Viewing profile — pamelafox

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 meanin…

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 …

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 confiden…

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 i…

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 h…

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 m…

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 …

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 …

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 Sharep…

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 retrieva…

I'd like to know as well, so that I can set up a caterpillar cam.

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 Mant…

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 wil…

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 someon…

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-…

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/G…

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 developer…

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 analyzin…

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…

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 exp…

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 subag…

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).

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…