How It's Made
How It's Made
Scaling Productivity with Ava — Instacart’s Internal AI Assistant
By Zain Adil, Kevin Lei and Ada Cohen Over the past few months, we’ve been building an internal AI assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 models called Ava. Ava has seen accelerated adoption at Instacart, with over half of Instacart employees using it every month and more than 900 using it every week. Ava’s web interface, similar to ChatGPT, also has additional features like conversation search, automatic…
Sep 7, 2023
How It's Made
Building an Essential Service During a Pandemic
A Q&A with Instacart CTO, Mark Schaaf It’s been a busy few months. We’re seeing the highest customer demand in Instacart history and have more active shoppers on our platform today than ever before, picking and…
May 21, 2020
How It's Made
Terraforming RDS — Bonus Anecdote
Thanks for making it all the way to the end of this series. See Part 1 for an overview of RDS and Terraform, Part 2 to get the basics of using Terraform with RDS and…
May 4, 2020
How It's Made
Terraforming RDS — Part 3
See Part 1 for an overview of RDS and Terraform, and Part 2 to get the basics of using Terraform with RDS and modules. This post covers parameter groups. What is a parameter group? A…
Apr 27, 2020
How It's Made
Say Hello to Jason James, VP of Design
We’re excited to announce that seasoned design leader Jason James has joined Instacart as our VP of Design. Jason comes to us from Thumbtack, where he grew the design team six-fold. In his new role…
Apr 21, 2020
How It's Made
Terraforming RDS — Part 2
See Part 1 for the basics of RDS and Terraform. This post covers using Terraform with RDS and modules. Keep in mind the abstraction layer stack from the previous post, modules can have a significant…
Apr 20, 2020
How It's Made
Terraforming RDS — Part 1
The basics of Terraform and RDS. At Instacart we are approaching a hundred PostgreSQL instances running in AWS RDS. They are all managed in Terraform. Using Terraform with RDS has caused a lot of pain…
Mar 4, 2020
How It's Made
Creating a Logical Replica from a Snapshot in RDS Postgres
In today’s world of data breaches and privacy concerns, every measure you can take to protect your data is another brick in the wall defending you. At Instacart, no matter how confident we feel about our…
Feb 5, 2020
How It's Made
One Grocery Catalog to Rule Them All
A Q&A with Leho Nigul, our first VP of Engineering, Catalog, and Tools Instacart has the largest grocery catalog in the world, with nearly 5 million unique products, spanning over 25,000 locations across North America. To…
Jan 30, 2020
How It's Made
Bringing Instacart Pickup to life
Designing a new product and shopping experience from the ground up. Contributors: Senior Product Designers Andressa Bougleux and Dan Shilov Save time, skip the grocery line, pick up your groceries on the way home. Why pickup…
Jan 29, 2020