---
title: "Latest reads"
description: "The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it."
---

# Latest reads
> The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.

## Articles

### [Custom Tracking Domains](https://yomu.fyi/post/custom-tracking-domains.md)
- Company: [Resend](https://yomu.fyi/company/resend.md)
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Resend has launched custom tracking domains, making the feature free for all users. Email tracking typically relies on shared domains, so another sender’s reputation can affect deliverability. Users configure the feature at the domain level by adding a required DNS record, after which Resend routes tracking through the custom domain; both click and open tracking are disabled by default. Click tracking records link clicks through redirects, while open tracking records image downloads from a 1x1 transparent pixel. Custom domains align tracking links with the sending domain, avoid unfamiliar recipient-facing domains, and can improve deliverability; API configuration accepts open and click tracking flags plus a tracking subdomain, while webhooks emit real-time open and click events.


### [Ecom-RLVE: Adaptive Verifiable Environments for E-Commerce Conversational Agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/ecom-rlve-adaptive-verifiable-environments-for-e-commerce-conversation.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Rahul Bajaj, Jaya Nupur, Anuj Garg, ben burtenshaw
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Ecom-RLVE extends the RLVE framework from single-turn reasoning puzzles to multi-turn, tool-augmented e-commerce conversations. EcomRLVE-GYM supplies eight environments spanning product discovery, substitution, cart building, returns, order tracking, policy QA, bundle planning, and multi-intent journeys, with procedural problem generation, a 12-axis difficulty curriculum, and algorithmically verifiable rewards. Each episode requires tool use and world-state changes; rewards combine task completion, efficiency, and a penalty for recommending product IDs not retrieved, while malformed outputs and illegal calls fail immediately. Adaptive scheduling advances each environment independently when its success rate is reliable. An initial study trained Qwen 3 8B with DAPO for 300 steps on cart building and reported progressively increasing difficulty reached, consistent with a steady learning signal.


### [The PR you would have opened yourself](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-pr-you-would-have-opened-yourself.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Pedro Cuenca, Awni Hannun
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Announcement

mlx-lm contributors can use a Skill and a separate test harness to port language models from transformers, with the goal of making new architectures available shortly after their upstream implementations land. The work addresses rising agent-generated pull-request volume and the difficulty of preserving implicit codebase conventions, user contracts, and performance-sensitive behavior that agents may not understand. Given a conversion prompt, the Skill sets up environments, finds model variants and checkpoints, reads transformers modeling code, writes an MLX implementation, and iterates through tests including dtype checks, generation examples, numerical comparisons, and per-layer comparisons. The resulting pull requests disclose agent assistance and include detailed verification data, while contributors remain responsible for reviewing and accepting the results. Current limitations include shared-utility refactors, vision-language models, quantized uploads, and thinking-specific tests.


### [Training and Finetuning Multimodal Embedding & Reranker Models with Sentence Transformers](https://yomu.fyi/post/training-and-finetuning-multimodal-embedding-reranker-models-with-sent.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Tom Aarsen
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

Sentence Transformers provides a Python library for training and using embedding and reranker models across text, images, audio, and video in retrieval and semantic search applications. The post shows how to finetune multimodal models on task-specific data, using Visual Document Retrieval as the example: matching text queries with document page images while preserving charts, tables, and layout. It describes the SentenceTransformerTrainer pipeline, model and processor configuration, dataset handling, and alternative Router-based encoders, while also covering multimodal reranker training with BinaryCrossEntropyLoss and direction-specific datasets. On its evaluation data, finetuning Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B raised NDCG@10 from 0.888 to 0.947 and outperformed all tested VDR models, including models up to 4x its size.


### [How we built Stripe Credits: A programmable, auditable way to pay your Stripe fees](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-built-stripe-credits-a-programmable-auditable-way-to-pay-your-s.md)
- Company: [Stripe](https://yomu.fyi/company/stripe.md)
- Author: Pratik Gupta
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Stripe Fee Credits replaces ad-hoc discounts and manual cash adjustments with a programmable, auditable virtual balance dedicated to eligible Stripe fees. The architecture has three layers: a standalone gRPC credits engine for metadata, policies, lifecycle, and audit history; logical financial accounts built on Money Movement and Storage; and fee-settlement orchestration that applies eligible credits before the primary balance. Logical accounts carry ledger balances without representing real cash, while platform checks restrict Originated Money Transfers to logical-to-logical movements and exclude these accounts from cash sweeps. Prepaid and Stripe-funded credits share the user experience but use separate funds flows: prepayments create deferred revenue and collect tax at drawdown, whereas Stripe-funded credits are booked as Stripe costs with taxes written off. The resulting infrastructure supports incentives, prepaid annual fees, and other programs across 26+ countries, with Dashboard balances and real-time auditability, while avoiding bespoke engineering for each commercial model.


### [Getting started with clickhousectl: the ClickHouse CLI for local and cloud](https://yomu.fyi/post/getting-started-with-clickhousectl-the-clickhouse-cli-for-local-and-cl.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Al Brown
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

ClickHouse developers often face friction managing local versions, isolated instances, project scaffolding, and Cloud operations without relying on complex shell scripts. The open-source command-line tool clickhousectl addresses this by unifying local environment management and ClickHouse Cloud workflows. Locally, it downloads shared binaries, initializes standardized directory structures, and spins up named, isolated servers with automatic port assignments to facilitate upgrade testing. For cloud workflows, the CLI enforces a split authentication model where browser OAuth provides read-only access and API keys permit state mutations like service creation and scaling. Furthermore, the tool includes Claude Code agent skills covering best practices and deployment workflows, alongside support for CI/CD pipeline automation via environment variables and JSON output.


### [Introducing the Databricks Connector for Google Sheets: Real-Time, Governed Lakehouse Data in the Sheets Users Love](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-the-databricks-connector-for-google-sheets-real-time-gover.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Toussaint Webb
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Databricks has introduced a Google Sheets connector that brings live, governed lakehouse data into a familiar spreadsheet environment. The connector addresses reliance on CSV exports, snapshots, and custom pipelines, which left business teams with siloed copies, inconsistent metrics, and slower decisions. Built on Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog, it lets users query governed datasets, including Unity Catalog Metric Views, through a no-code GUI or SQL, while Unity Catalog manages permissions. Users can refresh results manually or schedule refreshes, keeping Sheets data current without exporting snapshots. The connector is Generally Available to all Databricks customers, and Nubank reports that it has enabled non-technical users to explore data in Sheets while preserving control.


### [What is operational analytics?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-operational-analytics.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Operational analytics uses real-time or near-real-time data to monitor day-to-day operations and support immediate decisions, unlike traditional analytics, which generally relies on batch data to explain past performance. Its workflow collects logs, events, clickstreams, telemetry, transactions, and other signals; streams them into a unified platform for cleaning, transformation, and enrichment; analyzes incoming data with rules, models, or anomaly detection; and sends results to dashboards, alerts, or operational applications. This can help teams detect issues earlier, reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), improve forecasting, coordinate across departments, and act on inventory, customer, or system changes. The approach also requires integrating heterogeneous systems, maintaining data quality and schemas, embedding insights into existing workflows, and building reliable low-latency pipelines, with tools such as Lakeflow, Databricks SQL, and AI and machine learning capabilities presented as examples.


### [Frontend Engineering at Palantir: Polar Scaled Tiles in Zodiac](https://yomu.fyi/post/frontend-engineering-at-palantir-polar-scaled-tiles-in-zodiac.md)
- Company: [Palantir](https://yomu.fyi/company/palantir.md)
- Author: Palantir
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Zodiac, Palantir’s custom 3D globe library built on Three.js, encountered severe performance degradation near the Arctic because latitude/longitude tiles converge into tiny slivers and create excessive geometry. Standard equal-angular tiling was replaced internally with polar-scaled tiles whose widths expand toward the poles so their surface areas remain closer to equatorial tiles. The design uses spherical surface-area calculations, power-of-two merge spans, and dynamic quadtree expansion; client-side texture compositing handles standard geodetic or Web Mercator sources, while heightmaps are combined and resampled for wider tiles. The change reduced polar geometry, draw calls, and textures by over 90% and made frame time more consistent, though texture loading remains the next bottleneck and native polar tiles would remove stitching overhead.


### [AI Prototyping Is Changing How We Build Products at Uber](https://yomu.fyi/post/ai-prototyping-is-changing-how-we-build-products-at-uber.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Uber describes how AI-assisted prototyping is changing product development by making interactive flows available within hours instead of weeks of coordination. In one example, a Merchant team customized a prototype to a specific catalog, producing immediate actionable feedback and rapid internal alignment. Across experiments, teams used Lovable, Figma Make, Claude Code, and Cursor to explore multiple concepts before PRDs and architecture decisions hardened; one PM explored six concepts in about 20 minutes. The pattern was earlier exploration, faster alignment, and clearer MVP boundaries, while PRDs and design reviews remained necessary for intent, tradeoffs, constraints, and durable decisions. Uber also opened prototyping to engineering and operational teams, while examining how prototypes should inform production without being mistaken for shippable solutions.


### [Unity AI Gateway: How to connect agents to external MCPs securely](https://yomu.fyi/post/unity-ai-gateway-how-to-connect-agents-to-external-mcps-securely.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Ahmed Bilal, Sunish Sheth
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

Databricks Unity AI Gateway provides a governed way to connect agents to external Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers while integrating management with Unity Catalog. The post addresses provider-specific OAuth app registration, client secrets, token refresh, permission auditing, and the lack of centralized visibility into agent access. It describes registering an external MCP server, choosing per-user OAuth or a shared principal, selecting GitHub, and letting Databricks handle OAuth registration, token exchange, and refresh; connections can then be tested in AI Playground or with DatabricksMCPClient and deployed through Agent Bricks. Unity Catalog supplies permissions and audit records, while MLflow Tracing captures requests and tool interactions, and supported providers include Glean, GitHub, Atlassian, Google Drive, and SharePoint across AWS, Azure, and GCP.


### [Expanding agent governance with Unity AI Gateway](https://yomu.fyi/post/expanding-agent-governance-with-unity-ai-gateway.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: David Nasi
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Unity AI Gateway extends Unity Catalog’s permissions, auditing, and policy controls to agentic workflows involving LLMs, MCP servers, and APIs. The release addresses limited visibility across multi-step actions with on-behalf-of user execution for MCP calls, configurable guardrails, and consistent governance across model providers without separate configurations for each provider and model choice can vary by task. Guardrails can detect PII, prompt injection, unsafe content, and data exfiltration, while logs capture identities, timestamps, MCP details, dollar costs, payloads, latency, status codes, and errors. OpenAI-compatible APIs, fallback models, and endpoint-, user-, or group-level rate limits support production operation, although some capabilities are in Beta or rolling out and availability is limited to supported Databricks regions.


### [Our vision for the ClickHouse Grafana plugin](https://yomu.fyi/post/our-vision-for-the-clickhouse-grafana-plugin.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Alex Fedotyev
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

ClickHouse is widely used with Grafana for observability and real-time analytics, but requiring users to write raw SQL creates onboarding and exploration friction. To simplify the user experience, planned updates to the ClickHouse Grafana plugin introduce native interfaces such as click-to-filter actions, categorized OpenTelemetry attribute displays, and guided variable editors. A new compact search mode leverages the hasToken function for fast log filtering, while a visual metrics builder simplifies aggregating OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes metrics without manual queries. Prebuilt dashboards for logs and traces will accelerate initial setup alongside automated annotations derived from service version changes and Kubernetes lifecycle events. Future prototypes also explore bidirectional SQL AST parsing for seamless query editing, JWT user identity forwarding for fine-grained access control, and conversational query generation.


### [Inside VAKRA: Reasoning, Tool Use, and Failure Modes of Agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/inside-vakra-reasoning-tool-use-and-failure-modes-of-agents.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Ankita Naik, danish, Ben, Anupama Murthi, Praveen Venkateswaran, Siyu, Ayhan Sebin
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Benchmark

VAKRA is an executable, tool-grounded benchmark for evaluating whether AI agents can complete enterprise-like workflows that combine API calls, document retrieval, and natural-language constraints. It provides more than 8,000 locally hosted APIs backed by real databases across 62 domains, plus domain-aligned documents, and uses full execution traces to assess multi-step behavior. The four capability groups cover API chaining, dashboard-API tool selection, multi-hop dashboard reasoning, and multi-hop multi-source reasoning with multi-turn dialogue and optional tool-use policies; tasks can require three to seven reasoning steps, while some segments specify one to twelve tool calls or up to five logical hops. Reported analyses find that models perform best on single-hop questions, degrade as API hops increase, and often violate policies or fail to retrieve enough information when constraints restrict the relevant source, exposing a gap between isolated tool competence and end-to-end reliability.


### [Amplitude ships 3x more production code with Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/post/amplitude-ships-3x-more-production-code-with-cursor.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Cursor
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Amplitude’s engineering team built toward an autonomous development pipeline that moves software from idea to production with minimal developer intervention, using Cursor to connect customer feedback, observability, code reviews, and other lifecycle context to agents. Cloud agents run in isolated, scalable VMs with complete development environments, enabling parallel, long-running, self-testing work that local machines could not support at the same scale. Automations now turn Slack bug reports and feature requests into Linear tickets and pull requests, perform hourly legacy migrations, and classify pull-request risk, while Bugbot reviews and autofixes low-risk changes. Since adopting cloud agents, Amplitude reports a threefold increase in weekly production commits, more than 1,000 unprompted agent runs per week, and Cursor as a top-three contributor by commit volume. About 60–70% of low-risk pull requests merge without additional developer work, while high-risk changes are routed to appropriate reviewers; the next goal is automating CI/CD, build validation, and deployment.


### [Better AI models enable more ambitious work](https://yomu.fyi/post/better-ai-models-enable-more-ambitious-work.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Luke Melas-Kyriazi
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Benchmark

An eight-month study of developers at 500 companies using Cursor examined whether improved AI mainly increases existing work or enables tasks previously out of reach. The research, conducted with Professor Suproteem Sarkar of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, covered releases of Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2, finding average weekly messages per user rose 44%. Developers initially used better models for more work of similar complexity, then after a 4–6-week lag shifted toward harder tasks: low-complexity messages grew 22%, while high-complexity messages grew 68%, mostly in the final six weeks. Growth varied by sector, led by media and advertising at 54%, software and developer tools at 47%, and finance and fintech at 45%. Documentation, architecture, code review, and learning grew more than UI and styling, suggesting expanding AI-generated codebases increase demand for management, understanding, and review while opening broader productive opportunities.


### [Meet HoloTab by HCompany. Your AI browser companion.](https://yomu.fyi/post/meet-holotab-by-hcompany-your-ai-browser-companion.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Marc Thibault, Pierre-Louis Cedoz, Hamza Benchekroun, Kai Yuan, Aurélien Lac, Tony Wu, Antonio Loison, Axel Moyal, Emrick Sinitambirivoutin, Aleix Cambray (H-AI)
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

HoloTab is a Chrome extension that brings HCompany’s computer-use AI into the browser. It navigates websites, fills fields, and makes decisions from a user’s description, with vision models, action planning, and interface understanding operating underneath without setup or technical skills. The announcement follows the March 31st release of Holo3, described as the company’s most advanced computer-use model to date. For repetitive workflows, users can record their actions and narration in a tab; HoloTab turns the recording into a routine that can later be rerun or scheduled. The stated goal is to make computer-use AI accessible beyond teams with engineers who can connect such systems, and the extension is presented as free and available for everyone today.


### [Building with Modal and the OpenAI Agents SDK](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-with-modal-and-the-openai-agents-sdk.md)
- Company: [Modal](https://yomu.fyi/company/modal.md)
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

The post walks through constructing a custom agent harness with the OpenAI Agents SDK and Modal Sandboxes, starting from a minimal coding agent that executes shell commands directly on the host. To improve safety, the agent is moved into isolated Modal Sandboxes, which are secure Linux environments that can be equipped with GPUs for compute-intensive tasks like training models. Memory is added via Sessions to accumulate context across turns, and subagents are introduced to handle focused subtasks with fresh context windows, preventing context bloat in the orchestrator while allowing long-horizon work. An async subagent pool enables parallel execution, with quotas to limit GPU spend, and filesystem snapshots allow checkpointing and deduplication of setup work across subagents, saving time and offloading memory. The harness is applied to the Parameter Golf challenge, where an orchestrator delegates parallel training experiments across different ML frameworks on GPUs, demonstrating autonomous research capabilities with composable skills.


### [Resend CLI 2.0](https://yomu.fyi/post/resend-cli-2-0.md)
- Company: [Resend](https://yomu.fyi/company/resend.md)
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Resend CLI 2.0 gives terminal-based access to the full Resend API and adds four features: sending emails from local React (.tsx/.jsx) files, managing automations and events, one-command webhook listening with automatic tunneling, and Agent Skills for autonomous API interaction. Users can now create automation runs, inspect results, and build multi-step workflows directly from the command line. The webhook listener automatically sets up a tunnel and forwards all event types to a local server, eliminating the need for separate tunneling tools. Agent Skills provide a structured interface enabling AI agents to independently manage their own inbox, sign up for accounts, receive confirmation emails, process attachments, and respond without manual intervention. Other improvements include programmatic log retrieval, enhanced API key storage via the system keychain (macOS Keychain, Linux Secret Storage, Windows Credential Manager), and the deprecation of the team command in favor of auth.


### [Interact with agent-created visualizations in canvases](https://yomu.fyi/post/interact-with-agent-created-visualizations-in-canvases.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Alex Vandak Maloney
- Published: Apr 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Cursor introduces canvases, allowing agents to represent information through interactive visual interfaces instead of chat text or markdown. In the Agents Window, these durable artifacts sit alongside tools including the terminal, browser, and source control, and agents can build dashboards, PR review interfaces, architecture diagrams, and eval-failure investigations. Canvases use a React-based UI library with first-party tables, boxes, diagrams, and charts, plus existing Cursor components such as diffs and to-do lists; skills can teach agents to create specific canvas types. Cursor reports that combining observability data from Datadog, Databricks, and Sentry MCPs with local debug files makes time-series analysis easier, while eval skills group rollout failures to expose hidden harness bugs. The company is also using canvases to visualize autoresearch progress and current hypotheses during client-performance experiments.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/145.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/147.md)