Episode 65: The Rise of Agentic Search

We’re really moving from a world where humans are authoring search queries and humans are executing those queries and humans are digesting the results to a world where AI is doing that for us.Jeff Huber, CEO and co-founder of Chroma, joins Hugo to talk about how agentic search and retrieval are changing the very nature of search and software for builders and users alike.We Discuss:* “Context engineering”, the strategic design and engineering of what context gets fed to the LLM (data, tools, memory, and more), which is now essential for building reliable, agentic AI systems;* Why simply stuffing large context windows is no longer feasible due to “context rot” as AI applications become more goal-oriented and capable of multi-step tasks* A framework for precisely curating and providing only the most relevant, high-precision information to ensure accurate and dependable AI systems;* The “agent harness”, the collection of tools and capabilities an agent can access, and how to construct these advanced systems;* Emerging best practices for builders, including hybrid search as a robust default, creating “golden datasets” for evaluation, and leveraging sub-agents to break down complex tasks* The major unsolved challenge of agent evaluation, emphasizing a shift towards iterative, data-centric approaches.You can also find the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.You can also interact directly with the transcript here in NotebookLM: If you do so, let us know anything you find in the comments!👉 Want to learn more about Building AI-Powered Software? Check out our Building AI Applications course. It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Our final cohort is in Q1, 2206. Here is a 35% discount code for readers. 👈Oh! One more thing: we’ve just announced a Vanishing Gradients livestream for January 21 that you may dig:* A Builder’s Guide to Agentic Search & Retrieval with Doug Turnbull and John Berryman (register to join live or get the recording afterwards.Show notes* Jeff Huber on Twitter* Jeff Huber on LinkedIn* Try Chroma!* Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance by The Chroma Team* AI Agent Harness, 3 Principles for Context Engineering, and the Bitter Lesson Revisited* From Context Engineering to AI Agent Harnesses: The New Software Discipline* Generative Benchmarking by The Chroma Team* Effective context engineering for AI agents by The Anthropic Team* Making Sense of Millions of Conversations for AI Agents by Ivan Leo (Manus) and Hugo* How we built our multi-agent research system by The Anthropic Team* Upcoming Events on Luma* Watch the podcast video on YouTube👉 Want to learn more about Building AI-Powered Software? Check out our Building AI Applications course. It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Our final cohort is in Q1, 2206. Here is a 35% discount code for readers. 👈https://maven.com/hugo-stefan/building-ai-apps-ds-and-swe-from-first-principles?promoCode=vgch Get full access to Vanishing Gradients at hugobowne.substack.com/subscribe