Blurring Lines: Data, AI, and the New Playbook for Team Velocity

Data Engineering Podcast

Summary
In this crossover episode, Max Beauchemin explores how multiplayer, multi‑agent engineering is transforming the way individuals and teams build data and AI systems. He digs into the shifting boundary between data and AI engineering, the rise of “context as code,” and how just‑in‑time retrieval via MCP and CLIs lets agents gather what they need without bloating context windows. Max shares hard‑won practices from going “AI‑first” for most tasks, where humans focus on orchestration and taste, and the new bottlenecks that appear — code review, QA, async coordination — when execution accelerates 2–10x. He also dives deep into Agor, his open‑source agent orchestration platform: a spatial, multiplayer workspace that manages Git worktrees and live dev environments, templatizes prompts by workflow zones, supports session forking and sub‑sessions, and exposes an internal MCP so agents can schedule, monitor, and even coordinate other agents.
Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
• Data teams everywhere face the same problem: they're forcing ML models, streaming data, and real-time processing through orchestration tools built for simple ETL. The result? Inflexible infrastructure that can't adapt to different workloads. That's why Cash App and Cisco rely on Prefect. Cash App's fraud detection team got what they needed - flexible compute options, isolated environments for custom packages, and seamless data exchange between workflows. Each model runs on the right infrastructure, whether that's high-memory machines or distributed compute. Orchestration is the foundation that determines whether your data team ships or struggles. ETL, ML model training, AI Engineering, Streaming - Prefect runs it all from ingestion to activation in one platform. Whoop and 1Password also trust Prefect for their data operations. If these industry leaders use Prefect for critical workflows, see what it can do for you at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect.
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Maxime Beauchemin about the impact of multi-player multi-agent engineering on individual and team velocity for building better data systems

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by giving an overview of the types of work that you are relying on AI development agents for?
• As you bring agents into the mix for software engineering, what are the bottlenecks that start to show up?
• In my own experience there are a finite number of agents that I can manage in parallel. How does Agor help to increase that limit?
• How does making multi-agent management a multi-player experience change the dynamics of how you apply agentic engineering workflows?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn

Links

• Agor
• Apache Airflow
• Apache Superset
• Preset
• Claude Code
• Codex
• Playwright MCP
• Tmux
• Git Worktrees
• Opencode.ai
• GitHub Codespaces
• Ona

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA