Dev.to
The Babysitting is Over: A New Plan for AI Coding
The promise of agentic AI coding was a tireless partner, an assistant that could take a feature request and run with it while we focused on the hard problems. The reality, for most professional engineering teams, has been different. The reality is a brilliant but distractible intern you have to constantly supervise. The reality is spending 20 minutes writing the "perfect prompt," only for the AI to ignore a critical constraint, use a deprecated pattern from your codebase, and confidently break three other features. The reality is the "babysitting tax." It's the cognitive overhead of constantly reviewing, reverting, and re-explaining. And it's negating the incredible potential of these tools. At BrainGrid, we believe the problem isn't the agent—it's the plan. Or the lack thereof. In our rush to generate code, we've skipped the most critical step: creating a shared, deep, and unambiguous understanding of what we're actually building. "Vibe coding" doesn't work in a multi-tenant system where permissions are non-negotiable, or at least not with peace of mind. It doesn't work in a complex fintech application where money is on the line. And it certainly doesn't work in a four-year-old codebase with layers of tech debt and unwritten rules. The bottleneck in software development is no longer just the speed of writing code. The bottleneck has shifted to the speed of creating a reliable plan. BrainGrid is the AI-powered planning platform built to solve this new bottleneck. It's designed to provide the structure and guidance—the "babysitting plan"—that turns powerful but unreliable coding agents into predictable and effective teammates. Here's how: We Give the Agent a Map BrainGrid starts by deeply analyzing your entire codebase—its architecture, data models, and dependencies. It provides the persistent context that agents desperately need but currently lack. We Help You Define the Destination Our requirements agent acts like a seasoned tech lead, asking you and your team clar
Nico Acosta
2026-06-17 05:41
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Dev.to
Email Triage Taxonomies for LLM Classification
The most important design decision in an email classifier isn't the model — it's the label set, and here's the one I keep coming back to: You triage email into one of four categories: URGENT — production incidents, executive requests; reply within 1 hour ACTION — code reviews, meeting follow-ups; reply same day FYI — informational, no response needed NOISE — newsletters, marketing, automated notifications From: {sender} Subject: {subject} Snippet: {snippet} Return ONLY the category name. Nothing else. That's the working prompt from the Nylas email triage recipe , and almost every line encodes a taxonomy-design lesson worth unpacking. Most people building email agents obsess over model choice and prompt phrasing. The recipe's quiet thesis is that the label set itself does the heavy lifting — get the taxonomy right and a cheap model classifies well; get it wrong and no model saves you. Why four is the magic number The recipe states it flatly: four is the right number. Three loses fidelity — everything important collapses into one overloaded bucket and you've built a binary classifier with extra steps. Five and the model starts confusing categories, because the boundaries between adjacent labels get too thin to express in a definition. Notice what makes these four work. They aren't topics — they're response obligations . URGENT means "reply within the hour," ACTION means "reply today," FYI means "no response needed," NOISE means "archive." Each label maps to exactly one behavior. That's the test I'd apply to any email taxonomy: if two labels lead to the same action, merge them; if one label leads to two different actions depending on content, split it. The same principle shows up in the sales context. The Agent Accounts overview describes an outreach agent classifying replies as interested / not now / unsubscribe — three labels, because the workflow has exactly three branches: book the meeting, schedule a follow-up, stop emailing. The taxonomy is the decision tree, fla
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:40
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Dev.to
Designing Agent Email Addresses That Humans Trust
You've built the agent, the reply loop works, the demo lands — and then someone asks the question you didn't budget time for: "so what address does it send from?" Suddenly you're staring at noreply-svc-prod2@yourcompany.com realizing that the first thing every recipient sees isn't your prompt engineering. It's the From line. An agent's email address is an interface. Humans parse it before the subject, mail servers judge it before the body, and spam filters score it before any human sees it at all. Once your agent has a real mailbox — which is what Nylas Agent Accounts (currently in beta) provide — address design becomes a product decision with three layers: the local part, the domain, and the disclosure question. The local part: role beats persona beats hash Take three candidate addresses for the same scheduling agent: scheduling@ — a role. Tells recipients what the mailbox does and implies that emailing it is how you use the service. jane.ai@ — a persona. Friendlier in a sidebar avatar, but it invites recipients to treat the sender as a colleague, with all the expectations that carries. bot-7f3a@ — an artifact. Screams "auto-generated," gets mentally filed next to spam, and gives a human nothing to anchor on. The docs consistently model the first pattern — sales-agent@ , support@ , scheduling@ appear throughout the Agent Accounts overview — and I think that's right for a reason deeper than convention. A role address makes an honest promise about capability: scheduling@ claims it can schedule, nothing more. A persona address makes an implicit promise of general competence that current agents can't keep. When jane.ai@ fails to understand a simple request, it reads as a person being obtuse; when scheduling@ fails, it reads as a tool hitting its limits. Same failure, different trust damage. The overview's framing is worth internalizing: an agent identity should be like any other user in your organization — reachable, persistent, accountable. Address design is how that
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:40
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Dev.to
From Chatbot to Mailbox: Persistent Agent Memory in Threads
Day 1, 4:02 p.m.: a customer asks your agent a billing question and gets an answer. Day 6, 9:30 a.m.: they reply "actually, that didn't work." If your agent lives in a chat widget, that second message starts from zero — the session died with the tab, the context is gone, and the customer gets to repeat themselves. If your agent lives in a mailbox, the reply arrives inside the conversation , with the full history attached by the protocol itself. That's the argument in one before/after: chat sessions evaporate; email threads persist. And for agents that work across days rather than minutes, the thread is the most underrated memory substrate available. The protocol already built your memory layer Email threading runs on three headers, as the threading docs lay out. Every message carries a globally unique Message-ID . A reply adds In-Reply-To (the ID it's answering) and References (the full chain of IDs, oldest to newest). By the time a thread is five messages deep, References holds five Message-IDs in order — a complete, tamper-evident record of the conversation's shape, maintained by every mail client on earth. Compare that to what we hand-roll for chatbots: session stores, conversation tables, context windows we serialize and rehydrate. Email gives you the equivalent for free, federated across organizations, and — this is the part I find most compelling — human-auditable . Anyone with mailbox access can read exactly what the agent's memory contains, because the memory is the correspondence itself. No vector store inspection tools required. With Nylas Agent Accounts (in beta), the agent owns the mailbox where this accrues, and you never parse headers by hand. The Threads API groups messages by their header chain; each thread object gives you ordered message_ids , participants , and activity timestamps. When a reply fires message.created , the payload includes a thread_id — fetch the thread, walk its messages, and the agent has its full conversational past before decid
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:39
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Dev.to
Scheduling Without a Human Calendar
A human assistant borrows the boss's calendar; a scheduling bot owns its own. That one difference dissolves most of what makes calendar automation miserable. The borrowed-calendar model is how nearly every scheduling tool works today: connect to a person's Google or Microsoft account via OAuth, request calendar scopes, and act on their behalf. It works, but the seams show everywhere. The human's calendar fills with bookings the bot manages. Delegation permissions vary by provider and admin policy. Tokens expire when the person changes their password or leaves the company. And the bot has no address of its own — every invite, every confirmation email, appears to come from a person who didn't write it. Nylas Agent Accounts (currently in beta) invert this. Each account is a real mailbox and a real calendar , provisioned automatically, owned by your application. From a participant's perspective there's nothing special about it — it's just another attendee on the invite. What "owning availability" actually changes When the bot's calendar is its own, availability stops being a permissions question and becomes a query. The agent calls the free/busy endpoint against its own primary calendar, gets back busy blocks for a time window, and proposes open slots. No delegation, no scopes negotiation, no "the admin needs to approve calendar sharing for service accounts." The scheduling-agent tutorial wires the whole loop: a meeting request lands at scheduling@agents.yourcompany.com , a message.created webhook fires, an LLM parses duration and timezone, the agent checks its own free/busy and replies with 3 candidate slots. When the human picks one, the agent creates the event: curl --request POST \ --url "https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/grants/<GRANT_ID>/events?calendar_id=primary¬ify_participants=true" \ --header "Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY>" \ --header "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "title": "Product demo", "when": { "start_time": 1744387200, "end_time": 174
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:39
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Dev.to
Mailboxes as Cattle: Ephemeral Email Infrastructure
When was the last time you deleted an email account on purpose? For most teams the answer is never, and that tells you something. We treat mailboxes the way we treated servers in 2008: hand-built, carefully named, kept alive indefinitely because recreating one is painful. They're pets. Meanwhile every other piece of our infrastructure — compute, queues, databases — became cattle: numbered, provisioned by code, destroyed without sentiment when the job ends. Email is finally catching up. With Nylas Agent Accounts (in beta), a mailbox is created with one call and destroyed with another, and that symmetry is the whole point. The full lifecycle in two commands Provisioning, from the CLI: nylas agent account create signup-agent@agents.yourdomain.com Or via POST /v3/connect/custom with "provider": "nylas" — no OAuth, no refresh token, just an address on a domain you've registered. Teardown is equally unceremonious: nylas agent account delete signup-agent@agents.yourdomain.com --yes (The API equivalent is a DELETE on the grant.) The signup automation recipe treats this as a loop: provision a fresh inbox, point a third-party signup form at it, catch the verification email through a message.created webhook, follow the confirmation link, delete the grant. No human inbox involved at any step, and nothing left behind. The middle of that loop is about twenty lines of webhook handler, and the recipe's version filters hard before acting — right grant, right sender, right URL shape: const { grant_id , id : messageId , from } = event . data . object ; if ( grant_id !== AGENT_GRANT_ID ) return ; const sender = from [ 0 ]?. email ?? "" ; if ( ! sender . endsWith ( " @saas-you-care-about.example.com " )) return ; const match = /https: \/\/ saas-you-care-about \. example \. com \/ confirm \? token= [^ " \s < ] +/ . exec ( message . body , ); if ( match ) await fetch ( match [ 0 ]); Nylas fires message.created within a second or two of mail arriving, so the whole signup round-trip typical
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:39
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Dev.to
The Tips Behind API Artisan: Building Laravel APIs Developers Actually Want to Use
I have just finished writing API Artisan: A Guide to Building APIs with Laravel , and I am giving it away for free. Before you commit to 300-odd pages, let me give you the short version: the tips, patterns, and small decisions that separate an API that technically works from one that developers are genuinely happy to depend on. None of this needs more hardware, a different framework, or a bigger team. It needs you to point your attention at the right things. These are the ones I keep coming back to. Start by measuring the right thing Ask most teams how they know their API is good and you get a single question back: does it work? Can I hit this endpoint and get a response? That question is necessary, and it is nowhere near enough. The question I want you to ask instead is whether your API is liveable with. Can a developer read your docs, understand your auth model, make a successful request, and handle an error without contacting support, trawling a forum, or guessing what a status code is trying to tell them? The gap between "works" and "liveable with" never shows up in a sprint retro, but it shows up everywhere else: in support volume, in integration timelines that overrun, and in the quiet moment a developer decides to build around your API rather than with it. Everything else in the book hangs off one mindset shift: an API is a product. It has users. Treat it as an implementation detail and it will behave like one. It will change without warning when your internals change, and it will be inconsistent because different people wrote different parts on different days with different conventions. Write the contract before the code The natural way to build an endpoint is to write the handler, return some data, and document it afterwards if there is time. It feels efficient, and in the short term it is. The problem is what it produces: a contract that was never designed, only discovered. Let me show you the trap, because I have watched it catch good developers. You have
Steve McDougall
2026-06-17 05:38
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Dev.to
Giving your agents a terminal: a first look at the tabstack CLI
Every project I touch lately ends up needing the same awkward thing: a reliable way to pull the web into a script or an agent. Not a brittle scrape held together with CSS selectors and hope, but something that takes a URL and hands back clean, structured text I can actually pipe into the next step. I have built that wrapper more than once, and it is never as small as you think it will be. So when Mozilla dropped the tabstack CLI, a single Go binary that wraps the Tabstack AI API, I wanted to spend a proper afternoon with it. The pitch on the README is direct: every web interaction your agent or stack needs, from the terminal or a script. It turns any URL into clean Markdown or schema-shaped JSON, runs natural-language browser automation, and answers research questions with cited sources. The part that made me sit up is that the output is pretty in a terminal and pipeable into jq without a flag. That is a small detail, and it tells you the people who built it actually live on the command line. Let me walk you through it the way I poked at it myself. Getting it installed There is no runtime to install and nothing to bootstrap, because it ships as a single static binary built for macOS, Linux, and Windows. The quickest route is the install script: curl -fsSL https://tabstack.ai/install.sh | sh That fetches the right binary for your platform and puts it on your PATH , and you are ready to go. If you would rather not pipe a script into your shell, there are a couple of alternatives. With Go on your machine you can use: go install github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/tabstack-cli/cmd/tabstack@latest That drops the binary in $GOPATH/bin , which is usually ~/go/bin . If your shell cannot find tabstack afterwards, you almost certainly have not got that directory on your PATH : export PATH = " $HOME /go/bin: $PATH " And if you want to avoid Go entirely, there are pre-built binaries on the Releases page, or you can clone the repo and run make install-local , which builds it and copies it t
Steve McDougall
2026-06-17 05:38
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Dev.to
The 5-Minute Mailbox
The email mailbox just became an API resource, and that matters far more than the setup time it saves. For most of software history, a real email address — one that sends, receives, and threads — was an artifact of IT process. Someone created it in an admin console, someone else configured the client, and your application got access through OAuth consent screens and refresh tokens borrowed from a human. Compare that to how you get a database, a queue, or a TLS cert today: one API call, one ID back, done. Nylas Agent Accounts (currently in beta) close that gap. The quickstart goes from API key to a sending-and-receiving mailbox in under 5 minutes, and the provisioning step is a single request: curl --request POST \ --url "https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/connect/custom" \ --header "Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY>" \ --header "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "provider": "nylas", "settings": { "email": "test@your-application.nylas.email" } }' No refresh token, no OAuth dance — unlike OAuth providers, the "nylas" provider needs only an email address on a registered domain. The response contains a grant_id , and that one ID drives everything else: messages, drafts, threads, folders, attachments, calendar, webhooks. There are actually three ways to create an account — this API call, the Dashboard, or a single CLI command ( nylas agent account create ) — but they all end at the same place: a live mailbox. Why 5 minutes is a threshold, not a convenience Provisioning time isn't a linear cost. There's a threshold below which a resource changes category — from "thing you request" to "thing your code creates." Virtual machines crossed it with cloud APIs and we got autoscaling. TLS certs crossed it with ACME and we got HTTPS-by-default. Mailboxes crossing it means email addresses stop being scarce, pre-planned identities and start being something a program allocates when it needs one. What does that look like in practice? System mailboxes without ceremony. A support
Qasim Muhammad
2026-06-17 05:38
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DeepMind Blog
Unlocking UK house-building with AI-accelerated planning
UK government partners with Google DeepMind to build a new AI-powered prototype aimed at faster housing decisions.
2026-06-17 05:29
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Engadget
Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sat with us to discuss the Snap Specs, privacy, parental controls and more. Spoiler: He says "computing" a lot.
staff@engadget.com (Karissa Bell)
2026-06-17 05:15
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HackerNews
Silicon Motion exec: Retail SSD market has almost disappeared
Lihh27
2026-06-17 05:13
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Reddit r/programming
Nginx explained in plain English
submitted by /u/AdvertisingFancy7011 [link] [留言]
/u/AdvertisingFancy7011
2026-06-17 05:08
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Ars Technica
Anthropic "pauses" token-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK
Move originally planned for Monday would have heavily increased power users' costs.
Kyle Orland
2026-06-17 05:00
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HackerNews
GitHub Models is no longer available to new customers
herrkanin
2026-06-17 04:54
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Engadget
Around a fifth of Steam Next Fest demos have a generative AI disclosure
We'll see how players react.
staff@engadget.com (Anna Washenko)
2026-06-17 04:50
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MIT Technology Review
Exclusive eBook: How AI is becoming the next military advisor
A collection of stories about how militaries are using AI models to make decisions. This subscriber-only eBook is a package of six stories that were originally published in MIT Technology Review between April 11, 2025, and April 21, 2026, and have been updated to reflect recent developments. by James O’Donnell Choose which file format to…
MIT Technology Review
2026-06-17 04:35
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The Verge AI
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is a great last-minute Father’s Day gift
Father’s Day is nearly here. Hopefully, you already got a gift for dads you care about, but if not, here’s a quick, easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys a good comic strip. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes contains every one of Bill Watterson’s beloved strips made during the comic’s ten-year run from 1985 through 1995, […]
Cameron Faulkner
2026-06-17 04:00
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HackerNews
DeepSeek V4 Pro at 5% the cost of Claude – what it takes to close the gap
coolwulf
2026-06-17 03:59
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HackerNews
AI is potentially a Dunning-Kruger effect amplifier
binyu
2026-06-17 03:47
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