• Hungry Minds
  • Posts
  • 🍔🧠 How Salesforce Used AI to Reduce Test Time by 30%

🍔🧠 How Salesforce Used AI to Reduce Test Time by 30%

PLUS: 10 System Design Questions 📋, API Design 101 📘, Python to Go 300% Improvement 🐍

Author

Alex Zajac
September 1st, 2025 • Time-to-digest: 10 minutes

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 182 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!

If you aren't subscribed yet, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing here.

📚 Software Engineering Articles

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

  • PostgreSQL LATERAL joins unlock efficient hierarchical data processing in complex queries

Time-to-digest: 5 minutes

Big thanks to our partners for keeping this newsletter free.

If you have a second, clicking the ad below helps us a ton—and who knows, you might find something you love. 💚

In today's market, control is key.

Percent gives you direct access to private credit deals where you choose the yield, duration, and risk level that fit your strategy.

With average deal terms under 10 months and potential for monthly payouts, you can accelerate your outcomes without the long liquidity lockup of venture capital.

Readers of Hungry Minds get a bonus of up to $500 on their first investment.

Salesforce tackled the massive challenge of managing 150K+ monthly test failures across 6M daily tests by building an AI-powered Triage Agent. Their solution combines FAISS semantic search with LLM reasoning to help 500+ engineers debug faster and smarter.

The challenge: Processing 78B test combinations daily while keeping developer sanity intact - with failures taking 7 days on average to resolve.

Implementation highlights:

  • Smart semantic search: FAISS-based indexing delivers similar failure patterns in under 30s

  • Context-rich analysis: Embeddings capture stack traces, code snippets, and changelists

  • Hallucination-proof: LLM reasoning layered on historical data, not pure AI generation

  • Async processing: Real-time failure analysis without blocking CI/CD pipelines

  • Progressive rollout: Started with 20 devs, validated, then scaled to 500+

Results and learnings:

  • 30% faster debugging: Dramatic reduction in time-to-resolution

  • High adoption: Developers trusted the system due to low false positives

  • Scalable solution: Successfully handles 150K+ monthly failures

Finding bugs is like finding your keys - they're always in the last place you look. But with Salesforce's AI triage system, it's more like having a friend who always remembers where you put them.

The 10 BIG Questions of System Design

System design is often misunderstood as a simple exercise of sketching boxes and arrows on a whiteboard.

API Gateway vs Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy 🌟

#85: Break Into Edge Architecture (4 Minutes)

5 Tiny Phrases Every Engineer Should Use With AI

How to prevent "AI Slop"

Three Free Tech Bootcamps That Could Change Your Career

How to become a Solutions Architect, Mastering the Foundations of Cybersecurity and the Absolute Basics in Data Engineering

Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems: What Actually Works in Production

Real patterns for building AI agent systems that don't fall apart. Two-tier architectures, stateless design, orchestration strategies, and what we learned building UserJot's agent infrastructure.

How we migrated our Rush.js monorepo to Node type stripping

A case study describing the business rationale, technical challenges, and impact of our migration to Node type stripping

ARTICLE (api-wizardry-101)
Everything I know about good API design

ARTICLE (https-magic-trick)
How HTTPS Makes the Web Secure?

ARTICLE (review-like-a-boss)
How to Scale Code Reviews

Want to reach 190,000+ engineers?

Let’s work together! Whether it’s your product, service, or event, we’d love to help you connect with this awesome community.

Brief: Meta announces its first consumer AR glasses with a display, priced at $800, alongside a gesture-control wristband, set to debut at Connect next month in partnership with EssilorLuxottica.

Brief: Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, nicknamed "nano banana," boosts AI image editing by maintaining consistency across edits and merging images seamlessly, now available in the Gemini app.

Brief: Spotify introduces direct messaging for sharing songs, podcasts, and audiobooks, letting Free and Premium users chat and react with emojis without leaving the app.

Brief: Finland activates a 100 MWh sand battery in Pornainen, cutting local heating emissions by 70% and storing renewable energy as heat for weeks at 90% efficiency.

This week’s coding challenge:

Build Your Own Redis

Real-world proficiency projects designed for experienced engineers. Develop software craftsmanship by recreating popular devtools from scratch.

This week’s tip:

Use niche PostgreSQL LATERAL joins to efficiently process hierarchical data with correlated subqueries. LATERAL allows subqueries in the FROM clause to reference columns from preceding items, enabling powerful hierarchical data processing patterns.

Wen?

  • Complex reporting queries: Perfect for scenarios where you need to find top N records per group with additional filtering or aggregations.

  • Hierarchical data analysis: Efficient for parent-child relationships where child queries need context from parent rows.

  • Performance optimization: Can outperform traditional subqueries or window functions when working with large datasets and selective filters.

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”
Thomas Edison

That’s it for today! ☀️

Enjoyed this issue? Send it to your friends here to sign up, or share it on Twitter!

If you want to submit a section to the newsletter or tell us what you think about today’s issue, reply to this email or DM me on Twitter! 🐦

Thanks for spending part of your Monday morning with Hungry Minds.
See you in a week — Alex.

Icons by Icons8.

*I may earn a commission if you get a subscription through the links marked with “aff.” (at no extra cost to you).