that reframe the same argument: the bottleneck in software development has moved from how humans write code to the quality of the context that guides coding agents.

The first piece, dated 2026-02-19, introduces the Context Development Lifecycle (CDLC), a four-phase cycle of generate, evaluate, distribute, observe. Debois treats context as a versioned engineering artifact rather than a markdown file nobody maintains. The evaluate phase applies TDD logic: agent outputs are scored statistically because LLMs are non-deterministic, and every failed evaluation exposes an unwritten specification rather than a defective agent. He is blunt that context rots and comes into conflict, which is why freshness and coherence need active management.

The second piece, a week later, argues that the value is in repetition. The first pass through the cycle captures conventions and finds gaps; by the tenth, according to Debois, the whole team codes differently rather than the agents merely following instructions better. His strategic claim is that models commoditise and tools converge, so the defensible asset is accumulated product knowledge: catalogued edge cases, mapped user needs, domain reasoning encoded where agents can reach it.

Debois draws the DevOps parallel himself, and claims the incentive structure is better this time because sharing context improves the author's own agent interactions. His unresolved worry: infinite context windows turn a curation problem into a governance problem, possibly a harder one.