Indeed

MCP Apps: Give the Model Data, Give the User a UI — Dustin Mihalik, Indeed

Sep 9, 2026 · 15:34

Dustin Mihalik, technical fellow at Indeed, shares lessons from building MCP apps for Claude, ChatGPT, and Indeed's Career Scout job seeker agent, arguing that data must come before UI because a naive widget makes the product worse: a text-based job search prompted the model to run ten or fifteen searches, filter results, and assemble a table, while a rendering widget caused it to call the tool once and stop exploring. He lays out three rules: anything shown to the user must also reach the model as data, or every follow-up question fails; the tool description must state a UI exists, or the model narrates the same results underneath it; and, superseding the others, separate data processing from UI rendering. At Indeed that meant a plain search tool the model calls freely plus a render widget taking a list of IDs, so it can search 100 jobs, filter to five, and show only those, with interactions pushed back through update model context. He closes on small composable tools and letting the render tool carry the model's reasoning about why a result fits.

Recsys Keynote: Improving Recommendation Systems & Search in the Age of LLMs - Eugene Yan, Amazon

Jul 16, 2025 · 20:54

Eugene Yan's keynote presents three innovations for recommendation systems: Semantic IDs, LLM-augmented data, and unified models. Kuaishou’s trainable multimodal Semantic IDs increased cold-start coverage by 3.6% and velocity by 3.5% by clustering content embeddings. Indeed used GPT-4 fine-tuning and distillation to filter bad job recommendations, reducing bad recs by 20% while boosting application rate 4% and cutting unsubscribes 5%. Spotify’s LLM-generated exploratory search queries drove a 9% increase in exploratory queries for new categories like podcasts. Netflix’s Unicorn unified ranker matched or exceeded specialized models across search and recommendations, while Etsy’s unified embeddings with a quality vector achieved a 2.6% sitewide conversion lift and 5% more search purchases.