Don’t outsource your spinal column
Zach Daniel on owning your AI stack — and why your context layer is the one thing you should never buy off the shelf.
Every so often a podcast episode earns a permanent spot in my “make the team listen to this” list. This is one of them. The Elixir Wizards crew at SmartLogic sat down with Zach Daniel — creator of the Ash Framework and VP of Engineering at Remedy Meds — for an hour on AI agents, context layers and harness engineering. And no, you don’t need to write Elixir for this to matter. Swap in your stack of choice; the argument holds.
The line that stuck with me: don’t outsource your spinal column.
Here’s what Zach means: your organization’s knowledge — how your business actually works, what your protocols are, why decisions got made — now feeds everything. It feeds the humans, and increasingly it feeds every agent and LLM workflow you run. That makes your context layer the central nervous system of the company. Hand it to a vendor’s “knowledge graph” or some enterprise context lake, and you’ve sold the one thing you can never buy back.
His alt…
