DEV Community

Here is a problem I hit building a long-running agent: I needed to inject a new instruction partway through a session ("the project is Go, write Go") but editing the top-level system prompt to add it invalidated my entire prompt cache. Every cached turn got reprocessed at full price. The fix is a feature that landed in the current Claude models: mid-conversation system messages. Here is what it i…

Every time I handed my Aadhaar card to someone for KYC, one thought kept nagging me: Where is this data actually going? Most "digital Aadhaar verification" tools out there silently upload your card details to their servers. You have zero visibility into what gets logged, stored, or sold. For something as sensitive as a national biometric ID, that's a pretty terrible default. So I built AadhaarQRC…

I started building AI agents about two years ago. Not toy demos, actual production features inside a health-tech product. And every single project started the same way. Write the tool-calling wrapper. Handle the edge cases in structured output. Figure out how the agent should read a PDF without hallucinating page numbers. Build the retry logic. Wire up the logging. Same boilerplate. Every time. F…

This article presents a straightforward approach to automatically and efficiently tune hyperparameters for machine learning models using Optuna as the optimisation framework. We explore how to use both Optuna’s native storage options and InterSystems IRIS as a database backend to track the progress of hyperparameter searches. We also show how MLflow can be used to monitor experiments and manage m…

When I started building , I needed reliable access to Instagram data. Like many developers, my first instinct was to use a self-hosted solution such as instagrapi. It worked for experimenting, but once I started depending on it for production workflows, I spent more time maintaining the scraper than building features. Eventually I switched to HikerAPI, a hosted REST API for Instagram. This post i…

In Java, sorting is an important operation when working with collections such as ArrayList, LinkedList, and other data structures. For primitive data types, Java already knows how to sort values. However, for custom objects like Student, Employee, or Product, Java needs instructions on how objects should be compared. To achieve this, Java provides two interfaces: Comparable – Used for natural sor…

I think a lot of people still imagine AI coding as opening ChatGPT, asking for code, and copy-pasting the result. That's not really how I work anymore. The biggest shift for me is that planning matters far more than coding. Earlier, execution was expensive, so most of the effort went into writing code. Now execution is cheap. I can have an agent implement something in minutes. The hard part is ma…

Most Retrofit tutorials show you isolated code snippets. This article traces the entire lifecycle of a Retrofit call — from app startup to data appearing on screen — using real code from a Pokedex app built with Kotlin, Hilt, Coroutines, and Jetpack Compose. By the end, you'll understand every link in the chain What Is Retrofit? Retrofit is a type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Instead of…

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA demand that organizations know exactly where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) lives inside their databases. Yet in practice, most teams rely on manual inventories, tribal knowledge, or external scanning tools that require data to leave the database engine — a process that itself creates privacy and security risks. This article presen…

The lawyers finished the Base44 paperwork on a Thursday night. The signing was set for Friday morning. That same Friday morning, the war with Iran broke out. Maor Shlomo signed anyway. That detail is the whole story in miniature. A guy in Israel, between reserve duty call-ups, sells a company he started as a side project, and the missiles are a scheduling problem. The setup Shlomo was not a kid w…

If you call an open-weight model behind an API, whether that is your own box, a hosted endpoint, or a router, you are trusting that the thing answering is the model on the label. Providers have every incentive to serve a smaller or more aggressively quantized model under load. I wanted to know if you can catch that from the outside. Short version: the obvious method fails, a less obvious one work…

If you have ever tried to build a Korean fortune-telling or astrology app, you already know the dirty secret: the fun part is the interpretation, and the brutal part is the date math. Saju (사주), the Korean "Four Pillars of Destiny," is computed from a person's birth year, month, day, and hour. Sounds like four lookups. It is not. I built and shipped a small HTTP API to do exactly this part for me…

Starting a new project feels exciting. A new idea appears, the first few lines of code are written, the design starts coming together, and everything feels possible. But after some time, many projects slowly disappear. The repository stays untouched. The last commit becomes weeks or months old. The idea that once felt amazing becomes another unfinished folder. This happens to many developers. The…

The Evolution: From Log Tails to Indexed Search Most teams start with a stream-based log platform, such as Papertrail, Loggly, or legacy syslog viewers. These platforms are fast to set up, and work well early on, but ultimately are just live tail with grep. Unstructured logs work fine here because a human is reading and searching them manually. As the application and team grow, you graduate to an…

Rent the Intelligence, Own the Memory On Friday, a single government letter pulled a frontier AI model off the internet for everyone. The Commerce Department issued an export-control directive on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 — the reported concern being that its guardrails could be jailbroken. To comply, Anthropic disabled it for all customers, not just foreign nationals. One letter at 5:21pm on a …

Every git user eventually has that moment. The terminal returns. The working directory looks wrong. You type git log and the last two hours of work are simply not there. Usually, this is not data loss. It is a solvable problem, and git reflog is what solves it. What reflog actually is git reflog records every position HEAD has pointed to on your machine. Every commit, checkout, merge, rebase, and…

When I started building PenPage — a privacy-first note app that stores everything in IndexedDB — I made one assumption that cost me three weeks of debugging: "Google Drive sync will be the easy part." It wasn't. Here's what I learned building a sync engine entirely in the browser, with no backend server. ## The core idea: one file to rule them all Instead of syncing every note file individually, …

Every morning for three months, I re-explained myself to my coding agents. The same preferences. The same project structure. The same "no, we already tried that" conversation. Fresh context window, zero memory of anything we'd discussed before. Then I built Lorekeeper — an open-source memory layer for AI agents. Fixing the storage problem was the easy part. The hard part was making memory get bet…

Automate your Confluence workflow directly from Claude Code — publish pages, sync content, and upload images without leaving your terminal. GitHub: https://github.com/tariqulislam/confluence-mcp-server What is an MCP Server? MCP stands for Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude Code connect to external tools and services. An MCP server acts as a bridge: it e…

How I Cut Speech-to-Text Costs by 60% Without Killing Quality I've been running transcription pipelines in production for the better part of a decade, and the one constant has been the tension between accuracy, latency, and what the finance team signs off on. Last quarter, I finally cracked it. Here's the playbook I wish someone had handed me before I burned six months and a chunk of our cloud bu…