Context Engineering as a Discipline: Building Governed AI Analytics

Summary
In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast, host Tobias Macey welcomes back Nick Schrock, CTO and founder of Dagster Labs, to discuss Compass - a Slack-native, agentic analytics system designed to keep data teams connected with business stakeholders. Nick shares his journey from initial skepticism to embracing agentic AI as model and application advancements made it practical for governed workflows, and explores how Compass redefines the relationship between data teams and stakeholders by shifting analysts into steward roles, capturing and governing context, and integrating with Slack where collaboration already happens. The conversation covers organizational observability through Compass's conversational system of record, cost control strategies, and the implications of agentic collaboration on Conway's Law, as well as what's next for Compass and Nick's optimistic views on AI-accelerated software engineering.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Nick Schrock about building an AI analyst that keeps data teams in the loop

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what Compass is and the story behind it?
• context repository structure
  • how to keep it relevant/avoid sprawl/duplication
• providing guardrails
• how does a tool like Compass help provide feedback/insights back to the data teams?
• preparing the data warehouse for effective introspection by the AI
• LLM selection
• cost management
  • caching/materializing ad-hoc queries
• Why Slack and enterprise chat are important to b2b software
• How AI is changing stakeholder relationships
• How not to overpromise AI capabilities 
• How does Compass relate to BI?
• How does Compass relate to Dagster and Data Infrastructure?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Compass used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Compass?
• When is Compass the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Compass?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
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Links

• Dagster
• Dagster Labs
• Dagster Plus
• Dagster Compass
• Chris Bergh DataOps Episode
• Rise of Medium Code blog post
• Context Engineering
• Data Steward
• Information Architecture
• Conway's Law
• Temporal durable execution framework

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