Claude code rising, Silver gets tanked, Airflow fully out #120 w/e 30 Jan 2026

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This was a quiet week, although everyone has been making tons of noise around Claude Code, which appears to be filtering into the mainstream. With the promise of endless automation, it’s easy to see why Claude Code might just be the thing that makes 2026 feel a little better.

Elsewhere, silver behaved like a memecoin, rocking up to an all time high before plunging down massively.

Workspaces have also come to orchestra. If you’ve ever asked yourself “Do we really need another Airflow instance” the answer is now officially a resounding No!

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Orchestra Product Updates

We’re excited to announce workspaces in Orchestra 🚀

Workspaces allow you to easily set-up spaces for different teams to easily build, run and monitor AI and Data Workflows.

Combined with fine-grained permissions and role-based access control, workspaces underscore out commitment to building the easiest-to-use and most powerful enterprise orchestration platform

Workspaces in Orchestra. Read the Workspaces docs here.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

📚 Read the workspaces docs

🚀 Try the Orchestra platform free

😃 Chat with us

January Feature Log

• Pipeline Context Propagation — Triggered pipelines can now inherit the parent run context as an input.

• Persistent pipeline table sorting — Your pipeline table sort order is now saved per user between sessions. Read more.

• Alteryx integration — You can trigger and monitor Alteryx jobs directly from Orchestra pipelines. Docs here.

• Richer Slack notifications — Slack Tasks now support Slack Blocks for structured, richer alerts. Check out Slack’s Block Kit Builder.

• State-aware savings + programmatic pipeline runs — New scripts help quantify state-aware savings and run pipelines in bulk programmatically. This is huge! Read more.

• Control upstream → downstream triggers — Choose which upstream run statuses should trigger downstream pipelines. Docs here.

• dbt → Slack alerts: user groups + multi-channel routing — dbt Slack alerts now support @user groups and multi-channel routing. Read more.

• Sensor Alerts — Add alerts on failing sensors to catch freshness/dependency issues early. Docs here.

• Interactive Assets page filtering — Click directly from coverage and asset-health charts to filter the assets table instantly.

• Run a single operation from lineage — Execute one dbt model (and its downstream dependencies) directly from the lineage view.

• Improved asset lineage navigation — A new lineage navigation experience makes it easier to select and visualise specific assets.

• Run-level filtering in lineage views — Filter pipeline runs by operation name, tags, and run status for faster debugging.

NEW

• Easier Git-Connections. You can now just “click a button” and if you’re signed in to your github, it will “just-work”

• Usage Page. Head over to Settings —> Usage to see an overview of usage and limits

• Approvals / Human-in-the-Loop - Pipelines can now be paused until a human approves the next step. Docs here.

• Workspaces - say goodbye to multiple airflow instances

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Medium 🧠

Editors Pick

🧠 RoPE, Clearly Explained (link)

🧠 Celebrating the 2026 Data Superheroes (link)

🧠 Snowflake OpenFlow: How To Create Custom Processors (link)

🧠 The AI Evolution of Graph Search at Netflix (link)

🧠 Optimizing Vector Search: Why You Should Flatten Structured Data (link)

🧠 Why Human-in-the-loop workflows might just save your data team (link)

Editors Pick

🧠 Announcing Workspaces in Orchestra (link)

🧠 HDF5 vs. TsFile: Efficient Time-Series Data Storage (link)

🧠 The Rise of AI Analysts: What It Means for Data Teams (link)

LinkedIn🕴

🕴 Why Most AI Analytics Agents Still Can’t Be Trusted (link)

🕴 Your Data Programme Isn’t Failing—It’s Bleeding to Death by Friction (link)

🕴 Human-in-the-Loop: A Pragmatic Path Between Manual and Automated (link)

🕴 The Hidden Cost of Managing Airflow for Multiple Teams (link)

🕴 Why I Stopped Using dbt’s Default CTAS Materialization (link)

News 📰

📰 Databricks telemetry shows multi-agent AI adoption surge…Read More

📰 Decube Secures $3M to Build the Data Foundations Enterprises Need for AI…Read More

📰 Snowflake Launches Energy Solutions for the AI Data Cloud to Accelerate Shift to a Lower-Carbon Future…Read More

📰 Silver got tanked

YouTube and Podcast 🎥

Editor’s Pick

🎥 Why AI Fails in Analytics (And Why Power BI Is Different) (link)

🎥 Leverage Claude Code to build an end-to-end data pipeline in MINUTES (link)

🎥 4 Lessons Learned the Hard Way and How Thinking Small Saved the Day - Scott Haines (Small Data 2025) (link)

🎥 Small data, big features: we are rewriting SQLite! - Glauber Costa (Small Data SF 2025) (link)

🎥 2026 Trends and Predictions: The Future of Data, AI, and the Lakehouse (link)

Special 💫

💫 Data Engineering Weekly #254 (link)

Jobs

💼 BI Manager at Talkiatry (link)

💼 Senior Data Engineer at InStride (link)

💼 Senior Instructor, Training Operations at Breakout Labs (link)

💼 Data Analytics Manager (Product) at Rocket Money (link)

💼 Experienced Analytics Engineer (dbt) for Australian Education Data Analytics Company at EduBI Analytics (link)

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