Photo credit Everyone is talking about how magical AI is right now, but if you have spent any time experimenting with it recently, you have probably realized how difficult it is to get the results you want. None of the hype is particularly useful when you are trying to build something real. The magic looks good on paper until it meets real systems. I recently put together a talk called "Agents, Tools, and MCP, oh my!

Photo credit When text-to-query approaches (specifically, text2cypher) first entered the scene, I was a bit uncertain how it was useful, especially when existing models were hit-or-miss on result accuracy. It would be hard to justify the benefits over a human expert in the domain and query language. However, as technologies have evolved over the last couple of years, I’ve started to see how a text-to-query approach adds flexibility to rigid applications that could previously only answer a set of pre-defined questions with limited parameters.