Context Camp
Context Camp brings together experts in retrieval and AI engineering. Hear how industry practitioners build harnesses that retrieve relevant information, manage evolving knowledge, and treat context as a first-class part of agent design. Harness and retrieval engineering working hand-in-hand!
By continuing, you agree to Maven's Terms and Privacy Policy.
Wed Aug 5·1:00 PM UTC
Your Agents Are Only As Good As Your Retrieval
Agents can only reason over what they retrieve. As systems gain more autonomy—and MCP gives them access to more tools and sources—a weak relevance layer can turn one bad result into a confident, consequential action. Before investing in orchestration, teams need to know whether their agents are finding the right evidence in the first place.
You'll learn from
Atita Arora
Search & AI Strategist — formerly Voyager Search, Qdrant, OSC, Lucidworks
Doug Turnbull (Maven)
Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia
Hugo Bowne Anderson
AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students
Thu Aug 13·5:00 PM UTC
Knowledge Management for Personal Agents
Effective agents need the right knowledge in the right context at the right time. The ideas, techniques, and skills in this lesson underpin building agents and building agentic search systems. Eleanor Berger will explore them through a personal agent built with Hermes and an Obsidian vault, showing how it accumulates facts, creates documents, maintains its knowledge base, and publishes content.
You'll learn from
Doug Turnbull (Maven)
Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia
Eleanor Berger
AI Leader, ex-Microsoft, ex-Google
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students
Thu Aug 20·4:00 PM UTC
Building Effective Agent Harnesses
AI FOMO makes every new harness feature feel mandatory. You ain’t gonna need most of it. Hugo will show how simple agent harnesses solve real user problems, why copying Claude Code is usually the wrong move, and how to choose the smallest set of capabilities your users need. Successful AI isn’t about keeping up. It’s about solving real problems.
You'll learn from
Doug Turnbull (Maven)
Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students
Fri Aug 28·10:00 PM UTC
RAG isn't dead. It's sleeping.
If you follow online AI chatter, you've heard that "RAG is dead". We're all just giving our agents grep now. Mature retrieval doesn't move the dial. In this talk, we'll walkthrough the building blocks and contextualize where RAG sits in a suite of solutions ranging from classic question answering to agentic search. When it's a better choice for managing context.
You'll learn from
Doug Turnbull (Maven)
Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students