Introducing composable, module system native and agent friendly command line tools for modern Java development By Danny Thomas, JVM Ecosystem Team Recent work on the Java language to pave the on-ramp has made it easier than ever to start a Java program and evolve it using the full language and platform. At the end of that on-ramp lies Java’s mature build and dependency management ecosystem, capable of carrying…
I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures…
By Emma Yanyang Kong , Aditya Deshpande , Asad Abbasi , Bowei Yan , David Fagnan , Ashish Rastogi , Dhaval Patel , Ray Zhang Introduction The Netflix experience is a journey of discovery. Every visual cue, from the artwork on a title to the video previews that autoplay while you browse, is there to connect you with a story you will love. We call these visual cues assets , and choosing the right one for each member…
Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willison sees two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems…
Samuel Yeboah , Francesco Di Chiara and Mingliang Liu Today, Netflix runs two Flink autoscalers. That is exactly one more than we want. We built the first one in-house years ago, when there was no mature option suited to our platform. The second came from the Apache Flink community, and it can scale workloads our homegrown system was never designed for. We now run both in production and are steadily converging on…
Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. more…
How and Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Distributed Graph: Part 3 — Querying the graph with gRPC execution API Authors: Nilesh Mishra and Ajit Koti This is the third entry of a multi-part blog series describing how we built a Real-Time Distributed Graph (RDG). In Part 1 , we discussed the motivation for creating the RDG and the architecture of the data processing pipeline that populates it. In Part 2 , we discussed…
A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. more…
by Aarti Laddha , Richard Diaz-Cool , Rishika Idnani , Venkatesh Selveraj Netflix supports a vast and evolving set of features and content types, ranging from 4K streaming and immersive audio to live streaming and cloud gaming, across a diverse ecosystem of devices. However, not all devices are created equal. Hardware limitations such as available RAM, CPU cores, display capabilities, or platform support mean that…
Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them: . This explains why the first major AI products appeared in chat, image generation, and code assistance. Not because these were the hardest human problems, but because their outputs were relatively easy to inspect. A user can judge the tone of a message, look at an image, or…
Authors: Ying Li , Arjun Rao , Shradha Sehgal Introduction Recommendations sit at the heart of the Netflix experience. Our current production models rely on thousands of hand‑crafted features over users, items, and interactions, along with specialized architectures for sequence modeling, feature interactions, and multi‑task objectives. This stack has evolved over many years to support diverse content types (movies…
Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all. more…
By AI Platform’s Model Runtime team and Inference team Introduction Most organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs. Netflix went further — we run the full stack ourselves, from model deployment through inference, inside our existing production environment rather than a separate ML silo. Some of those decisions weren’t obvious, and a few revealed their trade-offs only under production load. This post focuses on…
The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car. But another variable is dosage: a little pain-killer salves my headache, but too much will kill me. The importance of dosage was noticed by a…
By Parth Jain , Rakesh Sukumar , Yingwu Zhao , Renzo Sanchez-Silva & Nathan Fisher A deep dive into the engineering challenges of building a real-time service dependency map at Netflix scale: from streaming architectures and distributed aggregation pipelines to time-travel queries and the methodology that made it work. Introduction In our first post , we introduced the problem: engineers at Netflix needed a unified…
Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. more…
Authors: Lequn Wang , J iangwei Pan , and Linas Baltrunas Figure 1. Autoregressive homepage generation. GenPage builds a Netflix homepage one row or entity at a time, each one conditioned on what’s already on the page and the user’s context. Introduction The Netflix homepage is the first thing users see when they open the app and the primary way they discover content to enjoy. Almost every part of it is…
TL;DR Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne. It was one of the more interesting panels I’ve done, largely because we disagreed. As my colleague Martin Fowler says, panels are much more interesting when people disagree and both sides have…
Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of signs of AI writing . That page points out that: Humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing human and LLM-generated text. While research on humans’ abilities to detect AI-generated text is still…
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