Read what ships.

01Shopify · architecture

We gave AI agents a mobile dev environment

Engineering teams outgrew their local machines while running parallel AI mobile development agents, constrained by heavy builds and lack of iOS tools on Linux. To solve this, they built Remote Dev using warm pools of remote Macs connected via SSH alongside separate Linux VMs for Android virtualization, paired with agent skills and live browser streaming. This setup shifted workflow bottlenecks, increasing AI-merged pull requests from 6 percent to 61 percent.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read3 days ago

ArchitectureMobile

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02Grab · architecture

App stability at scale with a layered defense

To maintain app stability amidst rapid weekly releases and AI-generated code, Grab uses a layered defense strategy covering prevention, release gates, and incident response. This pipeline includes static analysis via custom lint rules, multiple tiers of automated and manual testing, a pre-production early access build, staged rollouts, and feature flags with instant kill switches. As a result, critical defects are caught early in the development lifecycle before reaching the wider production user base.

DEPTH ■■■■■16 min read4 days ago

MobileReliability

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03Shopify · architecture

How Shopify turns open models into task experts

Shopify uses a continual learning flywheel to post-train open models, such as NVIDIA Nemotron, to serve as dedicated subagents for specific tasks like GraphQL generation. By optimizing inference and utilizing automated self-healing to generate training data from production failures, the team successfully created task experts that outperform frontier models while reducing serving costs by 90-98% and improving response times.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago

Architecture

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04Sentry · architecture

Sentry JavaScript SDK v11 adds tracing for all JS platforms

Sentry replaced its OpenTelemetry-based JavaScript SDK instrumentation with a source-code transformation approach using diagnostics channels in version 11. This change removes reliance on Node-specific module loader hooks, enabling reliable tracing across non-Node runtimes like Deno, Bun, and Cloudflare Workers, while also supporting bundled applications. The result is a simplified architecture that reduces bundle weight and fixes previous limitations with load order and immutable exports.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read2 weeks ago

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05Shopify · architecture

Cross-store product clustering across millions of stores

Shopify needed to group identical product listings from millions of different merchants under a single global identifier. To solve this at scale without comparing every possible pair, the team implemented a multi-stage pipeline using vector retrieval, a tiered scoring system of ML models, and a bounded graph clustering approach. This architecture successfully standardizes product data across the entire platform while controlling computational costs.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read5 days ago

Architecture

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06Sentry · performance

Reducing Android scope-sync overhead in Sentry Flutter

The Sentry Flutter team investigated scope-sync overhead on Android and found redundant data normalization across isolates alongside unnecessary buffer copies during JSON encoding. By removing the duplicate normalization and encoding directly to UTF-8 bytes, the team reduced processing time by 27 to 30 percent across benchmarked payloads.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read2 weeks ago

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07Shopify · tooling

Building Overexposed: understanding application exposure

The team built an automated scanner called Overexposed to track internet-facing services and verify access controls across Kubernetes and Cloud Run. By querying live cloud inventories and probing endpoints like an outsider, the scanner classifies exposure while avoiding false assumptions from static config files. As a result, the engineering organization improved accuracy and significantly reduced inconclusive findings over time.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read5 days ago

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08Grab · architecture

Powering AI-led research through simulation

The engineering team built a self-contained simulation platform called sim-rs to model marketplace dispatch dynamics and accelerate experimentation. By connecting automated software agents to this simulator with strict safety safeguards, the team successfully optimized strategy policies and simulator performance. This closed-loop lab environment allows agents to test ideas rapidly while ensuring that only valid, production-ready improvements are produced.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read2 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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09Sentry · performance

The Sentry Android SDK is now 20-30% faster!

The Sentry team optimized the Android SDK to reduce initialization time by 20-30% and background CPU usage by up to 10%. Improvements were achieved by profiling with Perfetto, replacing slow runtime manifest parsing and DSN parsing with build-time bytecode writing and lightweight parsers, and reusing thread pools. Upgrading to the latest SDK version allows applications to realize these startup performance gains.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read5 days ago

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10Shopify · architecture

ShopGym: Realistic, reproducible sandboxes for shopping agents

Training and evaluating shopping agents is difficult due to changing live store environments, bot detection, and limited hand-built test stores. The team developed ShopGym, a framework that converts live storefronts into self-contained, anonymized sandbox shops and generates benchmark tasks. Evaluation showed that synthetic shops preserve key structural properties and behavioral alignment with live stores, giving agents a reliable environment to practice and improve.

DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read3 weeks ago

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11Sentry · tooling

Unreal MCP now speaks Sentry

The Sentry team integrated their crash reporting plugin with Unreal Engine's new experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing coding agents to fully automate setup and debugging. By combining editor tools and Sentry MCP, an agent successfully configured the SDK, uploaded debug symbols, packaged a build, induced a crash, and traced the root cause without manual file editing. The integration streamlines crash reporting setup, though it currently suffers from occasional agent tool-discovery issues and server fragility across editor restarts.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read2 weeks ago

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12Sentry · practice

Should you use a log or a metric?

This post explains the distinction between logs and metrics in application monitoring, noting that logs capture what was true during specific events for debugging while metrics track ongoing numerical trends over time. The author demonstrates how to implement both using Sentry SDKs during a user signup flow and outlines criteria for choosing between them. The resulting takeaway helps engineers decide whether to log an event or track it as a metric based on the questions they need to answer.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 days ago

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13Grab · architecture

Smarter personalization: How property data helps us understand user price sensitivity

Existing user personalization systems fail to systematically account for residential property values, leading to one-dimensional profiles and regional blind spots. A conceptual four-step method is proposed that combines public property data, large language models, building-level price estimation, and hierarchical clustering to classify user affluence. The approach remains unimplemented, with future viability depending on technical validation, data quality, and privacy approvals.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read2 weeks ago

Data EngineeringMachine Learning

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14Shopify · tooling

Helix: The internal tool powering our Shopify app's native migration

Shopify is migrating its mobile apps from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin using an internal LLM-powered tool called Helix. Helix breaks migrations down into small checkpoints and enforces strict quality gates covering behavior, UI equivalence, architectural compliance, and human review. This iterative loop allows the team to reliably generate and migrate hundreds of screens to native code.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read4 weeks ago

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15Sentry · practice

How Etsy gets its mobile apps ready for peak traffic

Etsy prepares its mobile apps for peak holiday traffic through advance planning, operational guardrails, and risk management rather than relying on capacity scaling or the ability to quickly revert binaries. The engineering team utilizes a phased code slush, dual crash reporting, remote feature flags, and custom error tagging to surface and mitigate issues effectively under heavy loads. By connecting crash rates to business metrics and automating manual triage workflows incrementally, the organization maintains high visibility and reliability when updates cannot be instantly rolled back.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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16Grab · architecture

Data Mesh at Grab (Part III): Operationalizing data reliability with automated DPIs

Grab addressed runtime data reliability issues in its data mesh by implementing automated Data Production Issues (DPIs). The system uses an incident orchestrator to detect contract breaches, a Data Health API for cross-platform root cause analysis, and Hugo for automated remediation. This approach resolved 86.9 percent of incidents automatically and made mean time to resolve six times faster.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read8 weeks ago

DatabasesObservability

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17Shopify · migration

Migrating Shop app from React Native to native

Shop migrated its mobile app from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin by leveraging AI coding agents to accelerate the rewrite. The migration resulted in improved startup times, higher session stability, smaller Android app sizes, and smoother rendering performance.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read6 weeks ago

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18Grab · architecture

Automated merchant review summary system with integrated feedback

To help users navigate large volumes of unstructured merchant reviews, the engineering team built an automated review summary system using representative sampling, large language models, and automated quality control checks. The pipeline generates overall and topic-based summaries while incorporating maintenance triggers based on new review counts and consumer feedback. This approach reduces the text consumers need to scan while ensuring claims remain grounded in source data.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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19Shopify · migration

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify

Shopify is migrating its mobile applications from React Native back to native Swift and Kotlin. The team determined that the emergence of advanced coding agents significantly reduces the cost of maintaining platform parity, making native development the superior choice again. To execute this migration efficiently, Shopify developed a system called Helix and a CLI-driven, agent-addressable architecture to enable fast, autonomous testing.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read6 weeks ago

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20Sentry · performance

Application Metrics caught my broken size estimator

An engineer integrated application metrics into a client-side video conversion tool to monitor file size estimation accuracy without using invasive telemetry. By tracking key performance indicators and analyzing the metric distributions, they discovered that an AI-generated estimation formula was flawed and producing results off by up to 83 percent. Replacing the broken logic with a correct bitrate-based formula brought the size estimation accuracy to within five percent of real-world results.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read7 weeks ago

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