cartero Wednesday, August 12, 2026 · No. 25956
LLM Evaluation

Beyond the Menu Tree: How Yelp Built a Smarter Customer Success Chatbot with AI

The Evolution of Support: From Fixed Phrases to Conversation At Yelp, delivering responsive and accurate customer support is a core priority. For years, our legacy Customer Success (CS) Chatbot provided support by guiding users through a static support experience. Users either navigated a 2-step menu tree or typed a query that was matched against a fixed set of phrases to retrieve an answer. While functional, the legacy chatbot had a key limitation: its reliance on rigid matching meant that i...

Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal Prompts to Integrate Your Affect

Decision Catalyst is a multimodal system that uses a camera to interpret a user's facial expression, then adds that to the embedding of an AI prompt query.

AI Agents

Fragments: May 27

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point - October 2025), we show our frustration that things we’ve been saying for thirty years still need to be said, we say how anything like a manifesto reunion needs to be led by a younger generation, and opine on what ju...

Machine Learning

SilverTorch: Index as Model — A New Retrieval Paradigm for Recommendation Systems

We’re introducing SilverTorch, a reimagining of recommendation systems that unifies all retrieval components for user generated content under a unified architecture.  SilverTorch shows up to 23.7x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. It’s also showing 20.9x more compute cost efficiency compared to a CPU-based solution while also improving accuracy.  Our research paper, “SilverTorch: A [...] Read More... The post SilverTorch: Index as Model — A New Retrieval...

Stripe

Expanding Stripe Radar to protect more of your business

Radar now blocks high-risk transactions across all supported payment methods; defends against new fraud types like multi-account abuse and pay-as-you-go abuse, regardless of which payment processor you use; and gives platforms new tools to evaluate and mitigate merchant risk on and off Stripe.

Artificial Intelligence

Human Bottlenecks

Rust

I’m building AionDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible database in Rust for AI/RAG workloads

I am the author of aiondb. I created this database because I felt that the architectures of competing products weren’t all that efficient. I am convinced that it is possible to build a multi-model database that performs just as well in graph processing as Neo4j, just as well in vector processing as Qdrant, and just as well in relational processing as 60% of PostgreSQL’s speed. I chose to use a single execution engine on unified MVCC/WAL storage, where the planner selects the physical repr...

Cloudflare

Iran's Internet is partially restored, Cloudflare Radar data shows

Cloudflare Radar data confirms early indications of a partial Internet restoration in Iran, nearly three months after the shutdown began. Traffic spikes and DNS queries have risen, but network activity is currently just 40% of pre-shutdown levels.

AWS

Meet Our Newest AWS Heroes – May 2026

We’re excited to welcome four outstanding community leaders as our newest AWS Heroes. These individuals embody the spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing that makes the AWS community thrive. From building AI-powered tools that help fellow builders navigate AWS re:Invent, to leading some of the largest AWS communities in Latin America, to sharing deep cloud […]

AI Coding Tools

The test suite as a regression sensor

Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…

Graph Databases

Elizabeth Garrett Christensen: Graph Queries in Postgres with Apache AGE

The Iceberg tables look like normal Postgres tables. You create them with USING iceberg and they're backed by Parquet on S3: Postgres engines now have access to more data than ever. With extensions like pg_lake, you can connect Postgres to gobs of files in object storage like csv, json, Apache Parquet™ and Apache Iceberg™. But having access to data in object storage and being able to aggregate data in object storage are two different things. This blog walks through the Postgres extension,...

AI Coding Tools

Agents on a leash: Agentic AI remains mostly single-agent and monitored at work

AI’s impact on software engineering continues, and more and more of that AI is packaged as agents as results from our newest pulse survey show agentic usage has almost doubled (59%) since we last asked about it in our annual Developer Survey