Tech Watch & Dev

A useful agentic change does not end when the diff appears. It ends when the system is coherent again.

I watched this exact loop last month: we asked an agent to tighten signup validation. It updated the form, the server-side validator, even the e2e test. Green across the board. We shipped. Two minutes later realized the password reset was broken.

A software change is not merely code moving. It is a shift in the requirement set.
There's a gap between the physical system (code, tests, schemas, diffs) and the theoretical system (requirements, contracts, constraints). Agents edit the former. We care about the latter.

When those two layers drift apart, an agent can satisfy the explicit task while breaking an implicit requirement nobody named and no automated check protects.

This post is my attempt to reason about that gap, and how to structure an agentic engineering harness around requirements, contracts, and deterministic feedback loops instead of just writing longer instruction files.

If you're interested, give it a read. If not, maybe let me know what I could do better!

Appreciate any feedback, and happy to partake in discussions :)

For people here, I doubt the npm security conundrum will need any introduction. A few days ago, I was very nearly affected by mini shai-hulud: @tanstack/router v1.169.5 was compromised; a day earlier I had installed @tanstack/router v1.169.2 (the exact previous patch version) in my project.

Suffice it to say, I am fed the f... up with npm and its supply chain vulernabilities.

However, I still need to build web applications, so the search for an alternative must begin. Htmx, Datastar, etc. are all fine, but you eventually end up needing client-side interactivity in a way that justifies bringing in react or similar, and that means lugging along hunderds of MBs of god knows what packages and adding bundlers, etc.

I'd love to hear how (and whether) others are dealing with this...

CEO finally managed to push through and debilitate all the people who were against it. Someone at the marketing team found the video of the anthropic guys building stuff with unlimited tokens and convinced him we do not need devs anymore. I’m asked to lay off 6 of my guys, we’ve been working on the project for 5 years now. These guys got bills to pay, families to feed. They took the time to learn and grow with this product and they’re asking me to let them go without much of a warning. And I’m probably next. Fuck this sucks. I’m drained emotionally, the past few months feels like I’m talking to a wall and there doesn’t seem to be another end. I feel like I’ve wasted the past 15 years. I’m burnt out, tired and disrespected. Just need to vent out.

New learning here so please bear with my ignorance.

I would love to replicate something similar to https://ziarestaurant.com/

Can anyone please suggest the techniques I should be looking into?

Thanks

EDIT: Thanks to all giving their advice. Overwhelmingly you gave me a "BLAH! Don't do it!" advice which has its value.

A special thanks to the few brave that gave me hints on how to pull this off (which I promise I'll never do) :)

Hello, I’m looking to help redesign a website and discuss the existing one with the person that runs it.

Before I start I’d love to be able to download the existing website webpages as images, in an ideal world this would be laid out like a visual flow diagram of current pages and / or also showing the information architecture.

(It’s not a huge site but big enough it would be quite time consuming to do manually).

Are there any tools or software you know of or use or recommend for to achieve something like this?

I was sure I’d seen something in the past and bookmarked it before but now I need it I can’t find it so am wondering if I made that up 😆

Thanks for any recommendations. It’d be extra useful if it’s something a non-coder could use, but open to any suggestions.

Sorry if this isn't the right forum, but I'm hoping someone can help. I run a small blog. It's been going for 12+ years. I'm not at the top of SERPs. I write long, complex content. It's niche.

I signal or block AI crawlers and known scrapers where I can. Now there's a particular automated service that has started hammering the site. At first it was a single page view here and there (one url each time, no event or timers fired).

For the past few days it's become the same url "visited" up to 30 times an hour. Every one of those repeat visits has a different URL. The UA is always Chrome/145 with a Google referrer and 800*600 browser. Because it "acts" human, it ends up in analytics, which are now a mess.

I managed to challenge on UA for a day or so in Cloudflare but it's getting through again. Meanwhile, real human users have to navigate CF challenge screens, which isn't ideal.

Is there anything else I can try?

Reqflow : pick an architecture (WhatsApp,
Uber, Netflix…), hit play, watch a request flow through it step by step. Click any component for purpose + tradeoffs. Kill the cache and watch the path change.

15 systems, 18 concept guides, a drag-and-drop Builder with AI review, and a timed Interview mode.

Feedback welcome — especially what's missing from the 15.

CPU data cache associativity issues are relatively well known. Instruction cache associativity issues, less so.

While working on go code, I investigated a surprising performance regression that turned out to be caused by L1 instruction cache associativity. In the code I didn’t even change.

The investigation included usage of go toolchain, but the underlying issue is mostly language-agnostic.

hey! So... I'm a teenager who wants to be a software engineer or Dev when I grow up and I am learning coding online right now, but I have this very specific problem and I was wondering if someone could help me with it. So I hate AI. Specifically gen AI. But I love coding and building stuff. I really want to pursue my interest in coding but every where I look, everyone is using AI for it and I understand that it can be used as a tool, yet I can't get rid if the feeling that it doesn't feel right to use AI. Not that its "cheating" or something, I just hate AI because of how much pollution it causes, water requirements to cool it down, also open AI being the biggest donator of the war, the ethical dilemmas that come with it and so much more... So I'm really confused on what sort of decision to take right now. I have quit the use if AI entirely for months now and it feels wrong to have to use it again later.

Help plz 😭

I have over 20yrs experienced and have been a lead for the last 10 years of my career. Im usually the one people go to for help and the one folks come to when junior members cant figure things out. With AI, i have a love hate relationship with it. Im old school, i prefer VI to vscode and with AI i just refuse to accept it. Anyways, today we had an issue in prod. A mid-level engineer went straight to claude. He couldnt figure out what the issue was. He runs out salt code through claude and in claude's defense, it did point out what the root cause was.

Now, because everyone nowadays depend heavily on AI, you'd think ppl wouldve spent the time to actually check the nginx config and see if they were different between our prod environments. No, everyone waited a few hours for me to confirm when all i did was compare our 3 prod env and yes sure enough they were different. Problem solved once we pushed out the correct config.

I think people lost the ability to think for themselves. What im seeing in my org is folks go straight for claude. If you use it right it works but i cant count the number of times i tailed log files in the past few weeks and managed to figure out root cause without using AI.

Lately, we have been told to leverage AI heavily. I found out they are also tracking our token usage. If that is true, then im at the bottom of the list in terms of adoption. I guess they can fire me and keep the folks who use claude for everything while they fumble to address prod issues because claude doesnt have all the necessary information regarding our infra and app.

End rant

Building a construction progress site for my company and need the site to have live updates from all users stored and published across all instances of the site. Hosting on netlify with supabase as a database but I can’t for the life of me get it to properly take an update from one user, push it to supabase and have it shown for other users. Very new to all of this and trying to do it myself and learn before reaching out to professionals. Any advice?