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Becoming Frontier

We’re trying to build Atlan as a truly frontier company: one where AI is at the core of how we operate and makes us vastly more ambitious, not just efficient. We’re learning by experimenting, and Becoming Frontier is where we share it all in the open: what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ve seen along the way.

Below, the engineering work up close: how specific systems at Atlan actually got built. The bigger experiments, and what they taught us, live on Becoming Frontier.

Read Becoming Frontier → Engineering deep dives ↓
Building a User Value Loop for MCP: What Traces Can't Tell You Featured
product

Building a User Value Loop for MCP: What Traces Can't Tell You

Every tool call can succeed and the user can still get nothing. How and why we built a user value loop for the Atlan MCP server, and what it told us.

Ben Hudson Ben Hudson · Aug 7, 2026 · 18 min read

Engineering deep dives

Long-form technical writing from the team. New work is published on Becoming Frontier.

Rex: Encoding Human Behavior Into a Simulation Engine
product

Rex: Encoding Human Behavior Into a Simulation Engine

How we created Rex, a simulation engine that encodes five years of anthropological research into personas that stress-test AI products before real users arrive.

Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar · Jul 22, 2026 · 18 min read
Loop Engineering in Production: Putting AI Agents on Call
engineering

Loop Engineering in Production: Putting AI Agents on Call

We had an agent loop running in early 2026, and it still failed. Here is the scaffolding that made Sherlock, our investigation agent, useful in real incidents: 85% of the roughly 11,000 alerts a month suppressed as noise before a model ever runs, and investigations that once took 10+ minutes now finish in about 2 minutes on average, for less than a third of the cost.

Arnab Saha Arnab Saha & Alok Sharma & Nikhila Jain · Jul 17, 2026 · 17 min read
Building Mnemosyne, our AI second brain for engineering work: How to give AI context from previous sessions
engineering

Building Mnemosyne, our AI second brain for engineering work: How to give AI context from previous sessions

Migration work has a familiar rhythm. You spend sessions with an AI assistant reverse-engineering APIs, mapping edge cases, documenting risks — building a real understanding of the system you're…

Nikhila Jain Nikhila Jain & Rittick Sinha Roy · Apr 13, 2026 · 16 min read
From Argo to Temporal Migration: How We Rebuilt Atlan's Workflow Orchestration
engineering

From Argo to Temporal Migration: How We Rebuilt Atlan's Workflow Orchestration

Atlan is migrating workflow orchestration from Argo to Temporal. Learn why we made that call, the interim crossover architecture that kept us live during the transition, and what we've learned…

Nikhila Jain Nikhila Jain & Sanil Khurana · Apr 3, 2026 · 14 min read
The Feedback Loop: Improving the Quality of Context for Humans and AI
community

The Feedback Loop: Improving the Quality of Context for Humans and AI

On building feedback loops for metadata, and what they become when AI enters the picture. "I found the dashboard I was looking for, but the description just repeated the title. I still didn't know…

Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar & Dhriti Arjun · Mar 10, 2026 · 10 min read
Olof: How an AI Queue Manager Rebuilt Support Engineering at Atlan
engineering

Olof: How an AI Queue Manager Rebuilt Support Engineering at Atlan

On a typical weekday, our support engineers at Atlan used to start their shift in Zendesk with a familiar feeling: too many tickets, not enough clarity. Someone from the team was always wearing an…

R
Rahul Bhatiya & Taksh Preet Singh · Feb 5, 2026 · 13 min read
Product to Platform Transformation: Why We Rebuilt Atlan's Apps Framework
engineering

Product to Platform Transformation: Why We Rebuilt Atlan's Apps Framework

This is the story of how we discovered we needed to rebuild—and why that decision unlocked Atlan's transformation from product to platform. Follow along as we explore the architectural constraints,…

Nikhila Jain Nikhila Jain & Christopher Grote · Jan 21, 2026 · 12 min read
Becoming Frontier
We’re trying to build Atlan as a truly frontier company: one where AI is at the core of how we operate and makes us vastly more ambitious, not just efficient. We’re learning by experimenting, and Becoming Frontier is where we share it all in the open: what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ve seen along the way.
Read Becoming Frontier →
Atlan defines Plain-language definitions for data governance and AI terms
Active metadata
Metadata continuously enriched through automated signals — usage patterns, lineage, quality scores — rather than static manual documentation.
Metadata lakehouse
A unified architectural layer consolidating technical, business, and operational metadata into a single active system serving humans and AI agents.
Data mesh
Decentralised data architecture treating data as a product with domain-oriented ownership and federated computational governance.
Column-level lineage
Field-level tracing of data transformations from source through every pipeline stage to the point of consumption — enabling precise impact analysis.