All Data and AI Weekly #224-12 Jan 2026

#mcp #llm #genai #snowflake

All Data and AI Weekly #224-12 Jan 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

🚀 The Lead Story: Snowflake Acquires Observe

"Observability is a Data Problem"

In a major move to own the entire data lifecycle, Snowflake has announced its intent to acquire Observe for approximately $1 Billion. This acquisition signals a shift away from siloed monitoring tools towards "AI-powered observability" where telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) lives directly within the Data Cloud.

Why it matters: It promises to break down the wall between "business data" and "operational data," enabling AI agents to troubleshoot infrastructure using the same context they use for analytics.
Key Stat: Snowflake aims to lower observability costs by allowing enterprises to ingest and retain 100% of telemetry data, rather than sampling it due to cost constraints.
Press Release | Observe Announcement

❄️ Snowflake & Data Engineering

Technical deep dives for the modern data stack.

⚡ Low-Latency CDC & OpenFlow

The lines between transactional and analytical databases are blurring. A new "Lift and Shift" capability allows native Postgres tables to run directly within Snowflake, paired with OpenFlow (Snowflake's managed NiFi service) to build low-latency CDC pipelines. This is critical for feeding real-time AI models without fragile ETL glue code.

🧊 Iceberg & Unity Catalog

Interoperability continues to be a major theme. New patterns allow connecting Databricks Unity Catalog directly to Snowflake via the Iceberg REST catalog, reinforcing the "open table format" war is ending in a truce of compatibility.

Connect Databricks Unity to Snowflake

🤖 The AI Agent Ecosystem

Autonomous coding, Red Teaming, and Orchestration.

🛠️ Builders & Orchestrators

Auto-Claude: An autonomous coding agent framework that goes beyond simple completion. It uses a multi-agent approach to plan, execute, and debug code.
- GitHub Repo
Gas Town: Steve Yegge’s latest project. It’s a multi-agent orchestration system (using tmux) designed to manage fleets of Claude Code instances.
- GitHub Repo
VideoRAG: A new framework that allows LLMs to "reason" over long-form videos by retrieving specific temporal segments rather than processing the whole file.
- GitHub Repo

🛡️ AI Security (Red Teaming)

Strix: An open-source AI agent designed for automated penetration testing. It mimics human hacker behavior to find vulnerabilities in your stack.
- GitHub Repo
Cortex Analyzers: For those using TheHive for incident response, these analyzers are essential for enriching threat data.
- GitHub Repo

🔒 Security Corner

OSINT and Threat Intel tools for the paranoid.

Web-Check: The ultimate "check this website" tool. It runs dozens of checks (DNS, SSL, headers, server info) in one dashboard.
- Web-Check.xyz
IntelOwl: A scalable API for threat intelligence management. It orchestrates various analyzers to generate a single "threat report" for an observable.
- GitHub Repo
DataSploit: An OSINT framework to perform reconnaissance on domain names, emails, and usernames.
- GitHub Repo

🧰 Developer Toolkit

Utilities to speed up your workflow.

VSCodium: A clean, telemetry-free build of VS Code. If you want the editor without the tracking, this is the standard.
- Why VSCodium?
YouTube Playlist Downloader: A simple, robust script for archiving playlists locally.
- GitHub Repo
Hardwood: Interesting work from the data engineering community (likely related to durable execution or storage engines).
- GitHub Repo

📚 Full Resource List

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

As we look forward in 2026, we are introducing SNACK-AI. This architectural pattern is designed to power AI applications at any scale—from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates: