Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit
Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcastShow Notes
The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration.
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.
More from Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast
What does AI have to prove when the buyer is a CFO? Elias Apel, CEO of Lucanet, answers from both sides of the table: he was a Lucanet customer, then its CFO, and now leads the company as it brings AI agents into finance and tax teams. Host Sebastian Zureich of Hg asks where AI can stand alone, where it cannot, and what a sceptical buyer demands of any software vendor.
Published in a week when Lovable's valuation doubled to $13.3 billion, up from $6.6 billion in December, this episode presents Ryan Meadows story of joining Lovable as a customer before becoming its Chief Revenue Officer, and how that experience shapes everything about how he thinks about AI, growth and the future of software. Hg's Tim Harrison sits down with Ryan to explore how they reached $400 million ARR in just 15 months, what it means to build an organisation entirely without legacy tooling, and why Ryan thinks most enterprises are still barely scratching the surface of what AI can do for their people.
Every December, Rob Toews publishes ten AI predictions in Forbes, then comes back a year later and grades himself in public. That habit of putting a stake in the ground, and owning the misses, makes him one of the more interesting voices in the space. In this conversation with Jon Wulkan, he explains why the frontier has narrowed to a handful of Western labs, why even well-resourced challengers have struggled to keep pace, and why the much-feared "SaaS apocalypse" is probably overdone.
In this episode, John Cranmer is joined by Gil Elbaz, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era. Gil, formerly in the CTO office at Nvidia working on multi-agent infrastructure, argues that the AI attack surface has fundamentally changed. The old boundary between what is yours and what is not has collapsed, and every agent, every MCP, every tool connection is now part of the perimeter.
When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light powers AI unicorns including Lovable and Legora, and Jonathan joins Hg director Soren Holt to explain how. The conversation goes well beyond automation. It's a builder's account of a first-principles redesign.