This week, we've focused on improving what already exists, rather than adding new features. We've shipped a ton of bug fixes and performance improvements.

If you've got questions, comments, or any feedback, email us at contact@briefer.cloud.

General Updates

Here are a few small improvements we've done to the editor, and to the overall performance of Briefer.

Editor performance improvements

We noticed that performance degraded as documents got larger. We've made a few changes to the way we handle large documents.

First, we've eliminated lots of unnecessary re-renders for graphs and tables. This should make the editor feel snappier, especially for large documents.

Support for larger datasets

Some users dealing with millions of rows of data were experiencing performance issues.

To fix that, we now run all the queries in your own compute instance and stream the results back to the editor. This change means that we can now support much larger datasets without performance issues. It also means that the users who pay for larger compute will experience more benefits from it.

Improvements

Besides the performance improvements we shipped a few minor UI updates. Besides all the small UI tweaks we've done, here are a few highlights:

In/Not-in filters

We've added support for in and not-in filters in visualization blocks. This is useful when you want to filter by multiple values at once.

New query on visualizations

You can now create queries more easily when using visualizations. Just click on the "New query" option the dropdown, or in the tooltip that appears when you create an empty visualization.

You can also create new queries or tabs by using the + button in the top right corner of the block.

Deleting tabs or entire blocks

You can now delete tabs or entire blocks by clicking on the drag-handle and selecting the desired delete option.

New users are viwers by default

Previously, when allowing anyone from @yourdomain.com to access Briefer, new users were added as editors by default. We've changed this so that new users are added as viewers by default. This is to prevent new users from accidentally making changes to the workspace.

Bug fixes

Bug fixes are the biggest part of this release. We've fixed a ton of bugs, but here are a few highlights:

• Fixed a bug where there was a race condition when creating tokens for compute instances. This was causing some users to experience multiple "something went wrong" alerts that would only go away after the environment got restarted.
• When changing the filters or settings for visualizations multiple times, we'd enqueue each update. This caused visualizations to be slow to update. We've fixed this so that only the latest update is enqueued and previous updates are discarded.
• Our AI suggestions were sometimes suggesting overwriting dataframes using [Object object] dataframes. We've not only fixed this bug, but we also improved the LLM's context.
• Creating new tabs was causing an empty block to appear in the editor until you switched to another tab and back. This was a visual bug that didn't affect the actual document, but it was annoying - and now it's fixed.
• Dragging and blocks into one another was not working properly. Sometimes, the editor would try to drag the wrong block, or it would not detect you wanted to group different blocks. This bug is now fixed.
• Editing AI suggestions and then accepting them was causing the edited diff not to be applied. Instead, it applied the raw AI suggestion. We fixed this so that any changes you do in the diff editor will now persist in case the suggestion is accepted.
• Display of titles was showing incorrect background colors during loading and disabled states. They were also not taking the appropriate space. We've done fixes to their appearance so they behave correctly in all cases.
• Visualizations were not being updated in scheduled runs. This was a bug that was causing some users to receive outdated visualizations in their scheduled reports. This is now fixed.