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Chroma and Agentic Retrieval
Data retrieval is a fundamental challenge in AI systems, and the approaches for solving it are still evolving. Vector search was an early answer to the retrieval problem, but the rise of agentic systems has raised the stakes considerably. Agents issue queries at machine speed, decompose complex…
Scaling Time-Series Workloads on Postgres
Many real-world processes produce data as a continuous stream rather than as isolated records. Sensor readings, financial markets, and application telemetry all generate data this way. This kind of time-series data has a distinctive shape. It’s written far more often than it is updated, it…
Scaling Agent Workloads at Vercel
Most AI agent setups today are built around a single session, where one user interacts with one agent at a time. However, that model breaks down when an agent has to serve a business, where thousands of requests can arrive at once and each session needs to be isolated, durable, and recoverable…
Inside Google’s Database Infrastructure for the AI Era
Historically, databases were responsible for storing data and returning exact results in response to queries. However, AI is now bending that contract in a new direction. Applications increasingly expect structured and unstructured data to come together. This is pushing databases into territory…
A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems
Building software that runs across many machines is notoriously difficult. Developers have to grapple with problems such as race conditions, partial failures, and message ordering. Notably, one category of distributed software has largely escaped…
SED News: The NVIDIA-Hugging Face Deal, China’s Proxy Economy, the Open Weight Surge
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this end-of-summer episode, Gregor and Sean turn to a busy season of mergers and…
Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context
Retrieval has become one of the central problems in building useful AI systems. The standard approach to grounding a model in one’s own data has been retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, where an agent searches a vector database for relevant information at query time. That pattern works, but it…
The Death of Online Anonymity
Age verification is reshaping how people access the internet. An ever-growing patchwork of laws can now require government IDs, facial age estimation, or behavioral inference before you can enter digital spaces. Discord, app stores, social media platforms, and AI chatbots are all being pulled into…
TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next
TypeScript is a programming language that builds on JavaScript by adding a system of types. Those types let developers describe the shape of their data and catch mistakes before code ever runs, while also powering the autocompletion and editor tooling that many developers now rely on every day. It…
The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value
It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those gains do not seem to be transforming businesses at an organizational level. One…
AI and the New Global Security Landscape
The conversation about AI often focuses on software, automation, and the race between attackers and defenders in code. However, some of the most consequential risks lie further afield, in domains where a mistake is measured in human lives. Advanced models can now offer step-by-step guidance toward…
How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems
News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a system can reason about content the way it reasons about language. However, that…
Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code
For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not fully trusted, it increasingly runs in isolated, sandboxed environments. Meanwhile…
SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into a wave of “runaway AI” stories, including…
The Terminal as an Agentic Interface
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category…
AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain
Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happening daily, with malicious actors exploiting the trust developers place in…
Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents
The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats. Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which…
The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia
Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in…
NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents
AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of the first serious attempts to fulfill that vision, connecting frontier coding…
AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations
AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work…
