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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hugobowne.substack.com

The Rise of Agentic Search

Vanishing Gradients

The Rise of Agentic Search