MLOps.community

Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo is the AI PM at Despegar, the largest online travel agency in Latin America, and the engineer-product-hybrid behind Sofia, the GenAI travel concierge that beat most of the OTA world to a working multi-agent system.

Before MCP was a standard and before LangChain was widely adopted, his team had already shipped their own orchestration layer and tool protocol in production. This conversation is a rare look at what it takes to build an agentic system that actually books trips, runs on WhatsApp, and keeps adding capabilities without falling over.

What we cover:
- Chappi, the brain of Sofia: how Despegar built an internal orchestration layer when there was nothing off the shelf- Building "MCP before MCP": the custom tool-calling protocol that predated the Anthropic standard- Multi-agent architecture by vertical: flights, hotels, activities, and cars each own their own flow
- Decentralized agent ownership: how any squad in the company can build a flow with central supervision
- Sofia on WhatsApp: making messaging the consumer control center, the way Slack became it for the enterprise
- The five-phase travel arc Sofia covers: dreaming, planning, anticipation, in-trip, and post-trip
- KPI evolution: why "in-scope conversation rate" topped out near 96 percent and what they measure now
- The flight-delay-claim use case and why filing claims through a chatbot is a perfect agent task
- Group trip planning in WhatsApp groups: the next frontier for travel agents
- Sofia as channel of choice: the WeChat-style vision for an agent that handles your entire trip
- Why Despegar held off on giving Sofia the ability to bargain with customers, for now.

Whether you are building production agents, running an OTA, or just curious about how an AI travel concierge actually works under the hood, this episode is full of grounded, in-production lessons from a team that had to invent the patterns the rest of us are now adopting.

Links and Resources:
- Despegar: https://www.despegar.com
- Sofia announcement: https://investor.despegar.com/news-presentations/news-releases/news-details/2024/Despegar-revolutionizes-the-tourism-industry-introducing-the-regions-first-Generative-AI-Travel-Assistant
- Sofia coverage on PhocusWire: https://www.phocuswire.com/despegar-debuts-genai-travel-assistant-remembers-previous-interactions
- MLOps Community: https://mlops.community
- Subscribe for more agent and AI infra deep dives

Timestamps
00:00 - Intro: Nicolas, Sofia, and Despegar in LatAm
01:30 - Chappi as the brain of Sofia and the squad model
04:00 - Anyone in the company can build a flow
07:00 - Why airline check-in still exists and what agents could replace
09:30 - The flight-delay refund story and the chatbot gap
13:00 - File-the-claim-for-me as a perfect agent use case
16:00 - The dreaming phase: helping users who do not know where to go yet
19:00 - In-scope conversation KPI hitting 96 percent and what comes next
22:00 - Beating the traditional flight search UI with conversation
25:00 - WhatsApp group trip planning and the ski trip example
28:00 - Personalization at scale and the new gateway to the internet
31:00 - WhatsApp as the consumer control center, like WeChat in China
34:00 - Sofia as gateway: complaints, customer service, and verticalized agents
37:00 - Building MCP before MCP and the custom orchestration layer
40:00 - Why Sofia does not negotiate prices, yet

#AIAgents #MCP #AgenticAI

This episode is brought to you by the MLflow team. Check out more information at MLflow.org.

What does it actually take to build voice AI at a billion-interaction scale? This episode features an ex-Amazon voice AI engineer who built customer support systems handling 2 billion+ interactions — now working on next-gen voice agent platforms. Anurag digs deep into the real engineering tradeoffs, design patterns, and use cases that separate production-grade voice agents from demos.

Voice Agent Use Cases // MLOps Podcast #372 with Anurag Beniwal, Member of the Technical Staff at ElevenLabs

🎙️ Topics covered:
🔹 Cascaded vs. speech-to-speech — Why cascaded systems still win in production, and how to make them feel natural without sacrificing control
🔹 Latency masking — Foreground/background model architecture and how to buy yourself time while deep retrieval runs
🔹 Constellation of models — Using Haiku for tool calling, fine-tuned smaller models for response generation, and why "one model for everything" breaks at scale
🔹 Turn-taking & ASR challenges — Why voice is harder than chat: accents, noise, silence detection, and domain-specific fine-tuning
🔹 Level 1 vs Level 2 customer support — Why today's agents max out at Level 1 and what it takes to capture Level 2 expert judgment
🔹 Inbound vs. outbound sales agents — Where voice agents are already winning, and why inbound lead qualification beats cold outbound
🔹 Booking, reservations & concierge — The clearest near-term wins for voice agents across hospitality, home services, and SMBs
🔹 Continual learning from natural language feedback — How to build agents that improve from real operator feedback without ML expertise
🔹 Conversational TTS — Why passing full conversation history to your TTS model changes everything for tone consistency
🔹 User tiers for voice platforms — Non-technical business owners vs. developers vs. enterprise: why one interface doesn't fit all.

If you're building production voice agents, evaluating voice AI vendors, or scaling AI-first customer support — this episode is packed with hard-won lessons from someone who's done it at Amazon scale.

🔗 Links & Resources:
MLOps.community: https://mlops.communityGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=g_QB5WgAAAAJ&hl=en&o
Amazon science page: https://www.amazon.science/author/anurag-beniwal
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
MLOps GPU Guide: https://go.mlops.community/gpuguide

⏱️ Timestamps
[00:00] Cascaded Systems Control Challenge
[05:35] Voice vs Chat Complexity
[14:16] MLflow's open source platform
[15:03] AI Model Constellations
[23:00] Model Constellations Use Cases
[31:40] Voice vs Text Context
[33:54] Voice as Thought Capture
[42:11] Cascaded vs Speech-to-Speech Debate
[50:02] Wrap up

Jesse Vincent is the Founder & CEO of Prime Radiant and creator of Superpowers — the most-used Claude Code plugin in the world. He built the first agentic software development methodology from scratch while managing MIT interns in the early 2000s, and hasn't written a line of code manually since October.

The Creator of Superpowers: Why Real Agentic Engineering Beats Vibe Coding // MLOps Podcast #373 with Jesse Vincent, Founder & CEO of Prime Radiant

In this conversation, Jesse walks Demetrios through the full Superpowers system: why he thinks most developers are still approaching agentic coding wrong, how he designs skills that force LLMs to stop rationalizing and actually follow rules, and what he's building next at Prime Radiant — including Green Field, an unreleased tool for reverse-engineering legacy codebases into specs. This one is for developers who want to go beyond "vibe coding" and build AI-assisted workflows that actually scale.

🔧 Topics Covered
🧠 The Superpowers Methodology — How the brainstorming skill extracts what you actually want before you hand work to an agent, and why most developers skip this step
📋 Spec-Driven Development & Plan Files — Why Jesse insists on TDD, DRY, and YAGNI for every agentic task, and how planning skills generate per-task context blocks agents can actually execute on
🐛 Debugging with Agents — Jesse's systematic approach to root cause analysis, reproduction cases, and the 30 years of debugging instinct he's baked into a skill
🔄 Pressure Testing LLM Skills — How Claude fires up sub-agents and stress-tests its own rules to catch rationalization before it shows up in production
🛠️ Clearance IDE — Jesse's new Markdown-native development environment built for humans working alongside AI, with a history pane for file navigation
📦 Green Field (Unreleased) — A toolset for turning old codebases or built products into clean specs — not yet public but dropping soon from Prime Radiant
🧑‍💼 Management as the Magic Trick — Why the real unlock of tools like Superpowers is that they make every developer a manager, and why that transition is hard the first time
⚖️ Software Ethics in the Agent Era — Reverse engineering, license washing, open source cloning, and whether the value of software itself is collapsing

🔗 Links & Resources
Prime Radiant: [https://prime-radiant.com](https://prime-radiant.com/)
Superpowers on GitHub: https://github.com/prime-radiant-inc
Clearance IDE: https://github.com/prime-radiant-inc (check repo)
MLOps.community Slack: https://go.mlops.community/slack
MLOps.community website: [https://mlops.community](https://mlops.community/)

⏱️ Timestamps
[00:00] Greenfield Toolset Insights
[00:27] Superpowers Kit Evangelism
[08:06] Hyperbolic's GPU Cloud
[17:48] Debugging Skill Creation
[22:12] Skill Extraction Strategy
[31:15] Smallest Harness
[41:06] Software supply chains
[48:56] Visual Precision Challenges
[54:09] Creative Feedback Loops
[1:04:24] MLflow's Gen AI
[1:05:55] Wrap-up

Maggie Konstanty is an AI Product Manager at Prosus, one of the world's largest consumer internet companies, where she builds and evaluates AI agents for food ordering and ecommerce at scale. She's been inside the messy reality of LLM evaluation longer than most — and her take is unfiltered.

It's 2026, and We're Still Talking Evals // MLOps Podcast #372 with Maggie Konstanty, AI Product Manager at Prosus

🧪 Why accuracy metrics lie — Maggie breaks down why "95% accurate" tells you almost nothing about whether your agent is actually working in the real world, and what to measure instead.
🏗️ Pre-ship vs. production evals — Your eval suite before launch will not survive first contact with real users. Maggie explains the structural disconnect and how to close the gap.
👻 The silent failure: user drop-off — Users who are unhappy don't complain — they just leave. Discover why drop-off analytics are one of the most underutilized eval signals in production.
🎯 Instruction to fail: the 20-evaluator trap — Setting up 20 types of evaluators not connected to your product goal is a fast path to wasted time. How to design evals that are tied to real outcomes.
🍽️ The "surprise me" edge case — A real example from Prosus's food ordering agent and what it reveals about how users actually behave vs. how PMs imagine they do.
🤖 LLM-as-a-judge: the limits — Why Maggie doesn't lean on LLM-as-a-judge for accuracy measurement, and what approaches she uses instead for production-grade evaluation.
🛠️ Arize/Phoenix & eval tooling critique — A candid take on the current state of eval platforms, why she spent a whole day fighting the UI, and why mature teams often go back to custom code.
🧬 Eval as team DNA — Evals aren't a launch checklist. Maggie makes the case that they need to be a constant practice embedded in team culture — and why alignment on "what good looks like" is harder than any technical implementation.
🔢 When to stop optimizing — What happens when your eval score approaches 100%, and how to know when it's time to shift focus to a different metric or flow.
💬 Red teaming with incentives — A fun tactic: running adversarial eval sessions where engineers compete to break your agent for an Amazon gift card.

This is required watching for AI PMs, ML engineers, and applied AI teams who have moved past "getting evals set up" and are now struggling with making them actually matter.---

🔗 Links & Resources
Maggie Konstanty on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-konstanty
Prosus: [https://www.prosus.com](https://www.prosus.com/)
MLOps.community: [https://mlops.community](https://mlops.community/)
Arize AI / Phoenix (mentioned): [https://arize.com](https://arize.com/) / [https://phoenix.arize.com](https://phoenix.arize.com/)
MLOps.community Slack: https://go.mlops.community/slack

⏱️ Timestamps
[00:00] Evaluations and User Alignment
[00:18] Eval Lifecycle in Production
[06:05] LLM Accuracy and Judging
[15:30] Evals vs Tests in AI
[22:39] Profanity as Frustration Signal
[29:23] Impact-weighted performance
[32:22] Eval Tooling Pros and Cons
[38:10] Build vs Buy Dilemma
[39:35] Wrap up

This episode is brought to you by Hyperbolic and the MLflow team. Check out more information at hyperbolic.ai and MLflow.org.

Why AI Coding Agents Are Moving to the Cloud — With Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp

Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the AI-native terminal and agentic development platform trusted by over a million developers. Before Warp, Zach was a product lead at Google on Google Docs — giving him a uniquely deep intuition for what it means to build truly collaborative developer tools at scale.

Why Agents are Driving Software Development to the Cloud // MLOps Podcast #371 with Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp

What we cover:
🏗️ Why agents belong in the cloud, not local sandboxes — Zach breaks down why the "set up a local dev box for your agent" approach is fundamentally flawed and what cloud-native agent execution actually looks like in practice.
🚀 GitHub is losing collaborative code review — One of the episode's sharpest takes: the hero features of GitHub, like collaborative code review, are migrating into agent workbenches. Zach explains why this shift is structural, not cyclical.
📱 "Just-in-time apps" are replacing SaaS — The era of long-lived, learn-to-use-it software may be ending. Zach argues that agents will generate ephemeral, purpose-built interfaces on demand — and why most current app categories are at risk.
🤖 Introducing Oz — Warp's cloud orchestration platform — A first look at how Oz works, how Demetrios is already using it to automate podcast production, and what multi-agent orchestration looks like in a real team environment.
👁️ Agent observability and why it matters — Debugging, compliance, context management, and handoff/steering: Zach outlines the three pillars every engineering team needs before trusting agents with production work.
🔐 Agent chaos is real — access control for AI — Why giving agents too much context is just as dangerous as giving them too little, and how Warp thinks about scoped agent permissions as you scale.
📦 SaaS for agents will look nothing like SaaS for humans — The 25-year investment in human-friendly UI is irrelevant for agents. Zach explains what the new infrastructure layer for AI workers will actually need.
⚡ Open-weight models will commoditize the coding agent space — With Nvidia investing $2B in open-weight models, Zach believes the current cost advantage that frontier labs hold is temporary — and how Warp is positioning for that world.
🧩 Multi-agent orchestration patterns — Parallel agents, agent-to-agent handoffs, and why there's no single "right" pattern yet. Warp's Oz platform is being built for flexibility, not prescription.

This episode is essential for engineering leaders, platform engineers, and any developer trying to understand where their daily workflow is headed in the next 18 months.

🔗 Links & Resources:
Warp: https://www.warp.dev
Warp Oz platform: https://oz.dev
Zach Lloyd on X/Twitter: https://x.com/zachlloyd
MLOps Community: https://mlops.community
MLOps Community Slack: https://go.mlops.community/slack

⏱️ Timestamps
[00:00] Agentic Coding Review Shift
[00:29] Warp Collaboration vs Sandboxes
[05:22] Continuous Co-Creation in Teams
[07:00] Hyperbolics GPU Cloud
[07:56] Skill Governance Framework
[14:41] Agents vs Browsers Analogy
[21:31] PR Provenance in Warp
[27:58] Agent System Commandments
[37:44] Harness vs ADE
[42:03] Adversarial Review Technique
[45:26] GitHub Limitations for Agents
[49:07] MLflow's GenAI
[50:06] Wrap up