Valve says it's using a randomized purchase queue to make the experience "less frustrating and more fair."

An AI agent that can email but can't hold a calendar slot is only half useful. The moment a conversation turns into "let's meet Thursday at 2," the agent needs a real calendar — one that sends invitations people accept in Google Calendar or Outlook, receives invites at its own address, and RSVPs back so the organizer sees a real response next to everyone else's. Bolting a scheduling library onto a shared mailbox doesn't get you there; the agent needs a calendar identity of its own. An Agent Account ships with exactly that. Every account gets a primary calendar that hosts events, accepts invitations over standard iCalendar, and RSVPs with yes, no, or maybe. To a participant, the agent is just another attendee on the invite. This post walks through using that calendar from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for. The calendar an Agent Account comes with When Nylas provisions an Agent Account, it creates a primary calendar that belongs to the account. You reach it through the same Calendars and Events endpoints at /v3/grants/{grant_id}/... that any other grant uses, so calendar code you've written for a connected Google or Microsoft account works here unchanged. Each account gets: A primary calendar , provisioned automatically. It can't be deleted while other calendars exist on the account. Additional calendars , up to your plan's cap, for separating concerns — a sales-calls calendar and an internal one on the same agent. Free/busy queries , so the agent can check its own availability before proposing a time. Event webhooks — event.created , event.updated , and event.deleted fire on every change, whether it came from the agent or from someone responding to an invitation. List the calendars from the terminal with nylas calendar list , or over the API with GET /v3/grants/{grant_id}/calendars . Both return the primary calendar plus any you've added. List what'

You give your AI agent a real mailbox, it sends its first batch of email, and half of it lands in spam. The agent did nothing wrong. The domain did — it's new, it has no sending history, and mailbox providers treat an unknown domain that suddenly sends volume the same way they treat a spammer. Deliverability is the work of proving the mail is really yours, sending at a pace providers trust, and watching the signals that say whether recipients want it. An Agent Account sends from a domain you own, so its inbox placement is yours to manage like any other mail from your company. This post is a practical playbook for getting and keeping an agent in the inbox, from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm wiring up monitoring. The deliverability checklist Five things decide whether an Agent Account reaches the inbox, and you can act on all of them before sending at volume. Work them in order — authentication first, because nothing else matters if recipient servers can't confirm the mail is yours, then pace and monitoring once mail is flowing. Authenticate the domain with DKIM and SPF as part of domain verification. Set up DMARC so providers know how to treat mail that fails authentication. Warm up a new domain before sending at volume, over roughly four weeks. Monitor bounces and complaints through the deliverability webhooks. Stay under the bounce and complaint thresholds that pause sending. The rest of this post covers each one with the commands and request bodies to wire it up. Authenticate with DKIM and SPF Authentication is the foundation, and for an Agent Account it rides on two records you already publish during domain setup. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature proving the message wasn't altered and really came from your domain; SPF authorizes the sending infrastructure to send on your behalf. Both are verified before a custom domain can host a

An AI agent with its own mailbox reacts to whatever lands in it. That's the point, until a spam blast, a mailer-daemon loop, or an auto-reply triggers the agent into answering noise. The same goes the other way: an agent composing mail on its own can address the wrong person, leak to a test domain that slipped into production, or email a competitor because nobody told it not to. A human would catch these. An agent needs guardrails encoded somewhere it can't skip. Agent Accounts ship three admin resources for exactly this: Policies bundle limits and spam settings, Rules match mail on the way in or out and run actions like block or assign_to_folder , and Lists are reusable collections of domains or addresses that rules reference. This post covers all three from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for inspecting and managing policies and rules from the terminal. Lists, workspaces, and the rule-evaluations audit log are API-only for now. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for. How Policies, Rules, and Lists fit together The three resources form a chain, and a workspace ties it to your accounts. A List holds values like domains or addresses. A Rule references lists through the in_list operator and describes conditions and actions. A Policy bundles limits and spam settings. A workspace carries one policy_id plus an array of rule_ids , and every Agent Account in that workspace inherits both. What matters here: you don't attach a policy or rule to an individual grant. You set policy_id and rule_ids on a workspace , and they apply to every account in it. Each application has a default workspace that holds any account you haven't placed elsewhere, so configuring that one workspace covers all your unassigned accounts at once. All three resources are application-scoped — they carry no grant ID in the path, and your API key identifies the application. Resource What it owns How it's referenced List A typed collection of

An AI agent sends an email, a reply lands three hours later, and the agent has to answer two questions before it can do anything useful: which conversation is this, and what did I last say? Get the first one wrong and the agent's reply shows up in the recipient's inbox as a brand-new message instead of slotting into the existing thread. To the person on the other end, that looks broken — like the agent forgot the conversation it started. Threading is the part of agent email that's easy to get almost right and quietly wrong. The fix lives in a few email headers most developers never touch, and in the Threads API that groups messages into conversations for you. This post walks through both, from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm testing a reply loop. The three headers that make threading work Threading runs on three email headers, not on subject lines. Every message carries a Message-ID — a globally unique identifier the sending server stamps on it. When someone replies, their mail client adds In-Reply-To (the Message-ID of the message being answered) and References (the full chain of Message-ID values, oldest to newest). Those two headers are how every mail client decides which messages belong together. Here's what the chain looks like across one exchange. The agent's first message gets a Message-ID ; the reply points back at it; the agent's follow-up references both: # The agent's outbound message Message-ID : <abc123@agents.yourcompany.com> Subject : Following up on your demo request # The recipient's reply Message-ID: <def456@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <abc123@agents.yourcompany.com> References: <abc123@agents.yourcompany.com> Subject: Re: Following up on your demo request # The agent's follow-up Message-ID: <ghi789@agents.yourcompany.com> In-Reply-To: <def456@gmail.com> References: <abc123@agents.yourcompany.com> <def456@gmail.com> The Ref

Most "AI agent that emails for you" demos point a language model at a human's Gmail inbox over OAuth. That works until the agent needs its own identity: an address people reply to, a calendar that accepts invites, a mailbox your application owns end to end. Borrowing a human's inbox means inheriting their OAuth scopes, their rate limits, and the awkwardness of an agent sending mail as a person who didn't write it. A Nylas Agent Account flips that around. It's a real name@yourcompany.com mailbox that you create and control entirely through the API — it sends, receives, hosts calendar events, and RSVPs, and it's indistinguishable from a human-operated account to anyone on the other end. Under the hood it's just a grant , so the grant_id you get back works with the same grant-scoped endpoints — Messages, Threads, Folders, Drafts, Attachments, Contacts, Calendars, and Events — you've already used for connected accounts, plus the standard webhook triggers. This post is a working tour of provisioning one, from two angles: the HTTP API for your backend, and the Nylas CLI for the terminal and quick experiments. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for. Why an Agent Account beats borrowing a human inbox An Agent Account is a first-class sender, not a delegated one. When the agent owns support@yourcompany.com , people reply to it directly, calendars invite it as a normal participant, and its mail authenticates as coming from you. A few concrete differences from pointing an agent at someone's existing mailbox: No OAuth flow to babysit. Creation needs only an email address on a domain you've registered — there's no refresh token to store or rotate, and the grant rarely expires because there's no OAuth token to refresh. Its own reputation. The account sends on your domain, and a new domain establishes its sender reputation over roughly four weeks of gradual sending. That reputation is yours to protect, not a shared corporate inbox's. Per-t

You built a LangFlow prototype. Every test passed. You exported the flow, dropped it into n8n, and the first production run broke. This is not a bug report. It is a pattern. The three-year SDET who has built LangFlow prototypes but hit mysterious failures when deploying the same logic in n8n production already knows the feeling. The prototype felt solid. The production pipeline felt like a different language. It is not. The difference is execution context. LangFlow runs in a notebook-like environment where state is forgiving and retries are invisible. n8n runs in a workflow engine where every node is a transaction boundary and every failure is final unless you explicitly handle it. Here are the three tests that pass in LangFlow but fail in n8n production, and what they teach about building reliable AI pipelines. Test 1: The "LLM Returns Valid JSON" Test What passes in LangFlow: You send a prompt asking the model to return JSON. The response comes back as a string. You parse it with json.loads() . It works. You move on. What fails in n8n: The model returns a string that starts with a code block. Or a trailing comma. Or a markdown fence. Or a preamble sentence before the JSON. Or nothing at all because the context window was exceeded. Why the difference: LangFlow's Python node silently tolerates malformed output. If json.loads() fails, you see the error in the output panel and fix the prompt. n8n's JSON node does not retry. It does not fall back. It throws a structured error that stops the entire workflow. The fix is not a better prompt. The fix is a validation layer that normalizes LLM output before parsing. import json import re def extract_json ( raw : str ) -> dict : # Strip markdown fences cleaned = re . sub ( r ' ^``` (?:json)?\s* ' , '' , raw . strip ()) cleaned = re . sub ( r ' \s* ```$ ' , '' , cleaned ) # Find the first { and last } start = cleaned . find ( ' { ' ) end = cleaned . rfind ( ' } ' ) if start == - 1 or end == - 1 : raise ValueError ( " No JSON o

European offensive cybersecurity company Paradigm Shift released details of a flaw and a technique to exploit it that opens the door for hackers to unlock and break into older iPhones.

Google DeepMind and A24 are teaming up to build AI filmmaking tools.

Every time I added AI to a React app, I rewrote the same 200+ lines. Streaming loop. Manual message history. Tool call orchestration. Error handling. setIsLoading(false) only if I remembered. After the third project I stopped and asked: why is nobody solving this the way RTK Query solved REST APIs? So I built Strand ( https://github.com/strand-js/strand ). Before const [messages, setMessages] = useState([]) const [isLoading, setIsLoading] = useState(false) async function send(text) { setIsLoading(true) manually stream tokens manually detect tool calls manually loop until done setIsLoading(false) only if you remembered } After const { messages, send, isPending, isStreaming, cancel } = useConversation({ system: 'You are a helpful assistant.', }) Streaming, history, tool calls, cancellation, retry; all handled. The thing nobody else has: useToolCall Works from ANY component; no prop drilling function WeatherStatus() { const { status, input, output } = useToolCall('get_weather') if (status === 'running') return <div>Checking {input?.location}…</div> if (status === 'done') return <div>{output?.temp}°F</div> return null } Live tool state: pending → running → done. Its observable anywhere in your tree. Fixing the isLoading design flaw The Vercel AI SDK has 4+ open issues ( https://github.com/vercel/ai/issues ) about isLoading getting stuck. The reason is architectural because "request sent" and "tokens arriving" are different states. Strand tracks four: const { isPending, isStreaming, isDone, error } = useConversation() // isPending: waiting for first token // isStreaming: tokens arriving // isDone: just completed // error: something failed Works with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini npm install @strand-js/core @strand-js/react zod npm install @strand-js/anthropic # or openai, or google Swap providers by changing one server import. Zero frontend changes. v0.1.8, MIT, open source. → https://github.com/strand-js/strand

Developers inheriting sprawling SQL codebases or revisiting queries from weeks earlier know the frustration: a dense, unformatted block that obscures joins, filters, and logical flow. Readable SQL isn’t cosmetic — it directly affects debugging speed, peer review accuracy, and long-term maintainability. What it is SQL Formatter restructures raw SQL into clear, conventionally formatted code, running entirely in the browser. It applies consistent indentation, capitalisation of keywords, and logical line breaks — all without altering the query’s semantics. The formatter understands the syntax of all major database engines, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, so it preserves dialect-specific functions and operators rather than flattening them into a generic style. The tool is one of 200+ free browser utilities on DevTools. It processes all input entirely on your machine — no data ever leaves the browser, no account is required, and no analytics track your usage. That privacy-first design means you can safely format queries that contain proprietary business logic embedded in production SQL. The engine handles the full spectrum of SQL complexity: basic SELECT statements, multi-table joins, Common Table Expressions (CTEs), correlated subqueries, window functions, and DML operations like INSERT or UPDATE . Because it parses the input rather than applying regular expressions, deeply nested constructs retain their hierarchy, with each subquery or CTE level indented to show ownership. How to use it Paste any SQL fragment into the left-hand editor and the formatted result appears instantly in the output panel. A live preview updates as you switch formatting options, so you can tune the output without re-pasting. The primary configuration controls help you match your team’s conventions or personal preference: Dialect : selecting a specific database ensures that functions such as PostgreSQL’s STRING_AGG or MySQL’s GROUP_CONCAT are not inadvertently mangled, and th

As developers, we've all been there. Q: Need to decode a Base64 string? Open one website. Q: Need to convert an image to Base64? Open another website. Q: Need to validate a Base64 string? Search Google again. Q: Need to compare two Base64 values? Yet another tool. I found myself repeatedly switching between different websites, browser tabs, and terminal commands just to perform simple Base64-related tasks. So I decided to build something that solved this problem for me. The Goal Keep every commonly used Base64 utility in one place and make it work directly in the browser. No installations. No command-line knowledge required. No account creation. Just open the website and use the tool What You'll Find Instead of only providing an encoder and decoder, I wanted to cover the complete Base64 workflow. Some of the available tools include: Base64 Encode / Decode Image to Base64 Audio to Base64 Video to Base64 Base64 Validator Base64 Detector Base64 Compare Base64 Repair Base64 URL Encode Base64 File Decoder CSS Data URI Converter And more are being added regularly. Why I Built It Honestly, this started as a personal productivity project. I was using different Base64 tools almost every week and got tired of bookmarking multiple websites for related tasks. Having everything in one place turned out to be surprisingly useful, so I decided to make it public. Give It a Try https://base64converters.com I'm continuously improving it and would love feedback from fellow developers. Are there any Base64-related tools or workflows you use frequently that should be included?

"It runs on my own GPU, so it's basically free." I believed that until I put a meter on it. So I ran a controlled benchmark on one box — an openSUSE machine with a single RTX 3090 — driving three local models through ollama under an identical fixed workload (256-token generations in a loop for ~4 minutes each), while my open-source dashboard priced every run by the real GPU energy it burned : power sampled from nvidia-smi every 10 s, integrated over each run's exact window, multiplied by my actual day/night tariff. One number per model, in euros per million output tokens. Here's the part that made me re-run it. The tiny gemma3:1b came out at €0.118 / 1M tokens — about 5× cheaper than a hosted Flash-class API (~€0.55). But gemma3:27b 's electricity alone was €0.706 / 1M — more expensive per token than just paying the cloud, and that's before a single cent of the GPU's purchase price. "Local" didn't make it cheaper; it made it cost more and I own the depreciation. The mechanism is one line: each token costs watts ÷ throughput , and a big dense model is both slow and thirsty. A newer mid-size architecture ( gemma4:26b ) bought a lot of that back, landing at €0.272 . The full guide is methodology-first and reproducible end to end — minting an ingest key, the stdlib-only client, the exact ollama loop that reads eval_count / eval_duration for real tokens-per-second, reading each run back priced, and the honest caveats (this is marginal GPU energy only — not capex, idle, or cooling — and the absolute numbers round to fractions of a cent; the shape is the finding). Read the full guide on Medium → https://medium.com/@arsen.apostolov/how-much-does-it-actually-cost-to-run-a-local-llm-per-million-tokens-measured-4a90a7f31a48

গত মাসে আমাদের একটা payment system এ বারবার একই সমস্যা আসছিল। Transaction fail হচ্ছে, একজন developer ঠিক করছে, ticket close হচ্ছে। তিনদিন পর আবার একই জিনিস। আমি log গুলো দেখলাম। একই মূল কারণ। কিন্তু কেউ সেটা fix করেনি। সবাই শুধু symptom দূর করে চলে গেছে। ভেতরের অসুখটা ধরেনি। মাস শেষে হিসাব করলাম। একই সমস্যায় টিম ১০+ ঘণ্টা নষ্ট করেছে। মূল কারণটা fix করতে ৫-৬ ঘণ্টা লাগতো। সত্যি বলতে, এটা শুধু আমাদের টিমের সমস্যা না। Brain Station 23, Selise, TigerIT এর মত company গুলোতেও এই জিনিসটা দেখা যায়। প্রায় প্রতিটা software team এ। Anton Zaides, Manager.dev newsletter এর লেখক এবং ১৫+ বছরের tech experience নিয়ে কাজ করছেন। তিনি এই বিষয়ে বিস্তারিত লিখেছেন ( source )। উনার মতে, একটা "ভালো" টিম আর "দুর্দান্ত" টিমের মধ্যে পার্থক্য মোটে ৭টা ছোট অভ্যাসে। কাজ দুগুণ করা না। ১০x engineer থাকা না। শুধু কিছু habit। আমি উনার ১০টা article পড়েছি। নিজের ৫ বছরের experience মিলিয়ে, এই ৭টা habit, ২টা bonus point, আর FDE এর মত নতুন concept গুলো আমাদের দেশের software company গুলোতে কীভাবে কাজে লাগে, সেটা লিখছি। কিছু শব্দ আগেই বুঝে নিই: EM / Team Lead = Engineering Manager। আমাদের দেশে একে Team Lead, Project Lead, বা Tech Lead ও বলা হয় (যিনি টিম চালান) PM = Product Manager (যিনি কী feature বানাবে ঠিক করেন) Ticket = Jira/Trello তে কাজের একটা item PR = Pull Request (code review এর জন্য কোড submit করা) Deploy = code production server এ পাঠানো Tech Debt = এমন code বা architecture যেটা পরে সমস্যা তৈরি করবে (ঋণের মতো, পরে শোধ করতে হয়) Bottleneck = এমন একটা জায়গা যেটা পুরো কাজকে ধীর করে দেয় AI Coding Tool = Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot এর মত tool যা code লিখতে, review করতে, debug করতে সাহায্য করে FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer। engineer যিনি client এর কাছে সরাসরি থাকেন, তাদের সমস্যা বোঝেন, আর solution বানান 📌 Patch না, Root Cause ভালো টিম bug fix করে। সামনে এগোয়। কিন্তু একই bug আবার আসে। আবার fix। আবার আসে। আবার fix। একটা উদাহরণ দিই। ধরুন, আপনার পেট ব্যথা হচ্ছে বারবার। আপনি প্রতিবার painkiller খেয়ে সামলাচ্ছেন। কিন্তু ডাক্তার দেখাচ্ছেন না। এক সময় ব্যথা আরো বড় হবে। Software এও একই। bKas

I wanted to get better at prompt engineering. Not the trick-the-robot kind, the boring-but-useful kind: how to ask a model a question so you get an answer you can actually trust. The trouble with practicing is that most tutorials use made-up examples, and it's hard to tell a good answer from a bad one when you don't care about the topic. So I practiced on something I did care about: the deals sitting in my Amazon cart. I had a vacuum I'd been eyeing and a hair styler that was "43% off," and I genuinely wanted to know if those were good prices or just good marketing. The stakes were real, actual money on an actual decision, and that's what made it a good drill. A vague prompt gives you a confident answer, and when you actually care, you can feel that the answer is hollow. What I learned, with the real deals and the actual before-and-after prompts: The trap hiding in every deal Start with the hair styler. The listing said: Shark FlexStyle. Limited time deal. $199.00, 43% savings. List Price: $349.99. My first instinct was the prompt most people write: "Shark FlexStyle $199, 43% off list $349.99, is that a good deal?" This feels reasonable. It is also nearly useless: it lets the model answer the easy question (is 43% off a big discount? sure!) instead of the real one (is $199 actually a good price?). That $349.99 list price is a marketing anchor. A lazy prompt accepts it, and so you get a lazy "yes, great deal!" back. The fix was re-framing this: Act as a pricing analyst. I don't care whether $199 looks like a discount off list. I care whether $199 is a genuinely good price for the Shark FlexStyle right now. Before concluding, work through: (1) the actual street price over the last 6-12 months, (2) how often it drops to or below $199, (3) the real discount vs. its typical selling price, not vs. list. Cite a source and date for each price, or mark it unverified. Same question, completely different answer. What the assistant came back with, in its own telling: $199 is a