Skip to content

CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Selective ingress

Definition

Selective ingress is the practice of filtering a high-volume event stream at the entry point of an expensive processing system so that only qualifying events trigger the full processing pipeline. In AI agent architectures, this prevents wasting compute (and user attention) on events that don't merit a full reasoning pass.

Instacart's Blueberry applies selective ingress to Slack thread events: "Blueberry watches Slack thread events and only promotes the ones that deserve a diagnostic pass: auto-triggered alerts, @mentions, DMs, follow-ups in an active thread. The balance is between responding to too much or too little." (Source: sources/2026-07-14-instacart-blueberry-on-call-reasoning-harness)

Design considerations

  • Cost: each diagnostic pass is expensive (LLM calls, tool invocations, sub-agent fan-out) — filtering avoids burning compute on noise
  • Signal: not every Slack message is worth investigating, even in an on-call context
  • Balance: too aggressive = misses real incidents; too permissive = floods thread with unhelpful responses

Seen in

Last updated · 585 distilled / 1,765 read