Uber’s context graph grounds Cortana in engineering relationships

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 38:46

   We still have teams that have like their own repositories, but majority of the skills go through this. My favorite is like context graph. What is context graph? The backstory is back in December, like one of the engineers built an AI assistant that you can go to like we call it Cortana, like you can go to web or you can go to Slack and ask any question from any code base. So it would do it and it would like search across all of our repositories and answer questions.

2. 39:15

   And then we saw people asking all kinds of questions. Like it could be research, it could be like what is how to run this query, like what is the data source for this, who owns this, like can you do RCA for this, whole bunch of software engineering tasks. And when we were looking at some of these traces, like it was clearly obvious that, you know, we could optimize the number of turns it takes for the models to get grounding because we have so many systems like historically all of these are like siloed systems right like engineer has to go into like the the task management platform engineer has to go to our like on-call dashboard has to go to like our own dashboard that we talked about then we're like okay how do we plug all of that into one mental map for the agents in just in the last few months and like there's a cool visualization wow it's built like they call it

3. 40:04

   over context graph like we have uh 100 plus node types like 130 plus edge types and this is live data as of like say like like three days ago if you click on any person node like you know you know what assets they manage what design docs they wrote what features they're working on what on-call events they like worked on what are the configuration changes what incidents they managed what jira events and if you take any node it has relationship to all other nodes and what this allows us is now the same assistant i talked about it has the context graph as a default grounding so if you ask any question it will first use this to like navigate okay like what is this person asking about once you get grounded into oh like this is about this domain this set of services then it can go deep and like read other documents read other things so it reduces your execute your

4. 40:55

   your agent traces and the amount of turns it needs to give you a good answer and we already see like in a whole bunch of categories of questions. The quality goes up, the cost goes down, the latency goes down. And we are still early in harnessing the full potential of this. And we are super excited about all of the things that we can build on top of this going forward. And then the nodes, are they people?

5. 41:21

   Are they tools? This is the schema visualization. So every person in the company will have like, there's a node for me, a node for every employee. and then it will have relationships to all of the instances. Like every PR that I generate, there will be a node for that. And there's a link saying, okay, Uday created this PR. Uday manages this asset. I work on this product feature. I contributed to this design doc.

6. 41:49

   So then the nodes are both people, but they're also assets. Yeah, exactly. Like one simple example is, let's say if you ask any question like, how many mobility trips around the world are with cash payment type. Like you first need to understand what tables exist, what columns exist. Are there other people who wrote these queries? Are they from science team? Are they from mobility science? Like now all of this data is interconnected.

7. 42:19

   Like you can go and check, oh, are there other queries that were done in the last 30 days around this? And what kind of tables exist? Go and explore those columns. because again, all of this is interlinked. Then you can quickly get to like the blessed queries that we have and answer these kind of even complex questions pretty quickly. Otherwise you would have to like go through many, many dogs, many, many like tool calls.

8. 42:45

   This makes it really efficient. Like it's much harder for us to manually write all of these cipher queries, but agents are really good at navigating the graph, like how they're really good at navigating file system with bash. seems very futuristic to me but it's pretty cool and i assume it's a ton of data to store just because uber has like 10 000 plus people working there easily so yeah the good part is uh you know similar to how our uh our api edge gateway team worked on mcp gateway effort our graph platform team that manages graph for our production graph with billions of nodes they also helped build uh this graph so this is in compared to our production graph this is much smaller so this is so it's not like a scale challenge for them anymore yeah and we also talked I already talked about like the the AI assistant Cortana which which kind of plugs some of all of the context

9. 43:37

   craft tools skills and it's omnipresent in Slack web CLI so anyone in the company like even someone in ops in some country they can ask any question about oh how is this built where is this located who works on this what was the history behind this and like it is able to take all of this data all of our google documents and then and then give them like a really good answer and it breaks down kind of the information silos across orgs right like they're able to like self-serve ask anything execute any skill anyone has built and i guess it must have like access to the data sources so for at least for the right right people so it can go into like things like logs and and yeah monitoring those kind of things yeah it has logs monitoring you can ask okay how what is the health of this service it can go look at all of its dependencies what kind of storage systems it uses

10. 44:26

    run all the queries and give you like a 360 degree health report for that asset and we carry forward all of the existing user permissions so like so then if i'll only able to act i'm only able to access the stuff that i had access to otherwise we will that data is not accessible yeah yeah Because inside Uber, I remember it used to be called break glass