jlaneve

Dane says Cloudflare has no service disruptions: https://x.com/dok2001/status/2095538619603628388?s=20

Astronomer | https://astronomer.io | NYC preferably, open to remote | Full-time

Hiring for ~10 eng roles listed at astronomer.io/careers, but the focus is specifically on distributed systems, observability, and applied AI.

Astronomer is a primary contributor to Apache Airflow and offers our customers a managed Airflow service with a similar business model as Databricks with Spark or Confluent with Kafka. Our tech stack is primarily Go, Python, and TypeScript. The problems we work on generally center around (1) building out our commercial managed Airflow offering, (2) building a data + infra observability stack on top of Airflow, and (3) building AI products and experiences that are genuinely load-bearing and additive to our customers experience on the platform.

We're also starting to write more about the work we're doing, this is pretty representative: https://www.astronomer.io/blog/astro-airflow-re-engineered-f...

Apply using our website or email me - my email is [firstname]@astronomer.io. Include HN in the subject to make sure I don't miss it! If you're emailing me, please include your resume, GitHub and a short note on what you deem to be the most interesting thing you've worked on.

Just for Opus 4.6. I've switched back to Sonnet and it's working.

We’re seeing this all the time - taking traditional workflow orchestration tools and instrumenting LLMs as part of it. It becomes a lot easier to build these because the complexity comes from a) the model, which frontier labs are making easy and b) productionizing a workflow, which workflow orchestration tools make easy. It’s also easy to recognize value because these workflows are often grounded in existing work and thus easy to measure.

We see these patterns do much so that we packaged it up for Airflow (one of the most popular workflow tools)!

https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk

The link should be https://saxenauts.io/blog/persona-graph

On the home page right now it links to the Slash funding announcement 4 days ago, but the description looks way off

Where do you think the gap between Airflow and what you need is?

I've been most impressed with Pydantic AI [1], so much so that we ended up building an SDK around it specifically for LLM workflows on Airflow [2].

[1] https://ai.pydantic.dev

[2] https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk

Disclaimer: author of the SDK here.

Airflow actually uses decorators to indicate something is an explicit task in a data pipeline vs just a utility function, so this follows that pattern!

It also uses an "operator" under the hood (Airflow's term for a pre-built, parameterized task) which can be subclassed and customized if you want to do any customization.

Disclaimer: author of the SDK here.

It is _potentially_ more restrictive than writing pure Python functions, but the plus side is that we can interject certain Airflow-specific features into how the agent runs. And this isn't mean for someone who knows agents inside & out / wants the low-level customizability.

The best example of this today is log groups: Airflow lets you log things out as part of a "group" which has some UI abstractions to make it easier. This SDK takes the raw agent tool calls and turns them each into a log group, so you can see a) at a high level what the agent is doing, and b) drill down into a specific tool call to understand what's happening within the tool call.

To your point about the `@task.llm_branch`, the SDK & Pydantic AI (which the SDK uses under the hood) will re-prompt the LLM up to a certain number of attempts if it receives output that isn't the name of a downstream task. So there shouldn't be much finickiness.

I appreciate the distinction between agents and workflows - this seems to be commonly overlooked and in my opinion helps ground people in reliability vs capability. Today (and in the near future) there's not going to be "one agent to rule them all", so these LLM workflows don't need to be incredibly capable. They just need to do what they're intended to do _reliably_ and nothing more.

I've started taking a very data engineering-centric approach to the problem where you treat an LLM as an API call as you would any other tool in a pipeline, and it's crazy (or maybe not so crazy) what LLM workflows are capable of doing, all with increased reliability. So much so that I've tried to package my thoughts / opinions up into an AI SDK for Apache Airflow [1] (one of the more popular orchestration tools that data engineers use). This feels like the right approach and in our customer base / community, it also maps perfectly to the organizations that have been most successful. The number of times I've seen companies stand up an AI team without really understanding _what problem they want to solve_...

[1] https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk

Hi HN,

We've built an SDK for building DAGs / data pipelines with LLMs in Apache Airflow [1] using Pydantic AI [2] under the hood. I've seen success across the board with Airflow users building simple LLM workflows before moving on to "AI agents". In my experience, the noise around building agents means that people forget that there are other ways to get more immediate value out of LLMs.

Coupling Airflow for orchestration and Pydantic AI for LLM interactions has turned out to be a very pragmatic approach to building these workflows (and agents). Neither tool "gets in the way" of what you're trying to do. Airflow's been around for 10+ years and has a very well-built orchestration engine rich with everything you need to write production grade data pipelines, and Pydantic AI's been a refreshing take on working with LLMs.

Would love some feedback from this community!

[1] https://github.com/apache/airflow [2] https://ai.pydantic.dev

Astronomer | Software Engineer, Office of the CTO | NYC | astronomer.io

Astronomer is a Series C data infra startup building a data ops platform for our customers on top of Apache Airflow. Airflow is one of the largest open-source data projects, allowing users to write, run, and scale data pipelines in Python. It's downloaded over 30m times a month!

The core of this role is to experiment with new ideas and build prototypes. As a Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO, you will act as a “hacker in residence” - someone with the freedom to experiment, explore big ideas, and validate concepts. You’ll be a generalist, working with whatever technology, tools, and programming languages are required to validate an idea. For the ideas that do work out, we work hand-in-hand with the broader product and engineering teams to turn the idea into a customer-facing feature or new product.

There’s a particular focus on how Generative AI will change the lives of data professionals over the next 3-5 years. We want to lead the market with both a perspective and set of products on how AI will evolve from a human-driven copilot to a set of fully autonomous agents.

Role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astronomer/77867d45-1141-4ba6-8772-...

My email is [my first name]@astronomer.io if you want to reach out directly. Please include HN in the subject line so I don't miss it!

Here's their blog post announcement too: https://digitalhumanity.substack.com/p/project-sid-many-agen...

> The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth.

Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need to push code to a repo to test things in CI...

This fits in about 9gb vRAM, right over the 8gb in an RTX 4060 (unless you're talking about the 16gb version). You could continue quantizing it down past 8 bits but at that point you're losing a lot more precision, so YMMV

Hey HN!

We've had lots of success using quantized LLMs for inference speed and cost because you can fit them on smaller GPUs (Nvidia T4, Nvidia K80, RTX 4070, etc). There's no need for everyone to quantize - we quantized Llama 3 8b Instruct to 8 bits using GPTQ and figured we'd share it with the community. Excited to see what everyone does with it!

I don't know much about Bracket, but looking through their docs[1] it looks like they support streaming from Salesforce as an alternative to batch/scheduled jobs (which is what Fivetran does)

[1] https://docs.usebracket.com/streaming

The Trunk registry[1] that they support is also super interesting, nice to see all Postgres extensions in one place

[1]: https://pgt.dev/

Heads up, this blog doesn't seem to work on Safari. I see a couple errors in the console, but the culprit appears to be `SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: invalid group specifier name`

This isn't really "from seat-based", right? After reading the announcement, it seems they're _adding_ consumption-based pricing on top of the already seat-based pricing. If you're running over 20k models per month, it seems you're going to be paying more for the incremental runs.

Original paper is on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08997

Yeah, I've noticed the same. It seems like just the search results don't show up - I see video recommendations, additional search recommendations, search results, etc.

Author here, good question. Today, the IDE's designed to write new pipelines for individuals who don't have experience with Airflow (data scientists, analysts, etc.) to let them self-service their orchestration needs. But we have an ambitious roadmap ahead of us, and importing other Airflow DAGs is certainly part of it!

That’s one of the things we’re working on at Astronomer - check out the Astronomer Registry! registry.astronomer.io

Looks super cool. What kind of NLP?

Astronomer | https://astronomer.io | Remote | Full-Time Astronomer is the commercial developer of Apache Airflow, a community-driven open-source tool that’s leading the market in data orchestration. We’re a globally-distributed and rapidly growing venture-backed team of learners, innovators and collaborators. Our mission is to build an Enterprise-grade product that makes it easy for data teams at Fortune 500’s and startups alike to adopt Apache Airflow. As a member of our team, you will be at the leading edge of the industry and build solutions for some of the world's toughest data problems.

All roles are listed at https://jobs.lever.co/astronomer?lever-via=pXKhCU4CVs and the three below are specific to improving data engineer's developer experience. Feel free to reach out via email at julian [at] astronomer.io.

- Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure: https://jobs.lever.co/astronomer/eb8cf141-a6f2-4207-b299-ee6...

- Senior Software Engineer, Product Development: https://jobs.lever.co/astronomer/62250bee-2727-4941-8e2d-806...

- Software Engineer, UI/UX: https://jobs.lever.co/astronomer/cefedf9a-91fa-490b-87df-9e0...