You can't scale vibes (Guy Podjarny)

You can't scale vibes. Guy Podjarny, co-founder of Tessl and founder of Snyk, on why instinct works for your own prompts and breaks the moment a skill gets shared. He joined Tristan Handy this week on the Analytics Engineering Podcast. Three ideas from the episode: 🔸 Context has a forcefulness dial. Rules load every turn. Skills load on a hint. Passive docs sit there until an agent goes looking. The front matter is the always-loaded part, which is why 100 skills end up competing for the same sliver of attention. 🔸 Skills are software, so they carry software risk. Malicious skills lifted wholesale from the open ecosystem. Negligent ones missing basic safety instructions. Vulnerable ones that walk an agent into pasting credentials somewhere they land in a log. 🔸 Most companies will own a harness, not rent one. Tristan thought building a dbt-specific harness was a bad idea, since Claude Code and Codex already work. It was neither hard to build nor a wash: better accuracy, meaningfully fewer tokens. Listen wherever you get your podcasts 🎧