---
title: "Beyond RAG: See a relational context engine reduce token burn"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-07-01"
time: "11:10am-11:30am"
track: "Expo Stage 1 NE"
room: "Expo Stage 1 NE"
speakers: ["Brandon Waselnuk"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: ""
scheduleRoom: "Expo Stage 1 NE"
scheduleLabels: ["Expo Stage 1 NE", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# Beyond RAG: See a relational context engine reduce token burn

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 1 NE
- Speaker(s): Brandon Waselnuk
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: track TBD
- Room: Expo Stage 1 NE
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
In this expo talk we'll give you a free context engine simulator, open source tools, and demo how a context engine works. See how modern engineering workflows with agentic loops and goals produce better quality code and reduce token burn. RAG, while useful, leaves context gaps for humans and agents. A context engine fills those gaps by including real-time, relational, personalized, and permission aware techniques to get high-signal context to humans and agents at runtime.

## Media Evidence
[Stop babysitting your agents... — Brandon Waselnuk, Unblocked](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiG2ssibKGc) (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

- Source video: `youtube-BiG2ssibKGc`
- Slide deck: [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-dense-slides|Dense Slides: Stop babysitting your agents... — Brandon Waselnuk, Unblocked]] — 1 visible slide image(s); 1 HTML recreation(s).
![[assets/dense-slides/BiG2ssibKGc/slide-001.jpg]]
- Additional slide evidence: [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-slides|Slides: Stop babysitting your agents... — Brandon Waselnuk, Unblocked]], [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-reconstructed-slides|Reconstructed Slides: Stop babysitting your agents... — Brandon Waselnuk, Unblocked]]
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-BiG2ssibKGc`: stop, babysitting, context, engine, code, europe.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
- `youtube-BiG2ssibKGc` — 2 slide-derived text signals
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-BiG2ssibKGc`: stop, babysitting, context, engine, code, europe.
- Evidence links for `youtube-BiG2ssibKGc`: [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc]], [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-slides]], [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-dense-slides]], [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-reconstructed-slides]]

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

## People
- [[brandon-waselnuk]]

## Supporting Slides
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-slides]] — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.

## Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-dense-slides]] (1 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-dense-slides]]
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-reconstructed-slides]]
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-slides]]
- Slide-derived terms: `braintrust`, `workos`, `openal`, `stop`, `babysitting`, `context`, `engine`, `mergeable`, `code`, `brandon`, `waselnuk`, `engineering`, `future`, `nols`, `lees`, `creare`, `gtan`, `hmds`

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# Beyond RAG: See a relational context engine reduce token burn ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 1 NE - Speaker(s): Brandon Waselnuk - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: track TBD - Room: Expo Stage 1 NE - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description In this expo talk we'll give you a free context engine simulator, open source tools, and demo how a context engine works. See how modern engineering workflows with agentic loops and goals produce better quality code and reduce token burn. RAG, while useful, leaves context gaps for humans and agents. A context engine fills those gaps by including real-time, relational, personalized, and permission aware techniques to get high-signal context to humans and agents at runtime.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[brandon-waselnuk|Brandon Waselnuk]] — Developer Relations at [[unblocked|Unblocked]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agent-security]]
- [[coding-agents]]

### Derived Links And Source Material
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc]] — related YouTube source page.
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-reconstructed-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-BiG2ssibKGc-dense-slides]] — slide evidence.

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.