Context and Chaos — Where context meets the chaos of building with AI
Where context meets the chaos of building with AI
Real takes from data and AI practitioners. No vendor slides. No hype. Just what actually happened, what worked, and why it matters.
Latest Issue
Your AI Context Layer Is Being Built on Stale Metadata
- Data governance programs built as one-time projects decay immediately after go-live — definitions go stale, data owners leave, and analysts quietly route around the catalog with Slack channels and tribal knowledge, compensating for what was never maintained.
- AI agents inherit exactly the stale context humans were silently compensating for — unlike analysts who feel the wrongness and ask someone, agents read the catalog and act, treating outdated definitions as ground truth with no ability to self-correct.
- The fix is not a better tool but a shift from governance-as-project to governance-as-operating-discipline: event-driven discovery, dedicated stewardship roles with freshness in their performance reviews, and operational funding instead of one-time capital budgets.
Practitioner Takes
Expert Directory
Amanda Darcangelo
Sr. Lead Data Consultant, OneSix
Vivek Dubey
Data & AI Leader
Prukalpa Sankar
Co-founder, Atlan
Tathagata Das Sarma
Data Leader
Charlotte Ledoux
Data Governance Expert
Manoj Shanmugasundaram
Data Engineering Leader
Vince Dacany
CTO
Gaurav Ramesh
Director of Engineering
Jessica Talisman
Ontology Expert
Marc Dupuis
CTO & Cofounder
Mahdi Karabiben
Sr. Product Manager (Data & AI)
Sandipan Bhaumik
Tech Leader - Data & AI
Juha Korpela
Co-founder & Data Modeling Expert
Nandini Tyagi
Customer Experience Manager, Strategic Initiatives
Amanda Darcangelo
Sr. Lead Data Consultant, OneSix
Vivek Dubey
Data & AI Leader
Prukalpa Sankar
Co-founder, Atlan
Tathagata Das Sarma
Data Leader
Charlotte Ledoux
Data Governance Expert
Manoj Shanmugasundaram
Data Engineering Leader
Vince Dacany
CTO
Gaurav Ramesh
Director of Engineering
Jessica Talisman
Ontology Expert
Marc Dupuis
CTO & Cofounder
Mahdi Karabiben
Sr. Product Manager (Data & AI)
Sandipan Bhaumik
Tech Leader - Data & AI
Juha Korpela
Co-founder & Data Modeling Expert
Nandini Tyagi
Customer Experience Manager, Strategic Initiatives
What is Context & Chaos Newsletter?
A free weekly newsletter for enterprise data & AI practitioners and leaders. The field moved to context engineering. We moved with it.
Every week, practitioners who are actually working in the trenches — not the ones writing about them from the sidelines — share what broke, what worked, and what they'd do differently. We cover context graphs, data contracts, retrieval architecture, agent memory design, AI governance, and the full stack of infrastructure that makes enterprise AI reliable at scale. Context & Chaos is a community-led newsletter program distributed via Substack and LinkedIn to 20,000+ data and AI professionals worldwide. New issues land every week. All issues are free, permanently archived, and written for the people doing the work.
Who reads Context & Chaos Newsletter?
Built for enterprise data & AI leaders and practitioners. Context & Chaos is written for:
Context engineers
Designing the retrieval and grounding layers that AI agents depend on.
Data engineers
Building pipelines that need to be AI-ready, not just analytics-ready.
AI engineers
Deploying agents in production and hitting the limits of what foundation models provide out of the box.
Data governance professionals
Navigating AI compliance without blocking teams.
CIOs, Chief Data and Chief AI Officers
Making architectural bets on context infrastructure.
What each Context & Chaos issue covers?
Three types of issues. One commitment: no filler.
Practitioner Deep Dives
An external contributor who shipped something real writes about the actual architecture, the failure modes they encountered, and the tradeoffs they navigated. Contributors include engineers from fintech, healthcare, media, and enterprise data teams.
Editor's Take
Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of Atlan, writes on what's shifting in the field — Gartner signals, community debates, vendor noise vs. actual direction.
Signal Pieces
Sharp recaps of events, research, and moments that moved the context engineering conversation. Short, sourced, opinionated.
No sponsored content. No vendor roundups. No AI-generated summaries dressed as insight.
Written by the community, for the community
Context & Chaos issues are written by practitioners and leaders across the field — data engineers, AI architects, governance leads, technical founders, and leaders sharing work from real-world production environments. We work with contributors to preserve their voice and protect specifics they cannot share publicly.
Frequently asked questions
FAQs on Context & Chaos
Context & Chaos is a free weekly newsletter on context engineering and enterprise data & AI infrastructure, with no paywall or registration required. All issues are published openly on Substack, LinkedIn, and the permanent atlan.com/context-and-chaos/ archive. Subscribers receive new issues every week by email.
Context & Chaos is an opinionated, practitioner-written newsletter focused specifically on context engineering and the infrastructure layer between enterprise data and AI. Unlike aggregator newsletters that compile link roundups or job listings algorithmically, every Context & Chaos issue is authored or editorially reviewed by data and AI practitioners, not vendor marketing teams.
Context & Chaos publishes weekly. Each issue is delivered to subscribers by email through Substack and LinkedIn, and is simultaneously archived on atlan.com/context-and-chaos/. Past issues remain permanently accessible across all three surfaces with no publishing gaps between editions.
The complete Context & Chaos newsletter archive is freely accessible on atlan.com/context-and-chaos/ and Substack without a subscription, paywall, or registration. Every past issue — including newsletters originally published under the Metadata Weekly brand before the rebrand to Context & Chaos in 2026 — remains available to read, share, and reference openly.
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