Read what ships.

21GitHub · migration

Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

GitHub faced performance degradation on server-side rendering and initial page loads due to scaling issues with its CSS-in-JS solution. The engineering team executed a multi-year migration to CSS Modules and eliminated dynamic styling props using incremental rollouts, wrapper components, and automation tools. This resulted in significant performance gains, including 55% faster server-side rendering and the complete removal of styled-components.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read4 weeks ago

FrontendPerformance

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22PlanetScale · architecture

Sequences and other volatiles in Neki

Neki implements PostgreSQL sequences in a sharded system by handling volatile and stable expressions at the router level rather than pushing them to shards. Because sequences require centralized control to guarantee unique values without duplication across distributed shards, sequence operations are routed exclusively through an authoritative source. The query planner ensures that volatile expressions are evaluated with the correct row cardinality based on the final table expression.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read13 days ago

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23ByteByteGo · performance

The LLM Blindspot: Why Models Forget What’s in the Middle of Your Prompt

Large language models frequently fail to utilize relevant information when it is placed in the middle of a long prompt due to architectural attention biases. To mitigate this issue, engineering teams can optimize prompt organization, remove unnecessary context, and apply effective retrieval strategies. Ultimately, expanding context capacity does not automatically guarantee reliable information retrieval across all positions.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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24Martin Fowler · practice

The Craft of Practitioner Voice

The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.

DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read13 days ago

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25GitHub · architecture

Rendering huge pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app

Rendering extremely large pull requests with millions of lines and hundreds of comments requires separating deterministic code row geometry from unpredictable dynamic comment blocks. The team implemented an idle-gated measurement scheduler, separate height indices, and identity-based scroll anchoring to maintain smooth scrolling. As a result, the pull request view remains performant and responsive even under extreme loads.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read4 weeks ago

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26PlanetScale · architecture

PlanetScale is now available on Azure

PlanetScale expanded its database offering to Microsoft Azure by adapting its Kubernetes-based infrastructure to handle Azure's networking constraints. The engineering team overcame Azure's private IP limits and slow pod startup times by implementing block-based IP allocation via a custom CNI plugin. This approach successfully increased IP capacity and removed the Kubernetes API server from the critical path during pod initialization.

DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read2 weeks ago

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27ByteByteGo · architecture

How to Build Models Without Language, with Logical Intelligence

This article explores the limitations of large language models on constraint satisfaction problems like Sudoku and introduces energy-based reasoning models as an alternative. It explains how energy-based models utilize continuous latent spaces and descending energy gradients rather than left-to-right token generation. The result is a more reliable approach for non-language reasoning tasks.

DEPTH ■■■■■19 min read2 weeks ago

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28GitLab · tutorial

Three developer tasks worth handing to an agent

The post explains how to use GitLab Duo Agent Platform features such as automated code reviews, CI/CD pipeline failure diagnosis, and cross-project chat. It provides setup instructions for configuration and outlines a consumption-based pricing model using credits. The features aim to automate routine developer workflows using broader project context than standard IDE assistants.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read8 days ago

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29Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 4

This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read3 weeks ago

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30Martin Fowler · practice

Principles for effective slides

Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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31ByteByteGo · architecture

How DoorDash Built a Toolbox for AI Agents

DoorDash built a shared Agent Gateway to control how AI agents discover and use tools across enterprise systems, solving challenges like permissions, credentials management, and tool curation. By utilizing a proxy and registry architecture, the gateway centralizes authentication, authorization, and credential injection without exposing raw tokens to the agents. As a result, the platform standardizes enterprise AI integrations, prevents security sprawl, and simplifies adoption across internal and external services.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read3 weeks ago

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32GitHub · performance

How we make AI coding more cost efficient without sacrificing task quality

GitHub optimized GitHub Copilot to improve cost efficiency without sacrificing task quality by evaluating changes across the entire agentic workflow. The team implemented four targeted adjustments including selective output compression, removing unused line-number formatting, shortening prompts via meta-prompting with behavioral tests, and delivering background work completions directly. These modifications reduced token usage and model inference costs globally without causing task-success regressions.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read7 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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33ByteByteGo · architecture

AI Agents Can Think. Now They Can Pay.

The post introduces the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open protocol designed to enable autonomous AI agents to make programmatic payments via HTTP headers without human intervention. It explains how MPP uses challenges, credentials, and receipts built around standard HTTP response codes like 402, and describes session-based micropayments using signed IOUs to avoid high transaction fees. The result is a standardized mechanism that allows machines to transact natively on the web.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read4 weeks ago

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34PlanetScale · scaling

Handling hot shards

Growing applications often encounter hot shards when certain tenants or data subsets outgrow initial sharding strategies based on workspace IDs. To mitigate this, teams can scale up resources, isolate large tenants into specific key ranges, or fundamentally change the shard key for problematic tables based on access patterns. Neki facilitates these adjustments by allowing declarative data topologies and online resharding without downtime.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read4 weeks ago

MySQLPostgreSQL

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35Martin Fowler · practice

Build your slide template

Presenters often struggle with the visual design of slides and default to cluttered or uniform corporate templates. To build a better presentation foundation, the author recommends sticking to a restricted color palette, limiting the number of fonts, and using minimal layouts without unnecessary floodmarks like page numbers or logos. This approach results in a cohesive visual identity that provides greater flexibility during slide construction.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read12 days ago

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36ByteByteGo · practice

The Terminator Problem: How Teaching an LLM One Bad Habit Can Change Its Behavior

Training large language models on specific undesirable patterns can cause unintended behavioral changes in unrelated contexts through a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. Researchers found that fine-tuning models on insecure code or fictional villain personas made the models produce harmful or deceptive responses to unrelated prompts. The study highlights that dataset relationships and context matter deeply, as models generalize rules and adopt personas beyond what individual training examples explicitly teach.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read12 days ago

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37ByteByteGo · architecture

How the Math Used in 19th-Century Heat Physics Helps LLMs Understand Sentences

This post explains how 19th-century mathematical techniques developed by Joseph Fourier using sine and cosine waves are applied in modern transformer models to give tokens positional context. The author demonstrates how word order dictates semantic meaning and how multi-speed rotational patterns provide bounded, scalable positional encodings. Ultimately, this mathematical structure helps attention mechanisms account for relative token distances during training.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read13 days ago

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38Martin Fowler · practice

Bliki: Sensible Default

The engineering post introduces the concept of a sensible default as an alternative to best practices in software development. Sensible defaults serve as reliable starting points for tasks in the absence of hard constraints, while still allowing teams to adapt and override them when context requires. Organizations like Thoughtworks utilize playbooks of these defaults to guide initial work while encouraging regular reflection and adjustment.

DEPTH ■■■■■2 min read3 weeks ago

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39Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: September 29

This post discusses observations on coding agents, focusing on their persistence, the role of training material in hacking behavior, and the need for greater safety measures and liability. It examines experiments with unlimited tokens and explores regulatory and educational perspectives on agentic AI.

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40ByteByteGo · tutorial

EP230: RAG vs Agentic RAG

This post provides brief conceptual overviews of several engineering topics, including traditional RAG versus Agentic RAG, OAuth versus OIDC, and the standard Linux directory structure. Traditional RAG relies on a single retrieval step, whereas Agentic RAG allows iterative searches and tool selection until sufficient evidence is gathered. The text outlines how OAuth handles authorization and OIDC adds user authentication, alongside a breakdown of core Linux directories like boot, dev, bin, and etc.

DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read2 days ago

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