Reading room.
Engineering blogs & AI research
A reading room from engineering teams and AI labs: titles, short feed excerpts, and links to the originals. For my own essays, explore the writing archive.
- 1359 articles tracked
- 37 sources
- Refresh scheduled daily
Sources
Scaling Grab's Data Lake: Our journey to Apache Iceberg adoption
Introduction: The evolution of Grab’s Data Lake At Grab’s scale, managing petabytes of data across billions of S3 objects demands more than a storage layer. It demands a robust architectural primitive that supports the h…
From Day 1 to Production: Building Lyft’s Analytics & Rides Intelligence Assistant as Onboarding…
From Day 1 to Production: Building Lyft’s Analytics Rides Intelligence Assistant as Onboarding Project Written by Sagar Baronia at Lyft. A Different Kind of Day One Most onboarding journeys follow a familiar arc: orienta…
Version control for prompts & skills in Studio
Aurora 1.5: Extending open foundation models for weather and Earth-system applications
Aurora 1.5 adds 22 more variables, hourly temporal resolution, and probabilistic ensemble forecasting to the Aurora foundation model, making it more useful for real-world weather, climate, and energy applications. The po…
How Informatica Reduced Data Integration Pipeline Development from Days to Minutes
In our Engineering Energizers Q A series, we highlight the engineering minds driving innovation across Salesforce. Today, we spotlight Nancy Chen, Vice President of Engineering at Informatica. Nancy leads the development…
Let’s Learn GitHub Copilot App – Free Virtual Training Event
Join us for a free online event series kicking off July 16 to learn how to get started with the GitHub Copilot App! The post Let’s Learn GitHub Copilot App Free Virtual Training Event appeared first on Microsoft for Deve…
Let’s Learn GitHub Copilot App – Free Virtual Training Event
Join us for a free online event series kicking off July 16 to learn how to get started with the GitHub Copilot App! The post Let’s Learn GitHub Copilot App Free Virtual Training Event appeared first on Microsoft for Deve…
The hidden variables in your agent eval
This is the seventh article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can t control in the agent stack, how t…
The hidden variables in your agent eval
This is the seventh article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can t control in the agent stack, how t…
Flint: A visualization language for the AI era
Short chart specifications are easy to write, but often produce uninspiring results. Flint is an open-source visualization language that offers a middle path, letting AI agents create expressive charts from compact, huma…
Intelligence is Free, Now What? <br> Data Systems for, of, and by Agents
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863) The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; t…
Discord Patch Notes: July 7, 2026
Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.
Don’t rewrite your CLI for agents
There s advice making the rounds: replace your CLI args with a single --json payload so agents can use your tool more effectively. The thinking being, that agents already think in structured formats, and nested data maps…
Don’t rewrite your CLI for agents
There s advice making the rounds: replace your CLI args with a single --json payload so agents can use your tool more effectively. The thinking being, that agents already think in structured formats, and nested data maps…
AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, AWS service availability updates, and more (July 6, 2026)
A couple of editions ago I wrote about what I find so energizing about working with startups. Last week I got a fresh dose of it: I spent a few days with the AWS Startups team, listening to stories of founders talking ab…
Not all model upgrades are upgrades
A new model drops with lower per-token pricing and better benchmarks. You switch. A week later someone asks why the agent is burning 12x more tokens on the same task while producing worse output. We ran 150 agent tasks a…
Not all model upgrades are upgrades
A new model drops with lower per-token pricing and better benchmarks. You switch. A week later someone asks why the agent is burning 12x more tokens on the same task while producing worse output. We ran 150 agent tasks a…
Building Enterprise AI Agents That Are Both Autonomous and Reliable
While red-teaming an early refund agent early last year, one of our engineers typed a deliberately absurd line: my very valid and very verified email. The agent, running on a frontier LLM, accepted it as proof of identit…
Google DeepMind and A24 announce first-of-its-kind research partnership
Migrating Counter Service storage: Design choices and learnings
Introduction Counter Service is used across Grab’s anti-fraud platform to answer time-windowed count questions, such as recent ride requests by a user or failed payment attempts on a card. The service handles tens of tho…
Leanstral 1.5: Proof Abundance for All
Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks
Learn how Kubernetes version rollbacks for Amazon EKS let you reverse cluster upgrades within seven days. This new feature provides a safety net for upgrade failures—no cluster rebuilds required—turning Kubernetes versio…
2026 BAIR Graduate Showcase
Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed…
Variance Reduction Below the Randomization Grain
Sergio Camelo, Caitlin Kearns, Matias Cersosimo, and Tilman Drerup As artificial intelligence increases the velocity of engineering and science teams, experimental throughput is set to become a bottleneck for many produc…
Meta’s AI Storage Blueprint at Scale
Over the past several years, model capabilities and training dataset sizes have experienced exponential growth. During the past year or so, the time between new-frontier-model releases has gone down from months to weeks.…
What AI benchmarks are not telling you
This is the sixth article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can t control in the agent stack, how to…
What AI benchmarks are not telling you
This is the sixth article in a series about Agent Experience (AX): the practice of making AI coding agents work correctly with your technology. The series covers what you can and can t control in the agent stack, how to…
How AI Learned to Investigate Mobile Build Failures Like an Experienced Support Engineer
In our Engineering Energizers Q A series, we highlight the engineering minds driving innovation across Salesforce. Today, we spotlight Archana Indran, Senior Engineering Manager for Mobile CI/CD. Archana s team built Ana…
Accelerate your infrastructure deployments by up to 4x with AWS CloudFormation Express mode
AWS CloudFormation speeds up infrastructure deployment with Express mode, enabling AI agents and developers to receive deployment confirmation in seconds and iterate faster. Available in all commercial Regions at no addi…
Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now available
Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5, are now generally available. They deliver up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4-based instances, 5x larger cache, fastest memory of any processor…
Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager
AWS Certificate Manager now supports the ACME protocol for public TLS certificates, enabling automated issuance and renewal through any ACMEv2-compatible client on any workload. Administrators get centralized governance,…
Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash
Cost Attribution in Discord’s API
Discord s API spans 1700+ endpoints across hundreds of Kubernetes deployments. The challenge: tracking per-feature hosting costs without restructuring. Jim Benton helps explain how Discord tackled the situation.
Discord is Now on Meta Quest: Reach Out to Your Servers While in VR
Starting today, Discord is now available to download directly from Meta’s Horizon App Store. No more sideloading. No more using the web app. Grab it using the link in this blog, or at discord.com/download.
10 Years of Meta’s Commitment to Python
This year marks Meta s 10th consecutive year as a sponsor of the Python Software Foundation (PSF), the charitable organization dedicated to advancing, supporting, and protecting the open-source Python programming languag…
SkillOpt: Agent skills as trainable parameters
AI agents often fail because their instructions, or skills, are manually modified with no guarantee of improvement. Learn how SkillOpt turns skill editing into a training process, making agent behavior more reliable with…
AWS Weekly Roundup: Agentic CX designer for Amazon Connect Customer, EC2 AMI Watermarks, Open Governance for MySQL, and more (June 29, 2026)
It has been a busy stretch on the AWS Summit circuit. At the New York City Summit, I delivered a workshop called Building AI architectures with AWS Serverless, and it was a lot of fun watching builders wire up agents and…
Leveraging PyFixest for High-Cardinality Marketplace Modeling at Instacart
Benjamin S. Knight Scaling Marketplace experiments requires specialized statistical techniques. We examine why standard ordinary least squares regression (OLS) becomes computationally intractable when controlling for hig…
Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity
AI agents can't remember past conversations. They must constantly reload or retrieve context, which grows less efficient as tasks get longer and more complex. Memora solves this with a scalable memory system separating w…
GenPage: Towards End-to-End Generative Homepage Construction at Netflix
Authors: Lequn Wang , J iangwei Pan , and Linas Baltrunas Figure 1. Autoregressive homepage generation. GenPage builds a Netflix homepage one row or entity at a time, each one conditioned on what’s already on the page an…
Inside Unified Planner: The AI Brain Behind Agentforce
In our Engineering Energizers Q A series, we highlight the engineering minds driving innovation across Salesforce. Today, we spotlight Gaurav Aggarwal, a Software Engineering Architect. Gaurav developed the Unified Plann…
Your agent already has a plan
If an agent isn t doing the right thing, the obvious move is to make the docs clearer. Add a tip, spell out the correct command, describe the right approach more prominently. You do all of that, and the agent still ignor…
Your agent already has a plan
If an agent isn t doing the right thing, the obvious move is to make the docs clearer. Add a tip, spell out the correct command, describe the right approach more prominently. You do all of that, and the agent still ignor…
Discord Update: June 25, 2026 Changelog
Here s the Discord Changelog from June 25, 2026, so you can stay informed on what’s new in recent app updates!
How we used DSPy to turn AI evaluations into better responses in Dash chat
We used DSPy to improve LLM judges and optimize our chat experience, creating an evaluation-driven feedback loop that produced better outputs.
Privacy-Aware Infrastructure in the AI-Native Era: An Asset Classification Case Study
Privacy controls — systems that enforce retention, access, allowed-purpose, downstream-sharing, or anonymization policies — require a reliable understanding of data to function. Before such a control can operate effectiv…
Learn from Microsoft: Transform software development through an agentic platform
See how Microsoft is transforming software development with agentic workflows, AI-powered automation, and specialized agents across the engineering lifecycle. The post Learn from Microsoft: Transform software development…
Learn from Microsoft: Transform software development through an agentic platform
See how Microsoft is transforming software development with agentic workflows, AI-powered automation, and specialized agents across the engineering lifecycle. The post Learn from Microsoft: Transform software development…
Understanding the brain with AI-driven explanations and experiments
Researchers introduce generative causal testing, which translates black box models into clear hypotheses and verifies them in the scanner, revealing what specific brain regions respond to in language. The post Understand…
Achieving Near-Linear Training Scalability for Pinterest’s Foundation Models
Sheng Huang | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Pong Eksombatchai | Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Sciences; Saurabh Vishwas Joshi | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Gaurav Arora | Software Engineer, AI Platform; Karthi…