Ep 37: Everyone wants bigger context windows. Linus Lee thinks that's the wrong instinct Artwork

Zero Prime Podcast

The Zero Prime Podcast with Pete Soderling explores the early stories of top startups as seen through the eyes of their engineer-founders. In each episode we uncover insights on what it takes to start a company as an engineer in the words of the founders themselves. From the most cutting edge infrastructure companies to the newest trends in developer tooling, we introduce you to the engineer-founder personalities behind the up and coming software startups that you can’t afford to ignore.

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Zero Prime Podcast

Ep 37: Everyone wants bigger context windows. Linus Lee thinks that's the wrong instinct

May 08, 2026 • Data Council

0:00 | 16:47

Linus Lee, Head of AI at Thrive Capital, sits down with Pete Soderling to talk context engineering, monolithic agents, and the failure mode most teams aren't measuring yet.

Most teams building AI agents right now are reaching for bigger context windows. Linus thinks that's the wrong instinct. He runs AI at Thrive and ships an internal research agent called Puck that's processed billions of tokens in production — which means he's seen the failure modes most of us are still pretending don't exist.

In this conversation, we get into:
– Why context engineering is really a search problem
– Why monolithic agents get brittle the second you try to change anything
– The observability gap nobody's talking about — when your dashboards are green but your agent isn't actually doing what the user asked
– Why he's pulling 50-year-old IBM diagrams into modern AI work

Linus is speaking at AI Council SF, May 12–14, 2026.
🎟️ Grab your ticket: https://aicouncil.com/sf-2026

📖 Read the full Q&A: https://petesoder.substack.com/p/linus-lee-says-your-agent-is-too

Chapters:
00:00 Why a product person ends up at a VC firm
02:31 What working in investing taught him about data
08:49 The trap most engineers fall into with context windows
12:19 Context engineering as a search problem
15:37 The failure mode at scale nobody's talking about
17:31 What he's most excited about at AI Council

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Pete Soderling

Host