Andrei Bondarev

Talk: Build an AI agent in 15 min

Author of Langchain.rb.

Build an AI agent in 15 min

The author of Langchain.rb will walk you through current capabilities of LLMs and what can be built today. We will build a business process automation AI agent in Ruby and discuss the common pitfalls and misconceptions. We’ll discuss what might be emerging as a new LLM-powered software stack.

Generative AI has been taking the world by storm. The Coatue AI (Nov 2023) report is putting AI models at the centerpiece of all modern tech stacks going forward that Application Developers will be using to build on top of. It would not be controversial to say that the Ruby ecosystem lacks in its support and understanding of the AI, ML and DS landscape. If we’d like to stay relevant in the future, we need to start building the foundations now. We’ll look at what Generative AI is, what kind of applications developers in other communities are building and how Ruby can be used to build similar applications today. We’ll cover Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), vector embeddings and semantic search, prompt engineering, and what the state of art (SOTA) in evaluating LLM output looks like today. We will also cover AI Agents, semi-autonomous general purpose LLM-backed applications, and what they’re capable of today. We’ll make a case why Ruby is a great language to build these applications because on its strengths and its incredible ecosystem. After the slides, I’ll walk the attendees through building an AI Agent in 15 min with Langchain.rb.

Bio

Andrei has been a software engineering professional for 13 years. Among many others he’s been fortunate to make his impact at Spree Commerce (Acquired by First Data), WeddingWire (IPO), FiscalNote (IPO), National Public Radio, and USA Today. He currently runs a software dev firm, and serves as an Architect and a Fractional CTO on the client projects. Consumed by the AI wave this year, Andrei pondered what the future holds for Ruby in the world of evergrowing AI/ML needs. He is the creator of Langchain.rb, an open source Ruby library for building LLM-powered applications. In his free time he enjoys playing tennis and going on long runs while listening to podcasts.