Lester Solbakken

Lester Solbakken is a Founding Engineer at HORNET.dev, where he builds production-grade retrieval infrastructure for AI agents. Previously pursued a PhD within Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with research centered on neural networks, exploratory data analysis and self-organizing systems. He speaks about building reliable, high-performance AI systems that bridge research and real-world deployment.

Sessions

Data Science

Stories

When better retrieval makes agents worse

Talk

Agentic systems can break not because information is missing, but because persuasively wrong context gets promoted into action. We examine a recurring pattern: retrieval metrics improve while agent behavior degrades as distractors enter multi-step loops. We show why relevance, reliability, and security are tightly connected in agentic retrieval.