A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of September 2025. The driver for all this is understanding more about Apache Flink’s Flink Agents project, and Confluent’s Streaming Agents.

Having poked around MCP and Models, next up is RAG.

RAG has been one of the buzzwords of the last couple of years, with any vendor worth its salt finding a way to crowbar it into their product. I’d been sufficiently put off it by the hype to steer away from actually understanding what it is. In this blog post, let’s fix that—because if I’ve understood it correctly, it’s a pattern that’s not scary at all.