Your Coding Agent Is 6 Months Out of Date — Jakub Hojsan, Exa

Every model ships about six months behind its knowledge cutoff. Your code review agent is reviewing changes it has never seen. Jakub Hojsan, forward deployed engineer at Exa, explains how Exa built search for coding and code-review agents. He walks through a real PR that falls in a model's blind spot, shows why just adding a web search tool doesn't fix it, and explains how to give your agent rules for when to search. He also covers query-dependent highlights that cut a 100,000-character page down to about 500 characters with no added latency, and previews Exa Agent. In this talk: • The knowledge-cutoff gap and why it breaks code review • Why agents need explicit rules for when to search, not just a search tool • Token-efficient highlights: giving the model only what it needs • Transparency, cost and model-provider independence versus built-in web search SPEAKER Jakub Hojsan, Forward Deployed Engineer, Exa LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubhojsan/ X: https://x.com/JakubHojsan Website: https://www.jakubhojsan.com/ LINKS Exa: https://exa.ai Exa MCP docs: https://docs.exa.ai/reference/exa-mcp Exa MCP server (GitHub): https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-mcp-server CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:12 Search built for agents, not 10 blue links 0:47 The knowledge-cutoff gap 1:12 A PR in the model's blind spot 1:47 How a human would review it 2:12 Why the LLM gets it wrong 2:47 500 characters instead of 100,000 3:17 Adding a search tool isn't enough 3:56 Give your agent rules for when to search 4:31 What Exa gives you 6:06 Demo: query-dependent highlights 7:36 Beyond coding: Exa Agent 8:40 Demo: finding conference speakers 9:25 Getting started with Exa MCP 10:20 Q&A: ranking billions of documents 11:25 Q&A: structured output schemas Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #CodingAgents #AISearch #AIEngineer