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Zalando replaced a custom system built more than seven years ago for matching ad events with Apache Flink, while continuing to process up to 200 MB of data per second. The new design stores unmatched events until their counterparts arrive, uses disk-backed state for reliability, and checkpoints progress every three minutes. The migration cut daily EC2 costs by more than half and improved event matching by about 0.5%.

Fugu-Ultra v1.1 is more capable across coding, agentic tasks, and advanced reasoning. It is now available at the same price as Fugu-Ultra v1.0. Fugu offers frontier-level performance without single-vendor dependency. It dynamically orchestrates the best models to tackle complex multi-step tasks.

Fast development with AI often leads to a decline in code quality, as automated systems generate more defects and reduce the rigor of code reviews. The shift towards “lights-off” software factories, which limit human oversight, does not result in the expected efficiencies, as models struggle to maintain the codebase's quality over time. Maintaining human involvement in planning and reviewing code is still necessary for long-term software sustainability.