Dev Propulsion Labs Jeff Huber of Chroma on how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools
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Oct 22, 2025 Jeff Huber, Co-founder and CEO of Chroma, shares insights from his decade in applied machine learning. He discusses how small, opinionated teams with low egos create the best developer tools, emphasizing that consensus stifles innovation. Jeff critiques the RAG approach, introduces the concept of context engineering, and outlines Chroma’s strategy of keeping their core open source while monetizing complementary services. He also highlights the importance of design, company culture, and the mission to democratize AI-powered services.
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Embeddings Went From Hunch To Obvious
- Embeddings and latent spaces became clearly valuable after initial skepticism from VCs.
- Jeff saw early intuition validated as the industry adopted embeddings widely.
Context Engineering Reframes The Problem
- 'RAG' was vague and unhelpful, so the narrative shifted to 'context engineering'.
- Context engineering frames the real job: curate the context window so models succeed reliably.
Context Window Is The New Programming Canvas
- Treat LLMs as a new computing paradigm that runs unstructured 'programs' via context windows.
- Good context inputs enable correct behavior; bad inputs distract models and cause errors.