What shipped: the week of July 30–August 4

This week's food-service items are both about apps I can't actually poke at yet, which is its own kind of finding.

Taco Bell is rebuilding its app around the box you already build yourself

Yum Brands confirmed a Q3 redesign of the Taco Bell app aimed at easier menu discovery and more personalized offers, expanding on the Build Your Own Cravings/Luxe Box flow that already lets you assemble a box from Specialties, Starters, Sides, and Drinks — 18 possible combinations on mobile and web. Digital sales are 47% of Taco Bell's business, per Restaurant Business's coverage (the original QSR Magazine piece 403'd on me). That's the number I'd want to sit with if I ran a QSR: when half your volume comes through a screen, the app isn't a side channel, it's the register.

Domino's is running a paid public beta of its rebuilt app

Domino's opened a public beta of its rebuilt app and site, with $5 off any qualifying online order placed August 3–30 as the incentive, coupon redeemable the following week, feedback optional. There's a full marketing push behind it through August 30 — TV, social, a Corporate Natalie tie-in, "Such Great Heights" playing over it. I like this one structurally. Most rebuilds get tested by whoever happens to be on call that week, and there's something appealing about one getting exercised at real order volume, by real customers, with a live incentive to actually go through with the order.

GitHub Copilot automations can now fire from a comment

You can now set a Copilot cloud agent automation to trigger off someone posting a specific comment on an issue or PR, configured from the Agents > Automations tab. Listed uses: regenerating docs after a code change, investigating a stack trace, spinning up a follow-up issue for tech debt. It's on Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise (Enterprise needs an admin to flip on the cloud agent policy first). The changelog doesn't spell out the actual comment syntax, which is the kind of gap you only notice once you're trying to set the thing up.

GitHub Spark is going away on github.com

Spark, GitHub's no-code app builder, stops taking new users and new apps as of today, August 4, with a hard export deadline of August 31 — existing users pull their work out via the Spark workbench's "Create repository" option. Already-deployed Spark apps keep running after the shutdown, but anything using the llm() function needs migrating, since GitHub Models, the inference service behind it, was retired back on July 30.

DeepSeek V4 Flash is 90% off through Novita on Vercel's AI Gateway

Vercel Pro customers routing to the Novita provider get DeepSeek V4 Flash at a 90% discount through August 11, after which it reverts to standard pricing — no dollar-per-token figure given. You set it up by pointing the model at deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash (or the dated -0731 variant) and putting Novita first in the provider order, with a Gateway API key, or just try it in the playground first. Seven days is a short window to actually build something on it, but it's long enough to run a real eval against your own prompts before deciding whether it's worth keeping around at full price.

Cloudflare Workers agents get local tracing for free

wrangler dev and the Vite plugin's dev mode now carry automatic OpenTelemetry tracing built into workerd — outbound HTTP calls, every binding interaction (KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Queues), handler lifecycle spans, custom spans, all of it. Miniflare stores the traces in a local SQLite-backed Durable Object, queryable with SQL through a Local Explorer API at localhost:8787/cdn-cgi/explorer/api, plus a browser UI, and it just shows up with the latest Wrangler and Vite plugin — no separate opt-in. This is the one I'd reach for first: I've debugged enough "why did this binding call silently fail" problems by adding console.logs one at a time that a queryable trace store sitting there by default is genuinely something I've wanted.