---
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

### [Transformation in action: Why AI deployment depth makes the difference](https://yomu.fyi/post/transformation-in-action-why-ai-deployment-depth-makes-the-difference.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Declan Ivory
- Published: Mar 20, 2026
- Type: Explainer

AI adoption is widespread in customer service, but the report identifies a deployment gap between organizations experimenting with the technology and those integrating it deeply into operations. Based on a survey of 2,470 global support professionals, it finds that 82% of senior leaders invested in AI in the past year and 87% plan to invest in 2026, while only 10% report mature deployment. Mature teams put AI at the core of workflows, give it meaningful responsibility, and use continuous improvement to achieve higher-quality, more consistent support; 43% report that outcome, nearly double the rate for teams at initial deployment. Lightspeed illustrates the approach by combining tailored training, executive alignment, content investment, and AI operations discipline, reaching 72% Fin resolution without human intervention across 43,000-plus monthly requests and 12-plus languages.


### [Querying DateTimes in ClickHouse](https://yomu.fyi/post/querying-datetimes-in-clickhouse.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Mark Needham
- Published: Mar 20, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

ClickHouse provides specialized functions to filter, bucket, and compute durations on native DateTime columns without requiring external processing tools. Using the New York City taxi dataset imported into a MergeTree table, queries bucket pickup timestamps into hour and 15-minute intervals using toStartOfHour and toStartOfFifteenMinutes while casting values to the Time type to group across dates. The dateDiff function calculates journey durations in minutes, which enables trip speed calculations across time windows and powers inline ASCII visualizations generated by the bar function. By combining toDayOfWeek with conditional aggregations like countIf and the lag window function, queries uncover distinct morning surge trajectories between weekdays and weekends. The analysis demonstrates that weekday trip volumes peak around 8:45 AM alongside dropping speeds, whereas weekend volumes increase steadily across the morning.


### [Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-etsy-s-database-sharding-to-vitess.md)
- Company: [Etsy](https://yomu.fyi/company/etsy.md)
- Author: Ella Yarmo-Gray
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Etsy migrated its long-running MySQL shard management to Vitess vindexes after an architecture spanning about 1,000 tables and shards, 425 TB of data, and roughly 1.7 million requests per second. The legacy ORM used a single index database to map records to shards, creating a scaling bottleneck and single point of failure. To avoid moving existing data, engineers built custom SQLite lookup and hybrid vindexes, changed new shard assignments to match Vitess’s hash algorithm, and introduced routing incrementally table by table with traffic ramps, rollback, and query compatibility testing. After five years, about 2,500 pull requests, and 6,000 queries, the migration removed the index database dependency, made scaling operations take days rather than months, simplified developer access, and kept database performance largely unchanged without a mass data migration.


### [How Slack Rebuilt Notifications 📣](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-slack-rebuilt-notifications.md)
- Company: [Slack](https://yomu.fyi/company/slack.md)
- Author: Frances Coronel
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Slack redesigned its legacy notification architecture to address user confusion, conflicting desktop and mobile preference systems, and tight coupling between notification content and push delivery. The engineering team unified four separate preference models into a single framework with three channel options: All new posts, Mentions, and Mute. To ensure safe rollback and backwards compatibility without direct database mutations, Slack implemented a read-time translation strategy alongside a new desktop\_push\_enabled preference and auto-saving cross-platform React UI components. This decoupling of activity from push delivery resulted in a fivefold sustained increase in settings engagement, reduced reliance on per-channel overrides, and eliminated synchronization mismatches across mobile and desktop clients.


### [Kaizen for the AI era: How small improvements build smarter support](https://yomu.fyi/post/kaizen-for-the-ai-era-how-small-improvements-build-smarter-support.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Caroline Glackin
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post presents Kaizen as a structured approach to continuous improvement, centered on small changes, immediate iteration, and participation from people closest to the work. At Fin, this philosophy is applied to Agent Fin through the Fin Flywheel: teams train it on complex queries, test simulated conversations, deploy it across channels, and analyze performance with AI-powered insights. Each interaction feeds a repeatable loop rather than a one-time launch, while Human Support representatives examine escalations, ask why Fin could not resolve them, and identify content, process, or tooling fixes. A lightweight AI-powered logging process captures suggestions in the moment, enabling subject matter experts or frontline teams to implement changes quickly; together, the two systems make continuous learning an ingrained capability and are presented as a source of competitive advantage.


### [Supabase Joins the Stripe Projects Developer Preview](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-joins-the-stripe-projects-developer-preview.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: gregor\_vand, ana\_mogul
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Supabase has joined the Stripe Projects developer preview, a Stripe CLI workflow for provisioning real services and obtaining working credentials with a single command. The integration provisions a complete Supabase project—including Postgres, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, and Realtime—without requiring dashboard interaction, while supporting both developers and AI agents through deterministic, repeatable steps. After installing the Stripe CLI and adding supabase/project, stripe projects env --sync writes credentials to a local .env file and stores them in the Stripe Project for agent access; existing Supabase users can link their account. Projects remain in the user’s Supabase account with dashboard, connection-string, and data access, and database credentials can be rotated with stripe projects rotate supabase/project. The feature is a developer preview, and Stripe and Supabase are requesting feedback through Discord or GitHub.


### [From firefighting to building: How AI agents restored our team’s core productivity](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-firefighting-to-building-how-ai-agents-restored-our-team-s-core-p.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Sneh Agrawal
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab’s Analytics Data Warehouse team supports more than 1,000 monthly users and 15,000 tables, but repetitive questions about definitions, lineage, quality, and basic enhancements consumed about 40% of engineering time. It deployed a multi-agent AI system that routes Slack requests into enhancement or investigation pathways, using FastAPI and LangGraph for stateful, cyclical collaboration, Redis for caching and sessions, and PostgreSQL for persistent memory. Specialized agents query Trino, Hive, or Delta Lake, inspect GitLab code, check incidents and pipeline health, or prepare semi-automated code changes, while human reviewers approve production modifications. The system autonomously resolves most standard inquiries and some common enhancements, reducing resolution time by an order of magnitude and bringing simple answers to users within minutes. The resulting capacity shift reclaimed several FTEs worth of engineering bandwidth and moved hundreds of hours from reactive support to roadmap work.


### [Introducing Composer 2](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-composer-2.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Cursor
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Cursor has made Composer 2 available as a coding model in Cursor. It is priced at $0.50/M input and $2.50/M output tokens, with a faster variant priced at $1.50/M input and $7.50/M output tokens. The release reports higher scores across CursorBench, Terminal-Bench 2.0, and SWE-bench Multilingual, with Composer 2 scoring 61.3, 61.7, and 73.7, respectively. Its training combines a first continued pretraining run with reinforcement learning on long-horizon coding tasks, allowing it to handle challenges requiring hundreds of actions. Composer 2's standard pricing and included usage pool on individual plans are presented alongside the faster option, which is set as the default.


### [Building a Magic Mirror: AI retail experiences with Remix](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-a-magic-mirror-ai-retail-experiences-with-remix.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

Shopify’s “magic mirror” is an AI-powered retail installation that uses a display and hidden webcam to deliver personalized messages, animations, and product interactions in under a minute. A Remix route handles the browser and server boundary: a button-triggered POST captures an image, sends it with a curated prompt to a vision-capable language model, and renders a compliment plus a makeup recommendation; server-sent events optionally let a remote device trigger or reset the experience. The prompt combines persona and safety constraints, a plain-text product and inventory table, and a required JSON schema, while strict product-ID lookup provides graceful degradation. The interface uses explicit states, delayed capture, timed response and reset screens, and animated transitions. The production setup keeps brand configuration, shared components, actions, and SSE infrastructure reusable across mirror modes.


### [March 2026 newsletter](https://yomu.fyi/post/march-2026-newsletter.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Mark Needham
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Announcement

The March 2026 ClickHouse newsletter details major platform updates, community deployments, and architectural practices for high-throughput analytics. Recent product announcements include ClickHouse 26.2 featuring time-based block flushing for streaming feeds, general availability of native inverted indexes for full-text search, and the release of chDB 4 with a Pandas-compatible DataStore API. Community implementations show Cloudflare managing 1.61 quadrillion daily events, while Trigger.dev isolated multi-tenant SQL execution using a domain-specific query language that compiles safe ClickHouse queries. In data optimization techniques, Hookdeck accelerated webhook payload search from over 30 seconds to under 400 milliseconds by partitioning payload hashes into typed bucket columns and scanning iterative time windows. Additional operational guidance emphasizes setting the ttl\_only\_drop\_parts parameter and aligning table partitioning with time units so background merges drop entire data parts cleanly without triggering mutation rewrites.


### [Updating the design of Notion pages](https://yomu.fyi/post/updating-the-design-of-notion-pages.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Paul Velleux
- Published: Mar 18, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Notion revisited its page design after years of adding blocks with inconsistent spacing and related details. Rather than relying on baseline alignment, which is difficult across browsers and user-controlled block heights, the redesign uses standardized spacing to create rhythm while preserving flexibility. The team also changed paragraph spacing so readers can scan documents and see breaks more clearly, then addressed the resulting problem of lists feeling too loose or too tight. Its solution treats blocks above and below a block as adjacent and reduces padding when neighboring items belong to a list, including checklists, bulleted, toggle, numbered, and page lists. Notion says the system will roll out across all pages, including lists, headings, and mixed-content documents, over the coming weeks.


### [How ClickStack makes ClickHouse faster for observability](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-clickstack-makes-clickhouse-faster-for-observability.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Mike Shi
- Published: Mar 18, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

ClickHouse delivers high performance for telemetry data, but unoptimized queries on high-cardinality observability workloads can bypass pruning, inflate intermediate state, and exhaust cluster resources. ClickStack addresses this challenge by embedding engine-specific optimization best practices directly into how queries are generated, structured, and executed. For search workflows, the platform executes progressive queries across bounded time windows using optimize\_read\_in\_order to return initial rows rapidly without scanning entire historical ranges. ClickStack also segments large chart aggregations into parallel bucket-aligned queries, automatically redirects map attribute filters to pre-materialized columns, and extends lazy materialization thresholds to minimize runtime input-output overhead. These query formulation strategies are being packaged into specialized analytical endpoints to power notebooks and external tools without requiring manual SQL tuning or exposing raw database interfaces.


### [Money Forward brings Cursor’s coding agents to product, design, and QA](https://yomu.fyi/post/money-forward-brings-cursor-s-coding-agents-to-product-design-and-qa.md)
- Company: [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor.md)
- Author: Cursor
- Published: Mar 18, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Money Forward expanded Cursor coding agents beyond engineering to product, design, and quality assurance after developers began saving an estimated 15–20 hours per week. Adoption among engineers rose 30% within a week, and the company now reports more than 1,000 daily users; engineering examples include Rails optimization, Terraform deployments, and Vue-to-React migrations. For the company-wide rollout, its MEPAR department chose Cursor for minimal setup, visual browser capabilities, a unified workspace, model-agnostic asynchronous cloud agents, and context retrieval across complex codebases. QA uses MCP-connected Jira and Notion materials to generate test cases and Playwright scripts, reducing test-generation time by 70%, while product managers inspect repositories for requirements and designers prototype against live frontends and product analytics.


### [Introducing AI observability notebooks for Managed ClickStack in Private Preview](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-ai-observability-notebooks-for-managed-clickstack-in-priva.md)
- Company: [Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse.md)
- Author: Mike Shi
- Published: Mar 18, 2026
- Type: Announcement

ClickHouse has launched AI Notebooks for Managed ClickStack in private preview to assist site reliability engineers during system investigations. Instead of isolating interactions in a standard chat window, the platform embeds Anthropic's Claude models directly into a cell-based notebook canvas. The system connects the model to internal ClickStack APIs, translating natural language questions into structured queries that leverage ClickHouse optimizations like materialized views and query chunking. Engineers can inspect reasoning, edit generated SQL queries, add manual visualizations, and branch investigations to evaluate multiple hypotheses independently. While currently utilizing a last-write-wins model for shared canvases, the roadmap includes true concurrent editing, customizable context, and external tool integration via an MCP server.


### [Enhance Your In-IDE Data Browsing Experience With MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/post/enhance-your-in-ide-data-browsing-experience-with-mongodb.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Silpa Ajjarapu
- Published: Mar 17, 2026
- Type: Announcement

MongoDB announced the general availability of an enhanced data browsing experience within the MongoDB for Visual Studio Code extension. The update introduces a paginated tree view that automatically detects human-readable fields like names or emails to create descriptive document titles instead of showing standard ObjectId hashes. An integrated action header inside the tree view enables developers to insert documents, refresh queries, sort by ObjectId, paginate results, and execute bulk deletes directly from the sidebar. Individual documents support hover-based contextual action menus for native deletion, copying, cloning, and editing. Furthermore, the extension now defaults to standard Shell syntax rather than Extended JSON across insert, clone, edit, and clipboard operations to maintain application code compatibility.


### [How we optimized Dash's relevance judge with DSPy](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-optimized-dash-s-relevance-judge-with-dspy.md)
- Company: [Dropbox](https://yomu.fyi/company/dropbox.md)
- Author: Ilya Yakovlev,Andrew Cheung,Binoy Dash,Simran Jumani,Dmitriy Meyerzon,Mark Breitenbach,Ishan Mishra,Kazuaki Okumura,Mike White,Kevin Altschuler,Facundo Agriel,Ishan Mishra,Eric Wang,Dmitriy Meyerzon
- Published: Mar 17, 2026

Dropbox Dash optimized its LLM-as-a-judge relevance scoring system using DSPy to migrate from expensive proprietary models to cheaper open-weight alternatives. By establishing automated feedback loops based on human agreement and strict JSON format validation, the team systematically generated robust prompts for new models. This reduced human-score disagreement by 45% and slashed model adaptation time from weeks to days while enabling 10x to 100x more data labeling.


### [State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026](https://yomu.fyi/post/state-of-open-source-on-hugging-face-spring-2026.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Avijit Ghosh, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Yacine Jernite, Irene Solaiman
- Published: Mar 17, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post examines how open source AI on Hugging Face changed over the past year across competition, geography, technical trends, and emerging communities. It combines Hugging Face and community-contributed metrics to assess users, models, datasets, downloads, repositories, and specialized sub-ecosystems. In 2025, the platform reached 13 million users, more than 2 million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets, while the top 200 models represented 49.6% of downloads and China surpassed the U.S. in monthly and overall downloads. The analysis also describes rising participation by independent developers, increased Chinese releases, and active communities in robotics and science, framing open source AI as overlapping ecosystems rather than a uniform market.


### [Behind the Scenes: How Maintaining Cloud Native Buildpacks Powers Platforms Like Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/post/behind-the-scenes-how-maintaining-cloud-native-buildpacks-powers-platf.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Juan Bustamante
- Published: Mar 17, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Maintaining the pack CLI and Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) is presented as invisible infrastructure work supporting platforms including Heroku, Google Cloud, OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, and internal systems. Over the last 14 months, maintainers shipped 27 releases—11 for pack and 16 for buildpacks/github-actions—reviewed more than 65 community pull requests, and delivered Execution Environments and System Buildpacks. The work also covered Windows CI migration, a docker/docker to moby/moby client upgrade, FreeBSD binaries, multi-architecture publishing, and a Platform API 0.14 lifecycle-restorer fix. System Buildpacks address platform composition and defaults, while Execution Environments support consistent configurations across development, CI, and production. The post argues that company-funded maintainers and CNCF collaboration turn production requirements into shared infrastructure, with planned build observability, OCI image annotations, and Kaniko removal as further examples.


### [5 Career Myths From Women in Engineering](https://yomu.fyi/post/5-career-myths-from-women-in-engineering.md)
- Company: [Two Sigma](https://yomu.fyi/company/two-sigma.md)
- Author: Emily Majewski
- Published: Mar 17, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Three engineering leaders at Two Sigma—Angela Wang, Cecilia Ye, and Mae Santos—challenge conventional career progression models by examining five persistent industry myths. Diverse transitions across civil engineering, enterprise architecture, and customer-facing solutions architecture supplied foundational skills for modern roles in feature engineering, reliability engineering, and real-time trading optimizers. The leaders emphasize that deep domain expertise stems from direct proximity to an active system rather than cumulative years of tenure. Beyond core programming capabilities, proactive contributions such as upgrading operational standards and cultivating peer relationships drive career opportunities and leadership recognition. Adapting to emerging technologies and maintaining consistent execution allows engineers to build credibility across evolving technical environments.


### [Holotron-12B - High Throughput Computer Use Agent](https://yomu.fyi/post/holotron-12b-high-throughput-computer-use-agent.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Pierre-Louis Cedoz, Hamza Benchekroun, Aurélien Lac, delfosse, Tony Wu, Antoine Bonnet, Kai Yuan, Aleix Cambray (H-AI), Alexandra, Axel Moyal
- Published: Mar 17, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Holotron-12B is a multimodal computer-use model released by H Company and available on Hugging Face. Post-trained from NVIDIA’s Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-VL-BF16 on proprietary data, it targets agents that must perceive, decide, and act in interactive environments while handling long contexts with multiple images. Its hybrid State-Space Model and attention architecture stores a constant state per layer per generated sequence instead of attention’s per-token key and value activations, reducing memory demands for long-context inference. In a WebVoyager evaluation on one H100 with vLLM, it reached 8.9k tokens/s at concurrency 100 versus 5.1k for Holo2-8B, and its benchmark score rose from 35.1% to 80.5% after training on localization and navigation data.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/151.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/153.md)