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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Carmaker Volkswagen has deployed a herd of 100 sheep to keep grass under control at a solar farm that powers one of its factories in Poland, providing a greener alternative to mechanical mowing.

The project, which is being run in partnership with a local university, will also contribute to research on agrivoltaics, the name given to the use of land for both solar generation and agriculture. Scientists will assess the impact of the practice on animal welfare and the wider ecosystem.

In 2016, Volkswagen opened a major plant near Poznań, Poland’s fifth-largest city. The facility employs around 3,000 people and mainly produces VW’s Crafter van.

In 2023, the company opened a solar farm next to the plant. On sunny days, its 31,000 photovoltaic panels can power the whole factory, though over the year as a whole it supplies around 25% of its electricity.

Volkswagen has now announced that, earlier this year, it welcomed around 100 sheep to the solar farm. They are grazing the 27 hectares of land around the panels as an alternative to mechanical mowing.

“The animals adapted very well to the new conditions,” says Justyna Nowak-Gajek, the owner of the flock. She explains that the sheep are splitting into smaller groups and “grazing peacefully”, whereas herds that feel unsafe tend to stick closer together.

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Meanwhile, scientists from the Poznań University of Life Sciences (UPP) are studying the impact of the project on the animals’ welfare and behaviour, as well as the functioning of the entire ecosystem.

“We are checking, among other things, whether shade created by the panels reduces heat stress in animals, improving their comfort and living conditions,” says Joanna Składanowska-Baryza, from the university’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences.

“At the same time, we are analysing changes in the microclimate, vegetation and soil to identify solutions that facilitate the effective combination of energy production with agricultural activities.”

Volkswagen has chosen Poland as the location for a new €1.7bn plant producing materials for electric vehicle batteries.

The investment has been welcomed by the Polish government, which is providing €350 million in grants for the project https://t.co/xh0LuzHOyq

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) October 10, 2023

The study is expected to inform the wider practice of agrivoltaics, which aims to “create [solar] installations that coexist with their surroundings and bring additional benefits to the environment and local communities”, says Quanta Energy, the firm that constructed Volkswagen’s solar farm.

“The photovoltaic farm now produces more than just green energy,” adds Maarzena Pillich-Grońska, director of the Volkswagen plant. “It has also become a place where we support biodiversity, local agriculture, and the development of scientific knowledge.”

In recent years, a number of Polish cities, including Kraków and Katowice, have also recruited sheep and goats as a greener alternative to mechanical cutting of grass on municipal land.

Various firms operating in Poland have been investing in renewables to supply themselves with energy. In 2024, the largest chocolate maker in Poland, Mondelez Polska, said it would spend $1 million (3.8 million zloty) on solar installations at its production sites in the country.

Successive Polish governments have also been seeking to bolster green energy. Last year, the country generated 29.4% of its electricity from renewables , up from 9.4% a decade earlier. Onshore wind led the way with 14.2%, followed by solar at 12.1% and biomass at 1.8%.

However, in 2023, a group of business associations and international companies, including Google, Amazon, Mercedes and Ikea, warned the government that there must be more rapid development of green energy in order to attract continued investment in Poland.

However, since then, figures show a period of stagnation , despite the current government pledging to accelerate Poland’s green transition after taking power from its conservative predecessor in 2023.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: VW (press materials)

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Here’s the good news: Deaths due to ischemic heart disease — when coronary arteries are blocked — fell by more than half from 1990 to 2023 in the United States, thanks to better control of up to a dozen risk factors. What’s still on the table: Almost 9 out of 10 of the most recent deaths could have been prevented by better managing those risk factors.

Much of the progress recorded since the start of the Global Burden of Disease study, published Wednesday in JAMA Cardiology , stemmed from drops in deaths from smoking (down 33.3%) and particulate air pollution (down 74.9%). But in the last year of the study, 419,000 of the estimated 473,000 coronary artery disease deaths — or 88.8% — were still linked to modifiable risk factors.

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Organizations need to transform to meet the needs of agentic AI.

Meta VP of Engineering Barak Yagour opened his talk at VB Transform 2026 wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, a small sign of how far AI has already worked its way into physical life. His argument went further: enterprise infrastructure was built for humans, not for agents, and it's starting to show.

Yagour, who leads its data infrastructure organization, told the audience that agentic queries hitting Meta's data systems grew 30x in a single half, an inversion that he said is breaking assumptions the company spent two decades building around.

The shift is not confined to Meta. Automated traffic overtook human traffic on the internet last year, reaching 51% of the total, according to Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report . That traffic is also growing roughly eight times faster than human traffic, according to HUMAN Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic report . Yagour cited both figures to describe what he called an inflection point already underway inside his own organization.

Yagour framed the shift as an open question for infrastructure teams everywhere. "What happens to the infrastructure we've spent years building when agents and not humans become the main consumers of that," Yagour said. "That's the world we're stepping into."

Capacity, identity and velocity are breaking at once

Yagour said three assumptions are breaking simultaneously inside Meta's infrastructure: capacity, identity and velocity.

On capacity, the math no longer works the way engineering teams are used to. "One engineer used to mean one unit of load," he said. "Now one engineer spawns 10 agents, each spawning subagents. Your 1,000-person org can generate the load of 100,000 users practically overnight."

His answer is not to block agent traffic but to make infrastructure agent-aware, with dynamic controls that understand agent hierarchies, cost attribution that traces consumption back to the use case that spawned it, and throttling that adapts based on priority.

Identity is breaking, too. Yagour said an agent does not fit the categories infrastructure teams built access controls around. It is not a human user, it does not carry a badge and it is not a deployed service, yet it makes decisions on its own.

Velocity is the third assumption under strain. Yagour cited a company-reported figure that GitHub Copilot writes 46% of the average user's code, then noted that faster code generation does not make the rest of the pipeline faster.

"That code still needs to be built, tested, deployed, monitored," he said. "The agent writes the code in seconds, but your CI/CD pipeline doesn't get faster just because the machine is the author."

Trusted data environments keep agents inside guardrails

Data is where Yagour said the pressure from agents is most direct.

"Data sits at the center of everything," he said, pointing to the decisions, products, recommender systems and next generation models it drives.

Meta is also rethinking how much autonomy to grant agents inside its own data systems. In February, the company shipped what Yagour called agentic data apps. Within three months, 63% of dashboards published across Meta were built using the new tooling, part of the same 30x rise in agentic queries Yagour cited earlier.

That growth raises a governance question. Human analysts have traditionally sat between raw data and business decisions, curating it and serving as an informal check on quality. Yagour said Meta wants to grant agents more independence on harder problems, but was direct about the risk.

"Autonomy without governance is nothing but chaos," he said. That's why the company built what it calls trusted data environments, to preserve the human check as agents take on more of that work.

"Inside, the agent can explore data freely, but every output is traced back to its source and scrutinized. So you always know that the data shared back is trusted and governed," Yagour said.

Sensitive fields are masked before an agent can reach them, and every access request is evaluated in real time against what the agent is trying to reach, why and whether it is allowed. Yagour summarized the approach as exploring broadly while releasing narrowly.

Reasoning models are rewriting the data layer

Meta's models are also demanding more from data as they shift from correlation to reasoning.

"Reasoning is data hungry," Yagour said.

Pattern matching works on sparse, summarized signals. Reasoning demands the full behavioral history, every interaction across every surface over time. Yagour pointed to two shifts already underway inside Meta's infrastructure to keep up.

Real-time streaming is replacing batch ETL for ranking pipelines. A pipeline that takes 24 hours to run is not viable when a model is reasoning about a user's current intent. Yagour said real-time streaming, not batch extract-transform-load processing, is becoming the backbone of Meta's ranking and recommendation systems.

Storage is becoming schema-aware to stop GPU starvation. Meta previously stored user data as opaque blobs with no awareness of what the data contained, which Yagour said led to heavy overfetching and idle GPU capacity. The company is now building storage that understands what it holds, pulling only the columns and time ranges a given query needs. Yagour said Meta is building toward 500 million queries per second and a petabyte per second of throughput for training data reads.

That data feeds directly into how Meta's recommendation systems behave. Yagour said 42% of Instagram users have told the company they want to fundamentally change the algorithm, not adjust a single session or setting. Meta's response is what Yagour called fully conversational recommendations, where a user tells the system what they want more of and it reasons about intent rather than matching on keywords. Yagour said the same search term, soccer, would return different results for a casual fan looking for highlights than for a club athlete seeking training drills, because the system would reason about which one is asking.

Yagour described the three threads of his talk, agents, data and recommendations, as reinforcing each other rather than moving independently.

"Agents make data more accessible. Better data makes reasoning. Reasoning creates new demands that push agents and infrastructure forward," he said. "This isn't linear; it's a flywheel."

During the Q&A, an audience member asked whether Meta's push toward more intelligent infrastructure signals the end of traditional file systems in favor of newer neural storage approaches, and whether agents will keep using SQL as their interface to data the way humans do. Yagour said Meta is experimenting at every level, including questioning whether SQL is the right interface for agents at all, and that storage at Meta's scale already operates in the multi-digit exabyte range and needs to keep expanding.

Yagour closed his talk with the timeline he believes the industry is working against. "We spent 20 years building infrastructure for humans. We have maybe 20 months to rebuild the whole thing for a world where humans and agents co-create at scale," Yagour said. "The window is open, but it won't stay open for long."

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Despite a statement from the studio, former id Software staff don't see how the studio can possibly make another game in its id Tech engine after a majority of the devs at the Texas-based studio were laid off.

Last week, after much conversation about what state the legendary studio is left in after 136 of its 185 developers were laid off by Microsoft , id Software released a statement on Twitter . "While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for," the post reads, saying "The team today is about the same size we were when making Doom 2016."

While the Doom 2016 line may be true, the cost of game development is rapidly increasing compared to even ten years ago. And given the comments from developers affected by these layoffs, like Derek Best, former principal VFX artist, who said, "Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size," many saw this as potential damage control from higher-ups at the studio.

Speaking to Game Developer , a source impacted by the cuts at id Software says, "Does Microsoft care? Absolutely not. And they seem to actually put some level of effort and care into making it as painful as possible."

Another dev let go last week told the outlet "They've just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech], so it's most likely going to end up in the in the trash can," and while Microsoft commented on word that only one staff member remained at the Texas studio working on id Tech , they did not specify how many were working on the engine, which is also used by Wolfenstein developer Machine Games.

The developer continues, "The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense... I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."

And yet, word is Bethesda is planning to focus on its biggest franchises going forward, and while The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 are likely the priority for Bethesda Game Studios, Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein – three series made in id Tech – are apparently included in that focus. I'm not sure I see the thought process behind Xbox's decision with that one.

"There are no benefits to being owned by Microsoft," says Doom dev: "They have destroyed immense amounts of value that I don't even think that they're aware of"