# Building Agents Is Trivial Now, Context Is the Next Frontier — Jeff Ng, Unblocked

Source: [AI Engineer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvMyYLTfvhg)  
Feed7 permalink: https://feed7.dev/p/building-agents-is-trivial-now-context-is-the-next-front-3c0b2ed056  
Published: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z  
Trust: Source Linked (source_linked)

## Why Included

Retrieve code alongside decisions, incidents, tickets, and conversations so the agent does not repeat a known outage trigger.

## Source Summary

A coding agent with repository access still recommended a known outage trigger. Background agents need reconciled decisions and incident context, not just more raw MCP results.

## Practical Implication

For unattended coding agents, retrieve decisions, incidents, tickets, conversations, and code together. Reconcile conflicts, rank relevance, enforce permissions, and provide a synthesized task view rather than making each agent resolve raw MCP output.

## Agent-Ready Context

An agent investigating QA latency of **3–4 seconds** versus an expected **hundreds of milliseconds** recommended re-enabling async dispatch. It missed a later Slack discussion and Linear postmortem showing that setting had caused an outage.

For unattended coding agents, retrieve decisions, incidents, tickets, conversations, and code together. Reconcile conflicts, rank relevance, enforce permissions, and provide a synthesized task view rather than making each agent resolve raw MCP output.

The example demonstrates one corrected recommendation, not a measured reliability gain. Building and maintaining an organization-wide context model also introduces access-control, freshness, and conflict-resolution work.

## Context Map

- Layer: context
- Domains: coding
- Topics: context-engineering, retrieval, mcp

## Uncertainty

- None recorded.

## Agent Instruction

Use this item as source-backed context. Do not invent claims beyond the linked source. If this item conflicts with another source, call out the conflict.