5 Foundry/AIP features you're probably not using, but should be

After months of working with the platform, I noticed some of the most powerful features tend to get buried in changelogs. Here’s what’s actually changed my day-to-day workflow, hope it helps anyone onboarding or migrating pipelines.


PRATICAL TIPS

Global Branching — iterate without breaking prod

Global Branching is now available on all enrollments. You can make changes across Transforms, TypeScript functions, Ontology, Workshop modules, and AIP Logic on a single branch, test everything end-to-end, and only then merge into Main. No more accidental production breaks.

Worth exploring: Ontology Manager → Branching and the proposal approval options before merging.

Variable Lineage Graph in Workshop

If you’ve ever spent too long figuring out why a variable isn’t recomputing, the Variable Lineage Graph is your answer. It replaces the old dependency graph with a much clearer visualization of which widgets read or write each variable.

How to open it: Workshop → Edit mode → Variables panel → Graph icon (top right)

Ontology MCP — expose your ontology to external agents

Ontology MCP turns your Developer Console app into an MCP server. External agents, LangChain, CrewAI, Copilot Studio, custom Python/TypeScript, can discover and call your object types, actions, and queries via a standard protocol.

You can now manage all MCP servers across your enrollment from MCP Hub, including enabling/disabling individual tools and customizing descriptions without touching application code.

AIP Document Intelligence for structured document extraction

If your team processes PDFs or image-heavy documents, AIP Document Intelligence is worth a look. You can experiment with different extraction strategies (traditional OCR through to vision LLMs), compare quality, speed, and cost side by side, then auto-generate Python transforms to run at scale.

Enabled by default on AIP enrollments. Find it via AIP Document Intelligence in Compass.

Search logs in Workflow Lineage for production debugging

A small feature with a big payoff: the Search logs tab in Workflow Lineage aggregates logs from all executions of a function, action, or automation over the last 7 days. Perfect for tracking down intermittent errors without clicking through individual runs.

Migration heads-up: if you’re still editing Python transforms in Code Repositories, note that starting June 2026 that editor moves to legacy status. VS Code Workspaces is now the recommended environment, it brings AI-assisted coding, integrated dataset preview, and a built-in terminal. Worth switching before you get stuck on a deprecated path.

Which of these are you already running in production? Would love to hear use cases around Ontology MCP or Global Branching.


Felipe Montes
Development Advisor
Follow me @ linkedin.com/in/felipemontesl/ or GitHub: Brazillianerd

Global branching is a useful feature, however i faced a challenge in one of the scenarios, please help me if you know about it.

I created a typescript function v1 on a global branch that is called inside the automation. The function purpose is to edit the ontology in bulk. In order to test, I created the ontology object on same global branch, when I tried calling the function in the automation I could not.

The automation is running on Main, not your branch

Check the branch selector at the top: is it showing your branch name or main?

3 things to confirm:

  1. Open the automation from within your branch context, not the default path
  2. Make sure the TypeScript function was built and published on the branch (check Developer Console)
  3. Confirm the object type shows “Ready” in Ontology Manager → Branching

Automation cannot be run on ontology branch or foundry branch Ontology Objects, it cannot execute - actions, functions on ontology/foundry branch. Also, automation cannot be created on ontology branch on foundry branch.

I had to create a duplicate ontology object on Main branch and add action on it and then run the automation to test the changes in ontology object. I then had to delete the duplicate ontology object and action type

Let me know if there is a better way. Thanks.