Just Now Possible

Thom van der Doef, Principal Product Designer at eSpark, and Ray Lyons, VP of Product & Engineering, dive into the fascinating development of the AI Teacher Assistant. They discuss the evolution from a chatbot interface to a structured workflow tailored for educators. Key insights include how retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and refined metadata are optimizing the assistant's performance, plus lessons learned in semantic versus keyword search. They also explore future enhancements using student data for personalized recommendations, aiming to bridge teacher mandates with real classroom needs.

Ellen Brandenburger, a product leader with expertise in AI and developer communities, shares insights from her journey at Stack Overflow. She discusses how joining the company just before ChatGPT launched led to significant shifts in product focus. Ellen details the formation of Overflow AI and the evolution of conversational search through various iterations, emphasizing the importance of transparency and attribution for developer trust. She also explores Stack's pivot to licensing their extensive Q&A corpus, showcasing how it enhances AI model performance and benchmarks.

How AI products come to life—straight from the builders themselves. In each episode, we dive deep into how teams spotted a customer problem, experimented with AI, prototyped solutions, and shipped real features. We dig into everything from workflows and agents to RAG and evaluation strategies, and explore how their products keep evolving. If you’re building with AI, these are the stories for you. The first full episode drops on Thursday, September 18th. Don't miss it!