Shameless plug: I have written a paper about using the MCP server architecture to enable agents to overcome the knowledge cutoff, to work with software released after the training stop.
Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#32Doesn't Skills solve all of this?
OpenClaw, Hermes and other agents have already made skill adoption mainstream?
Are you guys still seeing a future where people are dumping entire MCP tool defs into context?
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#33Hi Michel, congrats and I have nice memories of working with you in lafayette street !! Keep up the good work on airbyte ! :)
Great to see you here!
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#34Doesn't Skills solve all of this? OpenClaw, Hermes and other agents have already made skill adoption mainstream? Are you guys still seeing a future where people are dumping entire MCP tool defs into context?
Great question, @Tsarp - Skill and tools work great together. What we've found is that agents generally need both to achieve great results. We're actually not trying to replace skills, but to give them new super powers.
Are there any examples you've run into where skills were missing tools (or data) that they needed for a specific task?
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#35[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#36More and more SaaS companies like ServiceNow or Hubspot are creating new tollgates for agent api calls. How do you think will this impact Airbyte Agents? I guess that replicating data locally will be harder since the platforms will try to protect it or charge for it.
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#37The prompts you mentioned here sound like SQL. Is there any way to run actual SQL on these systems? Is "agents need to poke around endlessly" a symptom of the fact that there isn't a way to run an actual query?
(I'd guess there is actually SQL at the bottom layer, but there's no way to talk to it?)
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#38The prompts you mentioned here sound like SQL. Is there any way to run actual SQL on these systems? Is "agents need to poke around endlessly" a symptom of the fact that there isn't a way to run an actual query? (I'd guess there is actually SQL at the bottom layer, but there's no way to talk to it?)
That's actually the approach we took with https://gentility.ai/ - we either provide almost-raw SQL query access to the DBs themselves or we synthesize from API into DuckDB via parquet and make that available to the agent to just directly query. It works well - my philosophy is to give agents the sharpest tools you can, and SQL is the best tool there is.
I understand the instinct to try to make a proprietary moat around it all but I think the pattern is useful and obvious enough that all big orgs will be doing something very similar within 5 years or so.
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#39Super interesting idea! Congrats on the launch. Context is definitely something that is lacking in my experience. Im always frustrated when an agent cannot answer business-related questions, and i compare them to coding agents which seem to be able to answer everything. The difference is that coding agent has the context right there at the fingertips, while for business its gated behind a bunch of services and custom data models. Context is king :)
How do you handle encryption and confidentiality? Im building in this space too (MCP gateway https://www.gatana.ai/) which already have semantic search for tool outputs, and ensuring encryption and confidentiality is not trivial.
Re: Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
#40[flagged]