AI Harness at Scale with Maxim Salnikov (Microsoft) | GitHub Copilot, Agent Ops, Context Engineering

Everyone can buy the same GitHub Copilot licenses. So what actually makes a company AI native?

In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Maxim Salnikov, AI Dev Tools Solution Engineer at Microsoft, where he leads AI native development enablement for over 100 enterprise customers of Microsoft and GitHub in Norway. Maxim has been building for the web since the late 90s and now spends his days inside real enterprise dev teams, watching how AI adoption succeeds and fails across finance, energy, agriculture, and pure software companies.

Maxim breaks down why AI adoption is a change management problem, not a technology problem, and why buying licenses is the easy part. We get into the anatomy of an AI harness, the internal layer that ships with tools like Copilot and Claude Code, and the external layer that successful companies build on top for their own codebases. He also makes the case for two new job titles emerging inside dev teams: context engineers and agent ops.

Key Topics:

- Why startups outpace enterprises in AI adoption, and how to close the gap

- Handling AI skeptics: why one bad experience in 2023 shouldn't be the final verdict

- Code as a secondary artifact: the harness is what you actually build

- Internal vs external harness layers, and how the VS Code team builds its own tools

- Context engineers and agent ops: the new roles appearing in team topology

- The AI superheroes anti-pattern and why it doesn't scale

- Managing agent skills like dependencies with APM (Agent Package Manager)

- How to become an AI native engineer: orchestration over one-to-one chat

CONNECT WITH MAXIM

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/webmax/

🐦 X: https://x.com/webmaxru

🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/webmaxru

🌐 Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/maxim-salnikov/

FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

🏢 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

📖 Agentic SDLC Handbook (free book mentioned in the episode)

📦 APM (Agent Package Manager)

#AINativeDevelopment #GitHubCopilot #ContextEngineering #AIHarness #SoftwareEngineering #Microsoft #AgenticAI #DeveloperProductivity

💬 Is your team building its own harness on top of AI dev tools, or running them out of the box? Drop a comment 👇