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👋 Hey there, Tech Enthusiasts! I'm Sarvar, a Cloud Architect who loves turning complex tech problems...

Hi everyone, I’m working on a new programming language called Zentax. It is still in early development, but the goal is to build a modern language focused on: Performance and low-level control Simple and clean syntax Native desktop application support A modular compiler and runtime design Zentax is not trying to replace existing languages — it is an experiment in building a unified approach for systems programming and UI development. Current Status Compiler: in development Runtime: early design stage Renderer: experimental Standard library: planning phase Looking for Contributors I’m open to collaboration from anyone interested in: Programming language design Compiler development Runtime systems Graphics / rendering engines Open-source tooling Even feedback and ideas are welcome at this stage. Links Git Hub Repo Discord Thanks for reading. Dr. Zoha Tariq Anoneurx

A story about an AI alert model that cut false alarms from 60% to 7% — and what happened when...

Hey all! I have this thought in mind that we should all come together as a community to celebrate...

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam 🎮 Play the Game: Letters to Tomorrow 💻 Source...

Meme Monday! Today's cover image comes from the last thread. DEV is an inclusive space! Humor in...

Mine got flagged twice in one day. Both essays generated more engagement than anything else I've...

Word scrambling is a deceptively simple mechanic. Rearrange the letters of a word, ask someone to restore the original — that's the entire game loop. But underneath that simplicity is a cognitive process that language researchers find genuinely interesting, and that developers building educational tools keep returning to. The Cognitive Mechanics of Unscrambling When a learner attempts to unscramble a word, they're engaging several parallel cognitive processes: pattern recognition (matching letter combinations to phonemes they know), memory retrieval (searching their lexical database), and hypothesis testing (trying a mental arrangement before committing). It's a lightweight version of the same cognitive work that makes retrieval practice so effective in spaced repetition systems. For language learners specifically, this is high-value low-stakes practice. The scrambled form gives enough context to confirm the answer upon success — no ambiguity like a multiple-choice distractor — while requiring genuine active recall. Implementation Considerations for Developers If you're building a word scramble feature into an educational app, a few things matter: Avoiding anagram collisions: "SILENT" → "LISTEN" is a classic example. Your scrambling algorithm needs to detect valid English words in the output and regenerate if it creates a different real word. A dictionary API lookup on the scrambled result handles this. Difficulty calibration: Longer words and words with repeated letters (like "BALLOON") are objectively harder to unscramble. A good difficulty curve starts with 4–5 letter words and increases length progressively. First/last letter anchoring: Keeping the first and last letters in position is a widely used technique to reduce cognitive load. It's psychologically effective — people anchor on word edges more than the interior. Using Existing Tools vs. Building Your Own For most educational content creators and teachers (non-developers), building their own tool isn't feas

It's widely accepted that as AI writes more and more of our code, opportunities decrease for newcomers to gain the skills needed to become professional programmers. At the same time, experienced people bemoan the way AI is causing them to gradually lose the skills they took so long and worked so hard to gain. Programming, like mathematics and perhaps music, sits in the middle between science and art. As science, it's all about capturing and organising knowledge, and as art, it's the application of creativity to problem-solving. Enjoyment - deep satisfaction or an emotional rush - can be had from either or both of these. But the perception is that AI is depriving us of opportunity, both to learn and to be creative. Code written by a human reveals a lot about the coder. Their depth of knowledge of the coding language, their creative use of variable and function names, and even the visual layout of a script. You can often tell at a glance whether the writer truly cared about the code they wrote, or whether it was just a means to an end, to ensure their next pay packet arrives on time. As AI improves, it makes fewer mistakes, but it also produces code that is increasingly hard for any human to read and truly understand. Since the job of a human in the coding loop is increasingly not to write but to validate code, this is becoming a problem. So here's my recent story, a series of happy accidents. I've been using agentic AI for about a year. First with Copilot in VS Code, then more recently with Claude Code at the command line. At the start, I found Copilot to make a lot of mistakes and to produce rather repetitive, poorly-structured code, but looking back, a lot of that was probably down to my own ignorance of how to control the process. The biggest problem I had was in validating JS or Python code. There was just so much of it, often using features of both languages I never fully got to grips with. I've never been a first-class programmer and most of my own code is pure

The Problem Nobody Talks About Picture this: You're trying to find a place to meet up with friends. Someone suggests a coffee shop. It's 8 minutes from their house. It's 45 minutes from yours. You say yes anyway, because suggesting a different place feels awkward. This happens all the time — with friends, with remote teams, with family scattered across a city. And the worst part? Most "meet in the middle" suggestions aren't actually in the middle. They're just the geographic midpoint, which completely ignores traffic, transit options, and the fact that roads don't go in straight lines. I got frustrated enough to build something about it. Meet Meetle Meetle is a free web app that finds the fairest meeting spot for any group of people — based on real travel times , not just distance. A Chrome Extension is coming soon so you'll have it one click away in your toolbar. You add everyone's starting location, choose how each person is traveling (driving, walking, or transit), hit Find Meeting Point , and Meetle does the math across every person simultaneously. It then surfaces the best nearby cafés, restaurants, parks, gyms, or whatever venue type you're looking for — ranked by actual fairness. No more "it's fine, I don't mind the drive." Now you have data. How It Actually Works Under the hood, Meetle uses three Google Maps APIs working together: Distance Matrix API calculates travel time from every person's location to every candidate venue, simultaneously. This is the core of the fairness scoring — you can't rank venues fairly without knowing everyone's actual travel time to each one. Places API finds candidate venues near the calculated center point. You can filter by type (coffee, food, parks, gyms, etc.), price level, minimum rating, and whether they're open right now. Maps JavaScript API renders everything visually — the map, the travel zones (isochrones), and the markers for each suggested venue. The scoring works two ways and you can toggle between them: Fairness mo

I have been doing a lot of work lately tightening up my diagnostic suite: the mechanics, the workflow, the way it runs against target repos, the way it helps narrow a repair instead of letting everything turn into a fog machine. And because I work with Codex as my coding agent, I have also become very familiar with a specific kind of AI-agent behavior. The “I am helping so hard I am about to make this worse” behavior. If you work with coding agents, you probably know the vibe. You ask for one thing. The agent does that thing. Then it also adjusts a helper. Then it updates a fixture. Then it “notices” a nearby pattern. Then it starts explaining three other improvements you never asked for. And now you’re staring at the diff like: “Why are you in that file?” “I did not tell you to touch that.” “That was not the repair lane.” “Please stop being useful for one second.” I am not proud of how many times I have verbally threatened a language model. But here we are. The funny thing is, I am building Scarab partly because I already expect this kind of drift. I know that when an AI coding agent is given too much uncertainty, it tries to solve the uncertainty itself. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it is a raccoon with a soldering iron. The challenge is that while I am developing the diagnostic system, I cannot always use the diagnostic system to supervise itself. So there are moments where I have to manually hold the line. That means a lot of conversations with Codex that sound like: “Do not widen the patch.” “Do not change the diagnostic output to make the diagnostic pass.” “Do not fix the test by changing what the test means.” “Do not touch SDS mechanics while repairing the target repo.” “Stay in the target.” “Stay in the lane.” “Why are you like this?” Very normal. Very calm. Very professional. Then something changed At some point, after a lot of tightening, the workflow started to feel different. Scarab had enough of the diagnostic work under control that I could tell

I was thinking about some tests for a service that uses language models; there are several, even prompt injection. A question came to mind: is it possible to make multiple requests asking for any text like Lorem Ipsum, generating many unnecessary tokens and incurring costs? But creating a test where there are multiple accounts making the same request to generate 10,000 Lorem Ipsum tokens simultaneously, could that cause a service outage? Because most of the infrastructure I see doesn't use any queuing method when the chat is free of tasks involving an agent or even heavier functionalities. I didn't actually generate anything, I just wanted to start a discussion on this topic.

I've been writing about AI coding tools for months here on Dev.to. Comparisons, benchmarks, tutorials on how to squeeze the most out of Claude Code, Cursor, and the rest. And I do use them. Every single day. But last week I tried something that surprised even me. I turned them off completely. For an entire week, no AI-generated code, no autocomplete suggestions, no "explain this function" prompts. Just me, my editor, and a blinking cursor. Here's what actually happened. The First Few Days Were Rough Day one was humbling. My output dropped by maybe half. What normally took 15 minutes stretched to 40. I found myself reaching for the Cmd+K shortcut out of muscle memory half a dozen times. But somewhere around day three, something shifted. I started reading source code instead of asking for summaries. I traced through execution paths instead of having the LLM walk me through them. I caught a subtle race condition that Claude Code had confidently dismissed as "not an issue" in the same codebase two weeks prior. That moment stuck with me. The Code Was Cleaner Here's the part I didn't expect. By day five, my code was noticeably simpler. Not because an LLM optimized it, but because I actually understood the problem well enough to keep it simple. AI-generated code often over-engineers. It adds abstractions for scenarios that don't exist. It writes defensive checks for edge cases that don't apply to your use case. It looks professional but carries unnecessary complexity. When you write it yourself, you stop at the simplest working solution because you know when you're done. An LLM doesn't know when you're done. It just keeps going until the context window runs out. The Real Cost of Productivity This is the part I've been thinking about most. AI tools remove friction. That's their superpower. But friction isn't always bad. The struggle of debugging your own code is how you learn a codebase. The effort of designing an API is how you develop taste for what makes a good one. If y

I was lurking around dev.to because I was bored and I saw a post made by @sylwia-lask on the...

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TL;DR Welcome back to Dev Opportunity Radar. This is a weekly series where I share opportunities,...

👋👋👋👋 Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of? All wins count -- big or small...

Pokémon Go Scans Trained Military Drone Navigation Tech Meta Description: Discover how Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones — the surprising data pipeline from your phone to the battlefield. (158 characters) TL;DR: Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, collected millions of 3D environmental scans from players worldwide through its AR scanning features. That same spatial mapping technology and data infrastructure has now been linked to navigation systems used in military drones — raising serious questions about informed consent, dual-use technology, and the hidden value of "free" mobile apps. Key Takeaways Pokémon Go players unknowingly contributed to a massive real-world 3D mapping dataset through Niantic's AR scanning features. This spatial data and the underlying technology stack have been connected to navigation systems used in autonomous military drones. The pipeline from consumer app to defense application is a textbook example of dual-use technology — civilian tools repurposed for military ends. Users were not clearly informed their scans could be used beyond in-game features. This story has major implications for data privacy, tech ethics, and how we think about "free" apps. Regulatory frameworks around dual-use data collection remain dangerously underdeveloped. Introduction: The Game That Mapped the World When Pokémon Go launched in July 2016, it looked like a harmless — if slightly chaotic — augmented reality game. Millions of people wandered parks, city squares, and college campuses, phones raised, hunting virtual creatures overlaid on real-world environments. But beneath the Pikachus and Poké Stops, something far more consequential was happening. Niantic was building one of the most detailed, crowd-sourced 3D maps of the physical world ever assembled. And as reporting has surfaced in 2025 and 2026, the revelation that Pokémon Go scans trained the navigation tech for military drones has ignited a firestorm of debate among tech

Hi everyone 👋 I'm currently learning C++ and looking to connect with other people who enjoy programming. I'm interested in improving my coding skills, building small projects, and learning from more experienced developers. If you're also learning C++ or are willing to share advice with a beginner, I'd be happy to chat and learn together. Happy coding! 🚀