Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, September 3, 2026
Yorg Schad, VP of Engineering at Pinecone, discusses Nexus, a new knowledge engine that treats AI context as a precomputed asset. This approach aims to overcome limitations of traditional Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) by curating context once into versioned artifacts, similar to materialized views in databases.
“The standard approach to grounding a model in one's own data has been retrieval augmented generation or rag.”
“That pattern works, but it has limitations, such as retrieving information that's not truly relevant, repeating the same lookup work on every query, and producing inconsistent answers to the same question.”
“The team recently developed Nexus, which is a knowledge engine that reframes context as a first class precomputed asset rather than something reassembled on the fly.”
“It's kind of in databases, materialized views, right? I have a pre-materialized view of set information, which is pre-curated.”