General methods that scale with computation will inevitably displace hand-engineered domain knowledge! Sutton’s Bitter Lesson hangs like a Sword of Damocles over all of us. This paper, which just dropped, applies that lesson to data agents, and says that as LLMs improve, they will quickly absorb the agent scaffolding researchers have spent the last few years painstakingly building. It argues that researchers should instead work on building curated contextual information about the data environment (aka. persistent semantic context) to help data agents be efficient across many queries.The Bitter Lesson for Data AgentsThe evaluation section aims to capture the Bitter Lesson...