Loading…
Latest reads
Every post, summarised
Grounded summaries of engineering blogs, newest first. Each links to the original.
- 4,671 posts
- 20 companies
The Good Stuff
Paid picks we use ourselves. Links carry a referral code — a subscription through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.
Latest posts
Supabase is now a connector on Perplexity Computer
Supabase is now available as a connector on Perplexity Computer, allowing the agent to use a Supabase project as a persistent data layer across runs. Computer can read from and write to Postgres tables, answer questions by running queries, retrieve user and payment data for support debugging, and invoke Edge Functions with test payloads. Recurring queries can be scheduled, with results posted to Slack, while workflows can combine Supabase data with Stripe events and route fixes through GitHub pull requests. The announcement presents the connector as a way to keep database work inside Computer’s multi-step workflows across more than 400 apps, without custom glue code.
Agentic payments for marketplaces: How a smart fridge can shop safely
GreenMart’s smart-fridge scenario addresses how an agent can turn a detected grocery need into an authorized order without receiving unrestricted access to household card or wallet credentials. GreenMart uses Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite to expose its catalog and checkout through a hosted Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) endpoint, while retaining responsibility for inventory, pricing, fulfillment, and order operations. A fridge agent discovers products and creates a checkout, and a companion app evaluates the final checkout against deterministic household rules covering items, totals, delivery, substitutions, and budgets. After approval, Link can provide bounded payment authority, while direct Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) support lower-level Stripe integrations; virtual cards are described for eligible non-Stripe merchants. The design emphasizes auditable policy decisions, explicit escalation or denial, idempotent retries, webhook reconciliation, and stopping when changes exceed the household’s authority.
What are Agentic Workflows?
Agentic workflows are AI-driven processes that let one or more agents plan, execute, and refine multi-step tasks toward a defined goal with minimal human intervention. Unlike chatbots and fixed automation, they evaluate context and intermediate results at runtime, gather data, select tools dynamically, and adapt when outcomes are incomplete, incorrect, ambiguous, or unexpected. The described pattern combines agents and LLMs with APIs, databases, code executors, prompts, feedback mechanisms, memory and state management, and, for complex work, coordinated specialized agents. Production reliability depends on clear success criteria, action guardrails, human review points for high-stakes actions, audit trails, governance, and production-grade infrastructure. Examples include customer-service resolution, fraud investigation, supply-chain optimization, and event-driven document processing across systems.
What is Tool Calling?
Tool calling lets an AI model interact with external tools, APIs, and systems to retrieve information or perform actions beyond its training data, turning a conversational model into an agent that can act. The process is an application-mediated loop: the model recognizes when outside help is needed, selects a tool from schema-described options, emits a structured request—typically JSON—and receives the result as context for its response or next step. Available tools can support information retrieval, code execution, process automation, and smart-device or IoT monitoring, while complex tasks may chain multiple calls into a workflow. The piece also distinguishes tool calling from function calling, describing the latter as a subset, and presents MCP as a standardization layer for describing, discovering, and invoking tools, with Databricks Agent Bricks offering governed integrations and agent-development support.
Uber Advertising Launches New Marketing Solutions for Restaurants
Uber Advertising is introducing Deal Drops and Reorder Rewards, two marketing solutions for restaurants designed around customers’ real-time ordering decisions. Deal Drops let participating restaurants run special offers for one hour before select cultural events, with in-app and push notifications, home feed placement, a dedicated hub, and optional inventory limits that add urgency. Reorder Rewards give customers a surprise reward after an order for their next purchase, keep it visible for a limited time, and apply it at checkout without extra steps. Uber says early global results showed restaurants using Reorder Rewards saw about a 5.5% average sales increase compared with what they would have earned without them, based on aggregate advertiser data from September through November 2025, not a guarantee. Together, these tools target high-intent event decisions and post-purchase re-engagement, with the stated aim of turning attention into action and one-time orders into stronger customer relationships.
What's new in ClickHouse Managed Postgres: Customer notifications, better observability, faster backups, extensions, and more
ClickHouse reports a set of updates to its Managed Postgres beta, aimed at simplifying onboarding and advancing its unified Postgres-and-ClickHouse data stack. The redesigned flow supports sample-data loading or PostgreSQL migration through ClickPipes, built-in SQL exploration, replication to ClickHouse, and cross-system queries through pg_clickhouse; services also notify users when disk usage remains above 85%, with console, email, and optional Slack channels. Observability now includes searchable PostgreSQL logs, CPU, memory, disk, IOPS, connection and per-table metrics, query insights, a Prometheus-compatible /metrics endpoint, and an OpenAPI slow-query API. Backups use more CPU and disk throughput on larger servers, making backup and restore times predictable even on 10+ TB servers, while extensions add pg_re2 and improvements to pg_clickhouse and pg_stat_ch, including regex pushdown, Arrow batching, sampling, and safer worker exits; Google Cloud Platform availability and further maintenance, configuration, and integration work are planned.
Introducing OfficeQA Pro V2: A New Benchmark for Enterprise Grounded-Reasoning
OfficeQA Pro V2 benchmarks whether AI agents generalize grounded reasoning to unfamiliar enterprise document collections rather than specialize in one corpus or task distribution. It contains 90 questions grounded in roughly 120,000 pages of U.S. Treasury accounting records spanning 1793–2024, including dense tables, charts, revised values, and changing reporting conventions. Questions were generated with asynth from seeded inputs, corpus evidence searches, traceable reasoning, and quality gates, then evaluated with deterministic exact match at 0.0% tolerance. Out-of-the-box frontier agents averaged 37.5% in one matched comparison, while competition systems averaged 41.1% and the winning team reached 63.3%; Databricks Genie raised matched-model accuracy by 24.0 percentage points on average, although failures remained in parsing, temporal reconciliation, and entity or category interpretation.
Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through Unity AI Gateway
Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI is now available on Databricks through the Foundation Model API and Unity AI Gateway, giving customers native access to an open-weight model alongside proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. The announcement positions Kimi K3 as a frontier-quality option for coding, agentic reasoning, and document understanding, with deployment flexibility, customizability, and zero data retention coverage. Databricks says the model runs against governed enterprise data through Unity Catalog, while Unity AI Gateway provides permissions, safety guardrails, audit trails, spend controls, routing, and a standardized REST API within Databricks’ security perimeter. The post cites a score of 57 and rank of #4 in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, internal benchmarks showing performance at the level of leading proprietary models, and 50–72% lower cost per task; availability includes US hosting for AWS and GCP workspaces.
Cloudflare AI Search: give your agents a search engine for your data
Cloudflare introduced developer experience improvements and a preview pricing model for Cloudflare AI Search. Previously, users had to manually connect separate Cloudflare primitives like Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize, R2, and Browser Run to build a search solution. The platform now automates crawling, ingestion, embedding, and retrieval across structured and unstructured data sources. Developers can index sites without sitemaps using link discovery, expose public /search and /mcp endpoints across namespaces, bind search instances directly to Workers, or secure endpoints with Cloudflare Access. Cloudflare uses this system for developer documentation, its corporate blog, and the Cloudflare Dev Stack MCP server to supply coding agents with cited documentation.
The next generation of MCP
Model Context Protocol previously required stateful connections between clients and remote servers, creating operational complexity around sticky sessions, message replay, and open streams. The newly released MCP 2026-07-28 specification transitions MCP to a fully stateless protocol alongside updated SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, and C#. The protocol eliminates mandatory handshakes and session identifiers from core request paths while enabling servers to run on request-scoped infrastructure like Cloudflare Workers. Interactive elicitation is restructured through Multi Round-Trip Requests, which allow servers to return input requirements without sustaining persistent connections. Standardized headers for method names and improved OAuth authorization mechanisms further enable standard web infrastructure to inspect and manage MCP traffic efficiently.
From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents
Discoverability is shifting from traditional search engine rankings to recommendations generated by AI agents acting on behalf of users. To address this shift, Cloudflare integrated Agent Readiness diagnostics and an Answer Engine Optimization tool into its dashboard. The Diagnostics feature evaluates hostnames against machine-readable standards across tiers ranging from robots.txt and Markdown rendering to OAuth discovery and agent payment protocols. Simultaneously, the Answer Engine Optimization tool measures how frequently leading assistants like Claude and GPT cite, mention, and prominently position brands across industry categories. By evaluating prompt responses using Cloudflare AI Gateway and Workers AI alongside access logs, site owners can systematically track agent traffic, benchmark against competitors, and remediate crawl blockers.
Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable
The modern web produces billions of bot requests that repeatedly fetch unchanged pages, highlighting an architecture fundamentally misaligned with automated visitors acting on behalf of paying users. Cloudflare outlines an open Agentic Internet structured around four foundational capabilities: readability, discoverability, callability, and payability. Identity and access rely on open specifications such as Web Bot Auth and Private Access Control Tokens, while Markdown for Agents and the Kitesurf browser reduce token overhead and context window bloat. For execution and monetization, WebMCP exposes structured tools directly through the browser, and protocols like x402 paired with Monetization Gateway enable per-fetch transactions. These open standards allow domain owners to define tool contracts, verify bot identities, and monetize agent traffic without relying on legacy advertising models.
How Cursor Router chooses the right model for the task
Cursor Router selects models for developer turns using production behavior rather than benchmark scores, balancing user satisfaction and cost. Its routing system first uses Compass, a continuous 0-to-1 complexity predictor trained on follow-up behavior, to keep simple turns on a price-efficient model or upgrade complex ones. Then a taxonomy of domains, tasks, and modifiers compares frontier-model strengths, while an optimizer applies a one-sided 75% uplift threshold and each mode's cost budget. The dataset contains hundreds of thousands of live Cursor turns, preserving conversation signals, model-switching effects, inferred performance from subsequent user actions, and token-based costs including cache misses. Current results report Auto Intelligence at above Fable-level satisfaction with 68% lower cost, and Auto Balance outperforming Opus 4.8 at 41% lower cost while raising satisfaction by 3%.
How we built an automated debugging workflow at Sentry
Sentry automated its internal debugging and issue triage workflows to handle bugs and pull requests generated by AI agents. The company deployed Seer, an AI-powered debugging agent, across several repositories to determine root causes, create fix plans, and open pull requests. To manage the resulting influx of pull requests, Sentry built an automated Slack routine powered by Claude that periodically scans for unaddressed pull requests opened within four hours. The routine asks Seer to identify relevant reviewers using GitHub commit history, verifies pull request status, and tags engineers to request merges, closures, or feedback. Early metrics show a 21 percent increase in pull request action rates, a 13 percent increase in 48-hour response rates, and a 12.5 percent rise in pull requests closed without merging due to duplicate or expanded fixes.
DeepSeek-V4 Flash 0731 vs GPT-5.6 Luna on DeepSWE: Cost and Coding
On the DeepSWE coding benchmark, GPT-5.6 Luna achieves 67.2% pass@1 versus DeepSeek-V4 Flash’s 53.3%, a 14-point gap. DeepSeek costs $0.10 per task, roughly six times less than Luna’s $0.61, delivering 532 solves per $100 versus Luna’s 110. A cascade that runs DeepSeek first and escalates only on failure solves 78.9% of tasks at $0.385 each, beating Luna’s solo accuracy and cutting cost by 37%. DeepSeek fails more gracefully (9% broken tests vs 15%) but is slower and dramatically weaker on JavaScript (35% vs 60%). Luna dominates seven of eight task domains, while DeepSeek leads only on query and config languages, illustrating how inexpensive models can combine with flagships for superior price-performance.
How to Show Your Logo in Apple Mail
Displaying a company logo in Apple Mail can improve inbox recognition, trust, and visual distinctiveness, while cited studies associate logos with higher brand recall, open rates, purchase likelihood, and email confidence. The article presents Apple Branded Mail, a proprietary format shipped in iOS 18.2 in 2024, as a free alternative to inconsistent provider settings and the paid certificates and trademarks sometimes needed for broad BIMI coverage. Setup begins with a DMARC policy of p=quarantine or p=reject, then uses Apple Business Connect to add a brand, upload a PNG, HEIF, or JPEG logo at least 1024 × 1024 pixels, select domains, and verify identity. Verification can take up to seven business days; root-domain branding covers unconfigured subdomains, while brands needing broader client coverage are directed to BIMI.
Agent Plugins package your skills, tools, and more
Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into portable plugins, addressing incompatible wrappers that force authors to maintain client-specific copies. It defines a plugin as a directory with plugin.json, skills/ subdirectories, mcp.json, and client-owned reverse-domain extension namespaces. The manifest fixes component locations, requires explicit MCP server types for stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE, and lets skills continue loading when an MCP entry fails. Version 1 deliberately excludes installation, distribution, permissions, sandboxing, trust verification, and user experience, leaving those concerns to clients and related ecosystem layers such as discovery and catalogs. Google is joining the Core Maintainers and says Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit support the format, while more product integrations are expected.
ClickHouse Release 26.7
ClickHouse 26.7 is a monthly release with 61 new features, 112 performance optimizations, and 329 bug fixes, including improvements to aggregation, joins, vector search, phrase search, query analysis, and URL access. Its combination of optimize_aggregation_in_order and the new optimize_aggregation_in_order_limit turns matching GROUP BY, ORDER BY, and LIMIT queries into low-memory streaming pipelines that can stop reading after N groups. In a TPC-H scale-factor-100 test, the optimized query ran 313× faster, processed 339× fewer rows, and used 592× less peak memory. The release also adds build-side JOIN pruning, LLVM JIT compilation for supported regular expressions, and macOS improvements including faster allocation-heavy workloads, concurrent remote-replica reads, SSD cache dictionaries, FileLog, and STREAM support.
How Physical Intelligence unified its robotics data stack with Postgres managed by ClickHouse
Physical Intelligence, which builds robotics foundation models, needed a data stack that could support both transactional operations and high-cardinality analytical workloads. Its previous single RDS Postgres instance could not handle those demands, so the team migrated to ClickHouse Cloud and adopted Postgres managed by ClickHouse for OLTP alongside ClickHouse for OLAP. Postgres is automatically replicated into ClickHouse through ClickPipes, while materialized views, full-text indices, and a query agent help researchers search across the company’s data. The resulting stack supports faster, easier exploration as data volume grows from the 10 billion to 100 billion row range, and also handles telemetry through ClickHouse with ClickStack and Grafana.
Baseten on Hugging Face Inference Providers 🔥
Baseten is now a supported Inference Provider on the Hugging Face Hub, extending serverless inference on model pages and through the Hugging Face Python and JavaScript SDKs. As part of the initial integration, it supports conversational and text-generation tasks, including access to open-weight models such as Kimi K3, latest DeepSeek V4 Flash, and GLM-5.2, with additional tasks planned to roll out soon. Developers can use a custom provider key for direct calls or authenticate with a Hugging Face token so requests are routed to Baseten; model pages and account settings support provider compatibility and preference ordering. Python and JavaScript OpenAI-compatible examples use the Hugging Face router, while integrated agent harnesses can access Baseten-hosted models without extra glue code.
Top topics
- Architecture834
- Performance816
- LLMs660
- Machine Learning622
- Open Source563
- AI Agents553
- AI470
- Developer Experience448
Weekly digest
The best engineering reads, once a week.