Port went back to seed stage with 200 employees and paying enterprise customers. Zohar Einy explains why.

Zohar is co-founder and CEO of Port, the platform underneath many companies' AI software factories. He started as a developer and security researcher, built a company, and now runs one that has to reinvent itself every few months.

What you'll hear:

• Why platform engineering moves from developer experience to pure standardization once agents do the work

• Port's research: up to 80% fewer tokens when agents get a unified context graph instead of ten MCP servers

• How to change direction with 200 people: a small parallel company staffed by the first employees

• At Port, around 70% of tickets now go to AI, and on-call happens from bed

• Why the new bottleneck is deciding what to send to the factory

Zohar Einy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zohar-einy Port: https://www.port.io Port research on token costs: https://www.port.io/blog/research-how-we-cut-ai-costs-by-80-percent Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/72469/only-the-paranoid-survive-by-andrew-s-grove/

More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.page Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork Host: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Most teams spend their AI budget on models and harnesses. Brian Houck thinks the weak link is

the context we hand the agent.

Brian is a Distinguished Scientist at DX and spent 20 years researching developer productivity at

Microsoft. With Margaret-Anne Storey, Max Kanat-Alexander, Eirini Kalliamvakou and Nicole

Forsgren he wrote CAFE(S), a framework for what makes context good enough for an agent to use.

What you'll hear:

- The five CAFE(S) properties: clarity, actionability, fidelity, efficiency, and security

- Why "order me food" fails as a prompt, and what a 25-year-old ramen post has to do with it

- Why 88% of engineers in Brian's research regularly lose time to out-of-date documentation, and

how AI makes that worse

- The productivity-experience paradox: developers ship more and feel worse about it

- The easiest productivity win for an engineering manager. It involves the calendar.

Links:

CAFE(S) paper (ACM Queue): https://queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3847288

Brian Houck on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhouck/

DX: https://getdx.com

More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.page

Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork

Host: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Outcome equals intelligence plus agency. AI is making the first part cheap. Yevgen Nebesov has spent five years mapping the second.Yevgen is a systems architect who watched too many good ideas in his projects go nowhere because the power arrangement around them didn't support them. His answer is the power loop, a model of power as a flow through six domains, and a book called The Architecture of Power.What you'll hear:- Why a traffic light has power, and where that power actually sits- The six domains of the power loop: events, narratives, agendas, beliefs, decisions, institutions- Why "technical debt" is a narrative, and how to sell a problem in the language of the dominant institution- How to hollow out a decision meeting by quietly building a parallel one- A bridge in 2050, an AfD case study, and the fawn rescue club that gets farmers, hunters and animal rights people into the same field at 4 a.m.Yevgen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevgen-nebesov/The Architecture of Power (book): https://leanpub.com/thearchitectureofpowerThe framework and the Power Canvas: https://architectureofpower.rocksYevgen's TEDxKarlsruhe talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePG1uvM6YKMMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work