Building Agents Is Trivial Now, Context Is the Next Frontier — Jeff Ng, Unblocked
Aug 21, 2026 · 13:22
Jeff Ng, founding engineer at Unblocked, argues building agents is trivial but missing context makes them confidently wrong. Cloud primitives and frameworks have removed plumbing that six months ago took a team a quarter. In a demo, an agent enriching a Linear ticket recommended re-enabling async dispatch, missing that a support engineer had disabled it after an outage; it lacked the Slack thread and postmortem. Background agents fail silently when no human supplies that context. Ng's context engine connects docs, code, tickets, and conversations, reconciles conflicts, and returns a synthesized understanding scoped to permissions. MCP provides access, not understanding; rerunning the same agent grounded in the engine flips its recommendation from repeating the outage to preventing it.
