Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: a conversation from the Hg Digital Summit

The engineer who coined "DevOps" in 2009 thinks he is watching the same pattern play out again, only faster. In this episode of Orbit, Patrick Debois joins Nathaniel Barnes, Hg's portfolio CTO, at our annual Digital Summit in Paris, to map the parallels between the DevOps movement and what is happening right now with AI agents in software teams. The framing question: what if context is the new code? Patrick unpacks the four phases of his context development lifecycle, generate, evaluate, distribute, observe, and explains why the maturity of a company's CI/CD pipeline is the single best predictor of how well it will absorb AI. He and Nathaniel dig into context drift, customer-facing "vibe coding" as a discovery engine, the silos that agents are quietly breaking down, and why the companies winning right now are the ones that skipped the 27-step plan and just started. As Patrick puts it: "We are at the age where it doesn't need to be perfect. We just need to be there." Essential listening for any technology leader navigating this moment.