pamelafox

5 ms·

1.
by pamelafox 5d ago
I am generally not a huge fan of block-based coding, but I worked with the Snap folks while I was at UC Berkeley, and they make a very compelling case for both block-based coding and their functions-first approach. While there, I helped dev
2.
Building safe MCP servers for a PostgreSQL database(blog.pamelafox.org)
1 points by pamelafox 27d ago|0 comments
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Browser automation agents with Pydantic AI and Playwright(blog.pamelafox.org)
2 points by pamelafox 27d ago|0 comments
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by pamelafox 6mo ago
I think “agent engineering” could refer to the latter, if a distinction needs to be made. I do get what you’re saying, but when I heard the term, I personally understood its meaning.
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by pamelafox 6mo ago
I’ve been using the term “agentic coding” more often, because I am always shy to claim that our field rises to the level of the engineers that build bridges and rockets. I’m happy to use “agentic engineering” however, and if Simon coins it,
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by pamelafox 7mo ago
So true! I've also setup automated evaluations using the GitHub Copilot SDK so that I can re-run the same prompt and measure results. I only use that when I want even more confidence, and typically when I want to more precisely compare
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by pamelafox 7mo ago
This is why I only add information to AGENTS.md when the agent has failed at a task. Then, once I've added the information, I revert the desired changes, re-run the task, and see if the output has improved. That way, I can have more co
8.
by pamelafox 9mo ago
I'm on the Python advocacy team at Microsoft, so I've been experimenting a bit with the new framework. It works pretty well, and is comparable to Langchainv1 and Pydantic-AI, but has tighter integrations with Microsoft-specific te
9.
by pamelafox 11mo ago
Yes, AI Search has a new agentic retrieval feature that includes synthetic query generation: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azure-ai-foundry-bl... You can customize the model used and the max # of queries to
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
I believe that Azure AI Search currently uses lucene for BM25, hnswlib for vector search, and the Bing re-ranking model for semantic ranking. (So, no, it does not, though features are similar)
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
I know :( But I think vector DBs and vector search got so hyped that people thought you could switch entirely over to them. Lots of APIs and frameworks also used "vector store" as the shorthand for "retrieval data source&quot
12.
by pamelafox 11mo ago
Do you mean that you're using the Copilot indexer for Sharepoint docs? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/semantic-i... AI Search team's been working with the Sharepoint team to offer more
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
At Microsoft, that's all baked into Azure AI Search - hybrid search does BM25, vector search, and re-ranking, just with setting booleans to true. It also has a new Agentic retrieval feature that does the query rewriting and parallel se
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
I'd like to know as well, so that I can set up a caterpillar cam.
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
Love this! Relatedly, does anyone have a suggestion for an outdoor solar-powered web camera that I could point at the critters in my garden? I'd love to stream a MonarchCam or MantisCam some day.
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
Ooo bobcats! I live in the bay area near Tilden Park, and I spent a while on iNaturalist trying to figure out where the bobcats hang out, as my 6 year old is very interested in wild cats. I realized sadly that bobcats are usually out at mor
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by pamelafox 11mo ago
I like this point, for people hiring DevRel: "Look in your community. Find users of your product or users of your competitor’s product. " I'm a current DevRel-er myself, and someone recently reached out looking to fill a DevR
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Why and how to filter the tools from MCP servers(blog.pamelafox.org)
2 points by pamelafox 1y ago|0 comments
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by pamelafox 1y ago
It was fun! Now we still see Wave-iness in other products: Google Docs uses the Operational Transforms (OT) algorithm for collab editing (or at least it did, last I knew), and non-Google products like Notion, Quip, Slack, Loop from Microsof
20.
by pamelafox 1y ago
Hm, I didn't work on the frontend but I don't particularly remember griping..GWT had been around for ~5 years at that point, so it wasn't super new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit I alw
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by pamelafox 1y ago
I was on the Wave team! Our servers didn't have enough capacity, we launched too soon. I was managing the developer-facing server for API testing, and I had to slowly let developers in to avoid overwhelming it.
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by pamelafox 1y ago
How do you determine if the tools access private data? Is it based solely on their tool description (which can be faked) or by trying them in a sandboxed environment or by analyzing the code?
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by pamelafox 1y ago
I am giving it a go for parenting advice- “My 5 year old is suddenly very germ concious. Doesnt want to touch things, always washing hands. Do deep research, is this normal?” https://chatgpt.com/share/68be1dbd-187c-8012
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by pamelafox 1y ago
Both humans and coding agents have their strengths and weaknesses, but I've been appreciating help from coding agents, especially with languages or frameworks where I have less expertise, and the agent has more "knowledge", e
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by pamelafox 1y ago
When you describe subagents, are those single-tool agents, or are they multi-tool agents with their own ability to reflect and iterate? (i.e. how many actual LLM calls does a subagent make?)
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GPT-5: Will it RAG?(blog.pamelafox.org)
1 points by pamelafox 1y ago|1 comments
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by pamelafox 1y ago
I ran bulk evaluations on a RAG scenario and wrote-up the results - discovered interesting differences (gpt-5 loves lists, smart quotes, and admitting it doesn't know).
28.
by pamelafox 1y ago
I just ran evaluations of gpt-5 for our RAG scenario and was pleasantly surprised at how often it admitted “ I don’t know” - more than any model I’ve eval’d before. Our prompt does tell it to say it doesnt know if context is missing, so tha
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by pamelafox 1y ago
We use text-embedding-3-large, with both quantization and MRL reduction, plus oversampling on the search to compensate for the compression.
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by pamelafox 1y ago
I am testing out gpt-5-mini for a RAG scenario, and I'm impressed so far. I used gpt-5-mini with reasoning_effort="minimal", and that model finally resisted a hallucination that every other model generated. Screenshot in post

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