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Keep the beams standing. Replace what they carry. — The 36 Stratagems, Replace the beams with rotten...

Introducing AI Disclosure on DEV: Tools for Nuance, Clarity, and Better Feeds Author leads by example using the new tag Ben Halpern Ben Halpern Ben Halpern Follow for The DEV Team Aug 26 Introducing AI Disclosure on DEV: Tools for Nuance, Clarity, and Better Feeds # showdev # announcements # ai # community 49 reactions 3 comments 3 min read

Two weeks ago I counted 204 guards in my repos and found that 89 % had never been shown they can...

Claude Code is amazing. It feels like cheating in the best way until it doesn't. The first time I dropped a vague comment and it gave me a fully working component, I was hooked. But somewhere along the way, I realized something weird was happening: I was coding less... and thinking less. Let’s talk about that. The Tools Got Better, But We Got Lazier In 2022, you still had to know stuff . Now? You just prompt your way through half the job. And sure, productivity skyrocketed. Ship faster, write fewer tests, scaffold full APIs in a couple of minutes. But here’s the tradeoff no one likes to talk about: we’re outsourcing thinking . Not tasks. Not code. Thinking. I've seen teammates slowly stop debugging on their own. They just throw the stack trace into Claude. I’ve seen people stop learning the fundamentals of async behavior or memory handling because “Claude will tell me.” Cool. Until Claude gives you a bad answer and you don’t realize it because you stopped building your intuition. The Industry’s Not the Same The layoffs? Brutal. And the worst part isn’t just losing a job it’s realizing you didn’t build portable skills . Because if Claude wrote all your code at your last job, what exactly did you learn? When companies trimmed down, they didn’t just cut bodies. They cut noise. They kept the people who could solve problems , not the ones who could Google fast or write perfect prompts. So ask yourself: if Claude disappeared tomorrow, could you still contribute? Using AI ≠ Being a Great Engineer I’m not anti-AI. I use Claude. I use Cursor. I use Copilot. But I don’t depend on them. There’s a difference between boosting productivity and becoming a prompt monkey. The first one makes you valuable. The second one… doesn’t. Let’s get real: code was never the point. It was always about solving problems, navigating ambiguity, simplifying complex systems, designing clean architecture. None of that goes away with AI. In fact, it becomes more important. The Skills You’ll Regret Not

Debian is polling its developers on how to handle AI-assisted contributions, with options that range from broadly permitting them to banning them outright. Whatever the outcome, I think this is one of the more consequential governance conversations in open source right now, and not for the reason the headlines suggest. The framing everyone reaches for is philosophical. Is generated code authored? Is it derivative? Does using a model make you less of a contributor? Those are real questions and I do not have confident answers to them. But if I imagine actually being a Debian maintainer, my problem is not philosophical at all. It is that my queue is full and my reviewing hours are finite. The bottleneck was never writing code Volunteer projects have always been constrained by review capacity, not by supply of patches. The scarce resource is someone knowledgeable enough to say "this is correct, this fits our conventions, I will own the consequences if it breaks." Assistants change the ratio between those two things dramatically. The cost of producing a plausible patch has fallen much faster than the cost of evaluating one. That asymmetry is the whole story. A project can absorb a lot of contributors when each contributor's output is roughly proportional to their understanding. It struggles when someone can submit a large, fluent, superficially reasonable change to a subsystem they have never read. I want to be careful here: plenty of experienced maintainers use these tools well, and their patches are better for it. The failure mode is not the tool. It is the decoupling of confidence from comprehension. Why detection is the wrong axis A ban sounds like a clean answer, and I understand the appeal. But I am skeptical it can be enforced in a way that means anything. You cannot reliably detect generated code, especially after a human has edited it, and especially for the kind of small idiomatic patch that makes up most of a distribution's traffic. A rule you cannot enforce d

Every so often a post reminds me that the most dangerous line of code in a system is the one that looks like it could not possibly be wrong. This week's version: calling .lower() on a string can be a security vulnerability. If your first reaction is skepticism, mine was too. Lowercasing is the plumbing of programming. We do it to normalize usernames, compare header names, canonicalize domains, and check things against blocklists. It feels like arithmetic. The problem is that case conversion is not a character-by-character mechanical operation. It is a linguistic one, defined by Unicode, and it has behavior that surprises almost everyone who has not been bitten before. Case is not symmetric, and not always local Two examples that break the mental model. Turkish has a dotless i, and correct locale-aware conversion maps between letters differently than English does, which means "the same" string can lowercase into two different results depending on locale settings. And there are characters outside ASCII whose lowercase form is an ASCII character, meaning a string that contains no k at all can become one that does after normalization. Sit with that second one for a moment, because it is the security-relevant shape. If you validate a string, then normalize it, you have validated something that no longer exists. Your check ran against one value and your system acts on another. That is the classic time-of-check versus time-of-use bug, except the mutation is not caused by an attacker racing you. It is caused by your own normalization call, quietly doing what the spec says it should do. I want to be careful not to overstate the specifics here, since the exact behavior depends on language runtime, Unicode version, and locale configuration. The generalizable lesson is what interests me. The pattern to look for in your own code Anywhere a string travels through this sequence, there is potential for trouble: Accept input. Check it against a rule: an allowlist, a blocklist, a com

I read a short argument this week that tooltips need a delay before they appear, and then, once you are obviously working your way along a toolbar, they need to drop that delay entirely. It is a tiny piece of interface behavior. It stayed with me longer than most architecture posts I read this month. Partly because it is correct, and partly because it is not really about tooltips. It is about the fact that timing is something you design, the same way you design spacing or color. Most teams treat it as a leftover. We pick 200ms because it felt fine on a fast laptop. Or we pick zero because zero seems honest. Or we inherit whatever number shipped inside the component library we installed on day one and never revisit it. Then the product feels twitchy or sluggish, and the bug report says "it feels weird," which is the hardest class of bug there is. Two different users living in the same hands What makes the tooltip case interesting is that a single person switches modes mid-interaction. When my cursor is crossing the screen on its way somewhere else, a tooltip that fires instantly is noise. It flashes, it covers content, it makes the interface feel jumpy for no reason. The delay exists to filter accidental passes. But the moment I stop and read one tooltip, I have declared intent. I am now surveying. If the next four icons each make me wait 500ms, the interface is punishing me for exactly the behavior it was trying to encourage. The delay was a filter for accidents, and I stopped having accidents. So the right behavior is stateful: wait at first, then trust me until I leave the neighborhood. That is the whole insight, and it generalizes further than hover states. The same pattern, wearing other clothes Once you see it, this shape is everywhere: Autocomplete that should debounce while you are typing a word, then feel instant once you have paused and are clearly evaluating results. Confirmation dialogs that make sense the first time you delete something and become a wall

Because "we'll be in touch" is not an observable state. I submitted a job application recently. It...

2024 was the year AI was everywhere. The ads, the praise, the feeling that something had already been decided without me. I am in my fifties. I had to decide whether to watch or take part. I decided to take part. I started with VS Code, on a paid plan. I did not have to think about what to build. Something had been sitting in my head for years: an automated trading system. I have lived fifty years, and while raising children the money got tighter, not looser. Financial freedom was moving away from me, not toward me. So I wanted to make money with automated trading. I think the idea first arrived in my mid-forties. That is why the decision to take part came so quickly. Whatever I said out loud would simply get built. That was the hope I walked in on. I do not really know how to code. But the AI would handle that part, so I trusted it. Where the illusion first cracked A year inside VS Code taught me that two names mattered: GPT and Claude. I used them in turn. I used them one at a time. Two problems. First, even on a paid plan the usage ran out fast. Faster than I expected. The road ahead was long and I was sitting still, waiting for a quota to reset. The second one was worse. The explanations were excellent. The results were not. That is where the illusion cracked for the first time. I still could not let go, so I paid for more. Adding Cursor bought me some headroom. And a different problem showed up immediately. Switch the model and it wants to start over Change the model, and it wants to rewrite everything from the beginning. Handed code written by a different AI, it would rather replace the whole thing than edit it. That is when I understood that switching AI mid-project is a bad idea. Everyone talks about pricing. Almost nobody talks about this one. And this is the one that actually held me back. I spent a lot of time fighting the tool. In the end I paid for Claude's hundred-dollar plan, and from then on I worked with Claude. What I gained: the job nobody wanted

The strongest candidate I ever voted no on solved the problem in eleven minutes. Clean. Optimal. Caught the edge case I normally have to hint at twice. Then I opened my notes to write the scorecard and found one line: "Solved it. I have no idea how." That is the short version of why strong engineers fail coding interviews. Not because they can't code. Because nothing they did survived the trip from the room to the scorecard. The interview is not the thing being graded. The document I write forty minutes later is the thing being graded, and you are not in the room when it gets read. TL;DR Strong engineers fail coding interviews mostly on signal density , not correctness. A silent correct answer scores lower than a narrated near-miss. Interviewers score 3-4 rubric axes (problem solving, coding, communication, and for senior roles, judgment) and each axis needs quotable evidence , not vibes. The decision happens in the debrief , where ambiguity defaults to no. "Lean hire" across the board is a rejection at most companies. The most common senior failure is solving a senior problem like a junior : no scoping, no tradeoffs, no failure modes, no tests. Fix it by talking in sentences your interviewer can transcribe verbatim: assumption, tradeoff, complexity, test. What do interviewers actually score in a coding interview? Not "did you get the answer." Almost every structured loop I've been part of scores a fixed rubric, and correctness is one box inside one axis. Here is roughly what the form looks like: Axis What it's really asking What lands on the scorecard Problem solving Did you scope before you built? "Asked whether input fits in memory before choosing an approach." Coding Would this survive code review? "Named things well, extracted a helper, no off-by-one." Communication Could I follow you in real time? "Told me the plan first, then coded the plan." Judgment (senior+) Do you know what breaks in prod? "Unprompted, called out the retry storm risk." Notice what every r

I just started a blog and published my first blog post about Logical Volume Management. I'm new to documenting my work, so I'd really appreciate any feedback on the content, clarity, or writing style in general. This site is a mix of a blog and a portfolio. Since I'm new to all of this, it would be great to get some feedback on whether this post works well just as a blog post, or if it actually holds up as a portfolio project too, before I keep writing more. www.mvtechblog.com Thanks in advance.

"Auto-provisioning" is one of those features that sounds boring on a spec sheet and turns out to be doing a surprising amount of work once you look underneath it. The pitch is simple: drop in a list of users and the system spins up hundreds of configured softphones across devices in minutes, no manual setup per user. The pitch is easy. The plumbing behind it is where the interesting problems live. I've been picking this apart lately and wanted to write down what actually has to happen for "provision 500 users in minutes" to be true. What manual provisioning looks like (so you can see what's being automated away) Setting up one softphone by hand is a checklist. You create the user on the platform, assign an extension and credentials, point the client at the right SIP server, configure the transport (TLS, ports), set codecs, wire up voicemail, maybe push notification tokens, contacts, feature flags. Then you do it on their device. For one user, fine, twenty minutes. For five hundred, that's a full-time job for a week, and every manual step is a chance to fat-finger a config and generate a support ticket later. Auto-provisioning exists to make that whole checklist happen without a human running it each time. The core problem: getting config to a device that isn't configured yet The central puzzle of provisioning is a chicken-and-egg one. You want to hand a device its configuration, but the device doesn't yet know who it is or where to get that config. So the whole flow is about bootstrapping identity and config onto a blank client safely. A few common approaches: Provisioning URL + credentials: The user (or an admin) enters a provisioning username/password, or the client is pointed at a provisioning server URL. The client authenticates, the server looks up who this is, and returns the full config bundle. Simple, works, but needs the initial credential to get entered somehow. QR / activation code: Instead of typing SIP settings, the user scans a code or enters a short a

Welcome to this week's Top 7, where the DEV editorial team handpicks their favorite posts from the...

AI coding agents leave you with 5-to-20-minute gaps all day. Five real ways I fill them — and the one "quick" habit that makes you the bottleneck.

5:00 PM. Laptop closed. Slack closed. Workday over. Except my brain didn't get the memo. I'm making...

I wanted to disagree with 'AI made me a worse reviewer' from Michael Amachree (@dev_michael) ....

Your Agent Doesn't Have a Reasoning Problem, It Has a Memory Problem Anannya Roy Chowdhury Anannya Roy Chowdhury Anannya Roy Chowdhury Follow Aug 24 Your Agent Doesn't Have a Reasoning Problem, It Has a Memory Problem # ai # agents # architecture # programming 11 reactions 1 comment 9 min read

Meme Monday! Today's cover image comes from the last thread . DEV is an inclusive space! Humor in poor taste will be downvoted by mods.

🚀 From FlipaClip to SitePoint: The Full Story of Kehinde Owolabi How a Nigerian teenager built a professional game engine with borrowed laptops, offline W3Schools, and pure determination. 🎮 Play the Game Try Limn Engine Live — Space Shooter Demo See what 4 years of determination built. This space shooter runs at 60 FPS on a Tecno Pop 4 with 1GB RAM. 📖 Introduction Every developer has an origin story. Some start with a fancy computer and a computer science degree. Others start with a flipbook app and a sister who trusted them with her phone. My name is Kehinde Owolabi . I'm 18 years old (born December 4, 2007), and I live in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm currently in PC103 at BYU Pathway, and I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I built a 94/100 professional game engine called Limn Engine. It runs at 60 FPS on a Toshiba with 4GB RAM. It was published on SitePoint and ranked #3 among 2D JavaScript game engines. Nobody knew it was developed on a Chromebook, a borrowed Thinkpad (behind my sister's back), and a Toshiba that "hung like hell." That was the secret I kept for months. But that's only one part of this story. This is the full story of how I went from a button phone to a 94/100 game engine, from FlipaClip to SitePoint, from a boy who failed physics to a developer who built something that runs on a Tecno Pop 4. The one-line summary: "I'm Kehinde Owolabi, an 18-year-old developer from Lagos, Nigeria who went from FlipaClip to building a 94/100 game engine on borrowed laptops — and got published on SitePoint." 🎮🚀 🎨 The Beginning: FlipaClip and the Spark of Creativity Before I was a developer, I was an animator. I used FlipaClip — a simple animation app on mobile — to create flipbook-style animations. I loved bringing characters to life, frame by frame. I would spend hours drawing, tweaking, and watching my creations move. That creative spark stayed with me. I wanted to create interactive experiences. I wanted to build games. But I didn't know how.

We often focus on what someone says, but in the realm of clinical psychology, how they say it is often more revealing. Subtle changes in speech—a slight tremor (jitter), a slowing tempo, or a flattened pitch—can be early indicators of depression or anxiety long before a user explicitly voices their distress. In this tutorial, we are building Psycho-Acoustic , a high-performance monitoring tool that leverages the HuBERT model , HuggingFace Transformers , and Librosa to quantify emotional states from non-verbal acoustic features. Whether you're interested in speech sentiment analysis , mental health AI , or advanced audio processing , this guide covers the end-to-face-mic implementation. The Architecture of Sound 🏗️ To accurately detect mental health indicators, we can't just look at text. We need a multimodal approach that combines raw signal processing with deep learning representations. graph TD A[Raw Audio Input .wav] --> B[Librosa Preprocessing] B --> C{Feature Extraction} C --> D[Traditional Features: Jitter, Shimmer, Pitch] C --> E[Deep Learning: HuBERT Embeddings] D --> F[Feature Fusion Layer] E --> F F --> G[Classification Head: Anxiety/Depression/Neutral] G --> H[Quantified Mental Health Score] H --> I[Deployment via ONNX Runtime] Prerequisites To follow this advanced guide, you’ll need: Python 3.9+ Tech Stack : transformers , librosa , torch , onnxruntime A basic understanding of digital signal processing (DSP). Step 1: Extracting Non-Verbal Acoustic Features 🌊 Before hitting the neural network, we need to extract "Psycho-Acoustic" features. Depression is often characterized by "speech prosody" changes—specifically reduced pitch range and slower speaking rates. import librosa import numpy as np def extract_prosodic_features ( audio_path ): y , sr = librosa . load ( audio_path , sr = 16000 ) # 1. Fundamental Frequency (F0) - Pitch f0 , voiced_flag , voiced_probs = librosa . pyin ( y , fmin = librosa . note_to_hz ( ' C2 ' ), fmax = librosa . note_to_hz ( ' C7