Loading…
Latest reads
The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.
Compose Multiplatform 1.12.0 Released
JetBrains has announced the release of Compose Multiplatform 1.12.0 with targeted capabilities for artificial intelligence integrations, web rendering, and desktop application layouts. The update incorporates an experimental Model Context Protocol server inside Compose Hot Reload, allowing AI agents to trigger reloads, capture screenshots, inspect the semantic tree, and simulate user interactions directly. For web deployments, the framework now provides automatic font fallback by downloading necessary Noto font subsets on demand when unresolved characters occur during rendering. Desktop developers receive an experimental v2 window and dialog application programming interface in the androidx.compose.ui.window.v2 package, which distinguishes requested states from actual window states and permits precise control over positioning, sizing constraints, and multi-screen placement. These combined enhancements improve developer workflows and runtime flexibility across multiple target platforms.
Elvira MustafinaHow Ubuntu Is Using Rust to Rebuild Core System Tools
Canonical is selectively adopting Rust to rewrite core system utilities across Ubuntu releases to improve memory safety, security, and long-term resilience. Starting in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, uutils coreutils shipped as the default implementation targeting complete GNU compatibility, alongside sudo-rs, which introduced intentional behavior changes like asterisk display on password entry. Canonical is also funding ntpd-rs to consolidate NTP, NTS, and PTP into a single utility, while collaborating on UPKI to bring certificate revocation to system utilities. To manage Rust packaging at distribution scale, Canonical vendors dependencies per package rather than creating individual Debian packages for crates and embeds software bills of materials into binaries using cargo auditable. Future plans include exploring Rust implementations of compression libraries like bzip2-rs, zlib-rs, and zstd-rs.
Irina MihajlovicOpenTelemetry Comes to IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm
With the 2026.2 release, JetBrains expanded its OpenTelemetry plugin from Rider to IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm. The tool captures logs, metrics, traces, and service maps locally without requiring an external observability backend. Developers can search structured log records, plot metric values over time, inspect distributed spans, and verify communication paths across databases and message queues during local runs. To ingest telemetry, the plugin automatically configures OpenTelemetry Protocol environment variables for supported run configurations and terminal sessions, or accepts forwarded data from existing collectors. Additionally, experimental Model Context Protocol support allows AI coding agents to query gathered logs, spans, and service topology.
Egor KlimovAirbnb ·
Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project-lighthouse-anonymize
Airbnb has open-sourced project-lighthouse-anonymize, a Python library powering their privacy-preserving anonymization used to measure user experience disparities. The release is accompanied by technical papers detailing Core Mondrian, an extended partition-based anonymization algorithm, alongside a framework for measuring anonymized data quality. The library enforces k-anonymity and p-sensitive k-anonymity while offering built-in data quality metrics.
Adam BloomstonIdeas Worth a Longer Conversation: The JetBrains Research Podcast
The JetBrains Research Podcast investigates foundational software development and computer science questions through discussions with industry researchers. In team psychology, Cat Hicks demonstrates that collaborative culture and organizational belonging reduce developer anxiety around automated tooling while curbing the risks of overproduction pressure. Historical analysis by Tomáš Petříček shows that programming spans five competing cultures rather than pure specification implementation, explaining why automated code generation historically encounters limits. Regarding artificial intelligence evaluation, Ibragim Badertdinov details how SWE-rebench isolates model capability through dataset decontamination, leveraging the strict verifiability of software test execution for training feedback. Additionally, conversations with Alexander Kulikov and Anna Kogan examine how foundational mathematical understanding aids AI oversight and address adoption hurdles for open-source computer vision infrastructure.
Katie FraserFrom Prediction to Action: How to Turn AI Outputs Into Decisions
Salesforce addressed an operational challenge where sellers faced roughly 12,000 dashboards and over 20 applications outputting machine learning predictions without clear next steps. The engineering team reframed machine learning outputs as raw signals rather than standalone answers. To bridge the gap between assessment and action, they built a Next Best Action layer that combines model signals, business logic, and contextual institutional knowledge into actionable recommendations. They integrated this layer with an AI agent using Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool contracts, enabling dynamic discovery and explicit handling of missing data. Finally, rather than introducing a separate dashboard destination, the agent serves on-demand recommendations directly inside Slack where sellers already collaborate.
Scott NybergGithub ·
Your alt text passes automated checks. That doesn’t mean it’s any good.
Automated accessibility checkers reliably flag missing alt text attributes but frequently miss unhelpful descriptions like raw filenames or repetitive labels. To evaluate image description quality without generating excessive false positives, GitHub built an alt text plugin for the GitHub Accessibility Scanner. The tool combines five deterministic, zero-credential rules that evaluate strings and visual layout spacing with an opt-in vision model check for subjective context. Page context including headings and surrounding prose is extracted alongside images to guide the model using structured outputs and explicit anti-nitpick instructions. While deterministic checks catch unwritten text, the model-driven rule serves as an opt-in prompt for human review rather than an absolute verdict.
Taarik AshenafiThe Cloudflare Blog – Brought to you by EmDash
Cloudflare migrated its official blog to EmDash, an Astro-focused content management system, acting as internal Customer Zero to evaluate scaling and usability. To prepare for traffic spikes reaching thousands of requests per second, engineers used k6 to execute ramp, breakpoint, and burst load tests. The resulting production architecture runs EmDash on Cloudflare Workers, pairing it with Workers Cache, an object cache backed by Workers KV, and Hyperdrive connected to PlanetScale. This layered caching design serves 99.5 percent of static files and 70 percent of requests from cache, flattening p95 latency under real-world loads reaching 850 requests per second. The migration also introduced a frontend redesign using the Kumo design system and added Model Context Protocol servers for automated agent workflows.
Kody JacksonMeta ·
MetaRoCE: A New RDMA Transport Built for AI-Scale Ethernet
Scaling frontier AI training and inference across massive GPU clusters places severe demands on network fabrics, yet conventional RoCE relies on Priority Flow Control to enforce in-order packet delivery. Meta introduced MetaRoCE, a clean-sheet RDMA transport protocol engineered specifically for lossy, multiplane commodity Ethernet without requiring PFC. By shifting intelligence to endpoint NICs, the protocol sprays packets across fine-grained logical paths, writing out-of-order data directly into destination memory without reorder buffers or head-of-line blocking. Congestion is managed via per-path ECN windows paired with receiver-driven rate hints returned in acknowledgments. In validation on a 64-node AMD GPU cluster running collective operations, MetaRoCE outperformed RoCEv2, sustaining roughly 86% throughput under 1% packet loss and achieving linear scaling across multiplane fabrics.
By Arvind Srinivasan, Neil Spring, Omar Baldonado, Rajiv KrishnamurthyMeta ·
MTIA 300: Meta’s First Training Chip with Built-in NICs and Communication-Offloading Engines
Training recommendation models poses distinct network bottlenecks because massive embedding tables trigger frequent collective operations that compete with computation on standard GPUs. Meta designed the MTIA 300 accelerator to overcome this by embedding two network chiplets containing twelve 800 Gbps RDMA NICs directly inside the chip package. The architecture offloads communication from its compute grid to sixteen dedicated message engines equipped with RISC-V cores and near-memory compute reduction blocks. Working alongside the co-designed HCCL library, the chip autonomously compiles and executes collective communication subgraphs without host CPU intervention. On a 150-billion-parameter production recommendation model, MTIA 300 delivered communication speeds 3.9 times faster than an equivalent GPU cluster while keeping concurrent compute degradation under 0.5 percent.
By Rajiv Krishnamurthy, Wes BlandHelp AI Coding Agents Write Up-To-Date Code With Modern Golang Skills
AI coding agents often generate outdated Go patterns because older syntax dominates training data and new features fall past model cutoffs. To address this gap, the GoLand team released Modern Go Guidelines, an open-source set of skills and CLI tools covering Go 1.0 through Go 1.27. The tool inspects a project's go.mod file or a specific version flag to supply only the language features and standard library additions compatible with that environment. Using a progressive disclosure approach, the CLI provides concise rule identifiers via a list command and expands into before-and-after examples through an explain command. This mechanism minimizes token consumption while helping agents produce up-to-date, compilable code without modifying project files.
Artem PronichevHow We Optimized the Qwen 3.6 Model for Our Junie Agent
Deploying the Junie coding agent locally on Apple MacBook M5 hardware requires overcoming steep performance bottlenecks during model execution. Engineers optimized the entire stack using Qwen3.6-27B rather than Qwen3.8-27B, which severely degrades without token-heavy reasoning enabled. At the agent layer, Junie appends requests directly into a rolling context and caches initial prompt prefixes to maximize KV-cache reuse across tasks. For model inference, the team disabled reasoning, selected 4-bit quantization, and patched MLX-VLM to execute self-attention prefill matrix operations using faster 8-bit instructions on the M5 processor. Combining these prefill improvements with simultaneous multi-token prediction and n-gram speculative decoding delivered up to a 2x generation speedup.
Stanislav ErokhinJunie Can Now Run Entirely on Your Mac – No Credits, No Cloud
JetBrains has introduced Junie Local, a feature that runs the Junie coding agent entirely on local hardware without cloud dependencies, subscriptions, or credit meters. Users execute a single command inside Junie to download a 4-bit quantized Qwen3.6-27B model, requiring an Apple M5 Mac with 64 GB of RAM. The team prioritized prefill throughput over pure generation speed by utilizing 8-bit arithmetic instructions on the M5 Neural Accelerator, which increased prefill throughput by approximately 40%. Performance optimizations also include KV-cache reuse, speculative decoding to double generation speed, and disabling reasoning to preserve performance. In JetBrains' evaluations, the local configuration performed comparably to cloud-based Sonnet 4.5 on everyday tasks while ensuring source code, diffs, and prompts never leave the local environment.
Dmitry SavelevSay it once: introducing Bot Preference Sync
Cloudflare announced Bot Preference Sync, a feature across all customer tiers that automatically reflects dashboard AI bot configurations directly in a site's robots.txt file. Website operators previously faced challenges synchronizing static robots.txt directives with edge enforcement rules, which led some crawlers to ignore stated preferences or attempt bypasses. Under this system, Cloudflare generates and prepends directives for Search, Agent, and Training categories to existing robots.txt files using crawler lists tracked in BotBase. Mixed-use crawlers performing both search indexing and training must meet strict transparency criteria, including honoring opt-outs and providing page-level visibility, to avoid edge blocks when training is disallowed. Additionally, onboarding workflows allow ad-supported publishers to automatically set AI model training to Disallow by default while retaining search visibility.
Jin-Hee LeeNetflix ·
A Tale of Two Flink Autoscalers
Netflix operates over 30,000 Apache Flink jobs across multiple AWS regions, ranging from managed pipelines to complex stateful DAGs. Its initial in-house autoscaler used external telemetry from Mantis and Atlas to scale TaskManagers as a single unit, cutting resource usage by 25–45% but failing on multi-operator stateful topologies. To address these limitations, Netflix adopted the Apache Flink Autoscaler library, which calculates True Processing Rate and per-vertex parallelism using internal metrics. The architecture uses Temporal workflows orchestrated within a Spring Boot application to evaluate jobs individually and prevent cross-job blast radiuses. Implementing the open-source autoscaler reduced annualized compute expenditures by 58% for client telemetry and logging, saving approximately $1.1 million.
Netflix Technology BlogSpring Boot Configuration Management Best Practices
Spring Boot externalizes application configuration across files, environment variables, system properties, and command-line arguments to allow a single artifact to run across multiple environments. A resilient setup classifies values into application defaults, deployment configurations, and externalized secrets stored in dedicated vaults. Binding properties to type-safe Java records via @ConfigurationProperties ensures immutability, supports relaxed property mapping, and eliminates the discovery issues common to scattered @Value annotations. Enforcing validation with @Validated and Jakarta Bean Validation constraints triggers fail-fast startup behavior when required settings are absent or malformed. Property precedence determines the effective runtime values, which must be adapted appropriately whether deploying a monolith, containerized workloads in Kubernetes, or a microservices cluster.
Siva KatamreddyGrab ·
Building Jarvis Pro: Route first, answer later
Grab designed Jarvis Pro as an AI assistant for account managers turning complex account data into actionable merchant conversations. Early prototypes generated polished but operationally unsound advice, such as pushing promotions when order drops were caused by outlet pauses and fulfillment issues. To address this, the team implemented a "route first, answer later" design that uses a prompted LLM classification step constrained by a routing guide to dictate context, tool paths, answer structure, and guardrails before generation. The pipeline also isolates narrow memory decisions, reconciles metric freshness across data sources, and caps tool calls to maintain usability. In offline evaluations across 351 realistic prompts, routing matched safe routes 99.4% of the time while answer quality scores in a portfolio subset improved from 78.5 to 91.0.
Christian CoffrantWhy AI-Generated Code Is Easy but Engineering Trust Is Hard
At Salesforce, engineering teams discovered that AI coding agents could produce internally consistent code and passing test suites that still failed to meet actual requirements. To ensure correctness before writing code, the team developed an agentic Spec-Driven Development workflow centered on explicit specifications and gated verification. The system separates evidence-based repository lookups handled by agents from subjective judgment calls escalated to human engineers. Implementation plans must cite repository evidence reviewed by a Skeptic Agent, while a Compliance Matrix traces each success criterion directly to executable test proof. Finally, a multi-agent review system evaluates the implementation under an asymmetric rule allowing an independent judge to downgrade passing checks but never override failed gates.
Scott NybergFrom all-or-nothing to task-based OAuth consent
Cloudflare introduced OAuth scope customization to replace all-or-nothing consent flows for third-party applications. Previously, users had to approve every requested scope or deny access completely, compelling developers of tools like MCP servers to construct custom pre-consent selection interfaces. With the new feature, developers can designate specific permissions as optional alongside required scopes when configuring an OAuth client. During authorization, users can deselect these optional scopes, while unrequested client scopes remain hidden to maintain task-specific consent screens. Because resulting access tokens contain only the granted subset of permissions, client applications must inspect returned scopes after code exchange rather than assuming full authorization.
Miller VargasPyCharm for AI-assisted Django Workflows
According to the 2026 Django Developers Survey, ninety percent of respondents incorporate artificial intelligence into their weekly or daily workflows. While agents generate code rapidly, developers remain accountable for understanding, evaluating, and shipping changes within their applications. PyCharm addresses these demands by integrating support for external agents, local models via Ollama and LM Studio, and customizable agent skills across codebases. The IDE maintains version-specific framework assistance, including auto-completion for Django 6.0 template partials, alongside architectural inspection tools and visual diffs. Furthermore, developers can trace application components, inspect API endpoints, execute HTTP requests, and query database migrations directly through built-in tooling.
Will Vincent