17 posts · 8 companies · newest first
Children don’t solve for play or whimsy. It’s a natural state of being, and many experiences we have in our youth are linked to imagination in some way. When I was younger, to feel imaginative meant to change the world around me, and that immersion drove my definition, understanding, and interaction with the world as it […] The post The Importance of Play & Whimsy at Work appeared first on Atomic Spin.
A workflow is running, and I need to close my laptop. Maybe I’m at a meeting, the end of the day, somewhere without a connection. If the agent is running on the laptop, closing the lid ends the run. For a while, I planned around it: before I left, I made sure agents were wrapping […] The post My Coding Agents Moved Off My Laptop and Onto a Remote Server appeared first on Atomic Spin.
If you’re anything like me, enabling that “Approve for me” setting in your agentic coding tool of choice feels like a big step. Waiting for approval prompts isn’t the best use of my time, but I’m still skeptical enough that I don’t trust the agent to decide entirely for itself when it needs my input. […] The post Get Into Agentic Development From the Shallow End appeared first on Atomic Spin.
I expected my first project using agentic development to feel smooth and easy to pick up from day one. After all, I read Atomic’s agentic playbook and stayed up to date on the latest trends and models. But when I started, I suddenly had more questions than answers. Do I need to design this whole […] The post My First Agentic Project: The Blank Page Was the Hardest Part appeared first on Atomic Spin.
Expedia Group Technology — InnovationHow Expedia Group is getting organizationally and operationally ready for agentsPhoto by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on UnsplashAt Expedia Group™, agents are showing up across the business: traveler-facing trip planners, partner tools, internal copilots, log readers, and a growing number of workflows that make teams say, “We tried this, and it was surprisingly useful.”That energy is exactly what AI should unlock. But without shared foundations, it can also create fragmented technology choices, partial governance stories, and promising experiments that…
How Airbnb’s agent harness transforms unstructured data exploration by encoding scientific methodology into scalable, reproducible, and audit-ready infrastructure.Wren DoughertyAsk a coding agent to analyze 100,000 customer support conversations and within minutes you’ll have a polished taxonomy, precise prevalence numbers, and an executive-ready summary. What you can’t see is the investigation that produced them: the methods it chose, the evidence it weighed, how much to trust it, or whether a second request would agree. All that reaches you is the polish. The model is undeniably…
The more useful coding agents become, the more access they tend to need. Installing dependencies, running commands, changing files, and generally more autonomy are part of the appeal. They’re also the point where I start thinking about what else the coding agent can reach, especially while these tools are changing so quickly. My answer is […] The post Your Coding Agent Should be in Jail. Here’s Why and How. appeared first on Atomic Spin.
Tilman Drerup, Moe Moazzami, Shih-Ting Lin, Greg Reda (and many more)IntroductionAt Instacart, artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way our machine learning engineers operate. In a prior blog post, we used one of our teams as a case study to illustrate how the emergence of agents has reshaped what machine learning engineers spend their time on. The post below goes a few levels deeper and zooms in on the machine learning modeling process itself, an area where recent developments in AI-assisted research have opened up exciting new frontiers that we are now actively exploring.…
Learn how Docker Sandboxes can make AI evaluation workflows more reproducible with consistent execution, structured artifacts, and runtime evidence.
A note from the author: Just before this post was set to be published, a new feature was released on Claude Code that makes this post somewhat obsolete: Claude’s new “Concise” output style. I was sick of scanning through walls of text each time I asked Claude Code a question. Skills like I have ADHD […] The post Quit Blabbing, Claude Code! Shorter Answers with Output Styles appeared first on Atomic Spin.
I gave a coding agent the same job four different ways and measured what each cost. The packaging barely mattered, but something else did.At OLX, we’ve been pushing to get AI tools into everyday engineering work. This has enabled us to have faster delivery and better test coverage, with less time spent on the mechanical parts. Our biggest constraint, however, is tokens. Tokens being a finite resource, we keep running up against our allocated quota. So the real question is how to get the best results per token spent.There’s no shortage of advice on how to feed context into agents: put…
Run AI agents in GitHub Actions with Docker Sandboxes. See how isolated agents can run Testcontainers tests, fix code, and open draft pull requests.
Learn how AI coding agents can run attacker code through commands you already approved and how Docker Sandboxes limit what an attack can reach.
How we built a Slack-native on-call reasoning harness at Instacart that shortens time to first insight, speeds up theory testing, and turns tribal knowledge into reusable infrastructure.Key Contributors: Karthik Halukurike, Gabe de Oliveira, Hassan Jallad, Alan WongOn-call work is a race to turn noisy signals into shared judgment. The hardest minutes of that race aren’t the ones spent fixing the bug — they’re the ones spent figuring out what the bug even is, while everyone in the thread is asking the same question from a slightly different angle.Blueberry is the system we built at Instacart…
This was originally written and published by Christophe Spy (Director of Engineering, Medium) as an internal Medium Eng post.Desired outcomes (what “good” looks like)🙏🏻 These are the kinds of changes we want to see if AI is going well at Medium.Less drudgery, more leverageEngineers use AI to remove repetitive, low‑leverage work (e.g. tedious refactors, boilerplate, large test suites), not just to ship more tickets.We see examples like:“We took a part of the codebase that was basically untestable and, with AI, made it testable and added meaningful coverage in days instead of months.”“We…
Over the past year, the way we use AI at Thumbtack has gone through a few phases. Early on it was mostly curiosity, people experimenting with ChatGPT and Copilot on side projects, sharing tips in Slack. Then the models got noticeably better at working inside real, mature codebases (not just greenfield projects) and the conversation shifted. It stopped being about whether we should adopt AI-assisted development and became about how. Lately, it is moving towards the adoption of end to end agentic workflows for development.I’ve been thinking a lot about what this shift means, not just for our…
Expedia Group Technology — EngineeringWhen your platform’s next user isn’t humanPhoto by Alex Vasey on UnsplashEarlier this month I hosted a town hall for Expedia Group™ Platform Engineering organization, focused on the rapid progress happening in the agentic coding space, and what it means for us as engineers and as a platform team.Our teams are responsible for the horizontal foundations that power Expedia Group: AI and analytics, data, user experience platforms, edge and API platforms, cloud and infrastructure, as well as EG’s developer experience.In other words, we own the “platform of…