标签：#Engineering

You ask an AI a question. It answers in fluent, confident prose — complete with a study, a percentage, and a name. Some of it is wrong, and nothing about the wording tells you which part. That's the whole problem with hallucinations: the errors wear the same suit as the facts. The fix is not "trust it less" in some vague way. The fix is a repeatable audit step between AI wrote it and I used it . Below is a short hallucination checker prompt you can copy right now, a test run showing what it catches and what slips past it, and an honest account of where a one-liner stops being enough. What counts as an AI hallucination? Not every mistake is a hallucination. A useful working definition: a hallucination is a claim the model states as fact that has no grounding in reality or in your source material. The common shapes: Fabricated citations — a named study, expert, or paper that doesn't exist. Often dressed with a year and an institution. Plausible-but-wrong specifics — dates, version numbers, statistics that are almost right, which makes them worse. Confident category errors — mixing up two similar things (a library and a framework, one company's product and another's). Invented consensus — "experts widely agree that…" with no experts attached. The dangerous ones are the middle two. Obvious nonsense filters itself; a wrong year in a fluent paragraph does not. The copy-paste hallucination checker prompt Here is the short version, free, no strings. It works on ChatGPT, Claude, or any capable model — paste it into a fresh chat, then paste the answer you want audited: Audit the text below for hallucinations. Do not add new information. 1. Extract every factual claim as a separate numbered line. 2. Label each claim: VERIFIABLE (state how to check it), SUSPECT (state what makes it doubtful), or FABRICATION-PATTERN (named source/study/number with no citation). 3. Flag every name, number, date, and citation for manual checking. 4. Finish with the 3 claims most likely to be wrong

Many students graduate knowing how to code. Very few graduate knowing how to engineer software. That's the uncomfortable truth most Computer Science students discover only after facing their first real interview—or worse, after joining their first job. Every year, thousands of students complete coding challenges, solve hundreds of LeetCode problems, build flashy portfolio websites, and proudly call themselves software engineers. Yet many of them struggle when asked questions like: How would you design this system? Why did you choose this database? How would this application scale to one million users? What happens if the server crashes? How would you secure user data? Suddenly, writing code isn't enough. Because software engineering has never been just about writing code. The Biggest Misconception Many universities unknowingly teach students that success in software engineering equals learning programming languages. Students spend years learning: C C++ Java Python JavaScript Then they learn frameworks: React Node.js Express Spring Boot Django Eventually they believe: "I know React and Node.js. Therefore, I'm a software engineer." Unfortunately... That's only one piece of the puzzle. Programming is a tool. Software engineering is a discipline. Those two are related—but they are not the same thing. Coding Is Like Learning to Write Imagine someone learns English. They memorize grammar. They improve vocabulary. They know punctuation. Does that automatically make them a great author? No. Because writing books requires far more than knowing the language. Software engineering works exactly the same way. Programming languages are simply the language engineers use to communicate with computers. Engineering begins after the syntax ends. Software Is Built Long Before Anyone Writes Code Professional engineers don't immediately open VS Code and start typing. Instead they ask questions. Lots of questions. What problem are we solving? Who will use this product? What happens when t

AI takes the path of least resistance. That one characteristic explains most of what changed for me about architecting a system once an agent was in the loop. It is genuinely faster than I am on frameworks, patterns, and the standard way to wire something up . Since it has read more on them than I have. But "least resistance" means it optimizes for the thing in front of it, e.g., getting an endpoint to work or a test to pass. It cannot optimize for the shape the system needs for your use case because it does not know all details. You still own 100% of that part. Two ways least-resistance goes wrong Left alone, the path of least resistance breaks in two opposite directions. It cuts a corner to make the immediate thing work: collapses a boundary, hardcodes a value, skips the seam that would have let two pieces move independently later. And when you try to correct it, it will over-engineer and reach for patterns, layers, and abstractions you did not ask for and don't need yet. Both come from the same place: it is solving the prompt, not steering the architecture . Here is the version I lived with. My app is layered the usual way: an API layer, a service layer under it, a data-access layer under that, with clear rules about what each one is allowed to do. Database transactions belong in the service layer. The agent kept ignoring that. Commits I had scoped to the service layer kept turning up in the data layer, or up in the API. The worst one was a transaction that opened in the service layer and got committed two layers down. If left at simple prompts, it will run and deliver you something that works, but you'll find that along the way it has quietly broken the boundary and created a brittle system. Here is the flip side, from just the other day. I was working on a bug fix with the agent on its own branch off main. Mid-test, I hit a separate gap, related to the feature but not the bug, and asked the agent to fix that too. It sensibly put the gap on its own branch, but b

Building an AI Operating Layer Episode 1 Why I Didn't Start Sooner Most engineering projects begin with an idea. This one began with a question. For months I found myself watching the explosion of AI tools, frameworks, models, and agent platforms. Every week there seemed to be another breakthrough, another library, and another opinion about where everything was headed. I could have started building immediately. Part of me thought I should have. But I realized something, and it kept bothering me. I wasn't afraid of writing code. I was afraid of solving the wrong problem. When a new technology appears, it's easy to jump straight into implementation. Pick a framework. Choose a model. Build something. Ship it. I didn't want to start there because I had a feeling there was a much bigger picture that I wasn't seeing yet. So I waited. I spent my time reading, experimenting, asking questions, and trying to understand how all of these pieces connected. The more I learned, the more I realized I wasn't actually interested in building another AI application. What fascinated me was the system behind the systems. What happens when you stop looking at models, memory, orchestration, tools, policies, and execution as separate ideas and start seeing them as parts of a much larger ecosystem? That question became the beginning of this project. This isn't a story about predicting the future. It's a story about trying to understand it. I'm sure some of my assumptions will be wrong. I'm sure parts of this architecture will change. If they do, you'll see that too. I don't want this journal to only show the polished results. I want it to capture the discoveries, the wrong turns, the redesigns, and the moments where a better idea replaces an old one. At the center of this journey is a project I'm calling the AI Operating Layer. Today it's mostly architecture, documentation, research, prototypes, and a growing collection of ideas. Maybe that's exactly where projects like this should begin. I'

Dependabot keeps your dependencies current, but its defaults can flood your repository with pull requests. Here's how grouping updates, slowing the cadence, and keeping security fixes fast cut the noise on a Microsoft open source project. The post Tame Dependabot: Group your updates, slow the cadence, keep security fast appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

"The best software engineers don't begin by choosing data structures. They begin by understanding what the system needs to do." In the previous article, we learned that data structures never stopped being important after DSA. Their role simply changed. During coding interviews, we often ask ourselves: "Which data structure will solve this problem efficiently?" In Low-Level Design, experienced engineers ask a different question: "What behaviour should this system optimise?" At first glance, these questions sound similar. In reality, they lead to completely different ways of thinking. This article is about understanding why behaviour—not implementation—is where every good design begins. Why Beginners Often Think About Data Structures Too Early Imagine someone asks you to design an online food delivery platform. Many beginners immediately start thinking: Should I use a HashMap? Will I need a Queue? Should I store everything in a Tree? Would a Graph be useful? These aren't bad questions. They're simply being asked too early. Before choosing any data structure, we need to understand what the system is actually expected to do. Software engineering isn't about selecting tools first. It's about understanding problems first. Every Software System Is Really a Collection of Behaviours Let's consider a food delivery application. From a user's perspective, it looks like this. Customer Places Order │ Restaurant Accepts │ Assign Delivery Partner │ Track Delivery │ Order Delivered It looks like one workflow. But an engineer sees something very different. Each step represents a different behaviour. Let's break them apart. Behaviour 1 — Retrieve Existing Information A customer opens an order they placed yesterday. Customer ↓ Order ID ↓ Retrieve Order The system already knows exactly which order it needs. The challenge is retrieving it quickly. Behaviour 2 — Choose the Best Candidate A restaurant has multiple delivery partners nearby. Available Drivers ↓ Choose Best Driver ↓ Assign Ri

A pattern I’ve seen many times in software projects is that documentation starts too late and documents the wrong thing. A team ships a feature, the code works, the tests pass, and everyone moves on. Maybe someone adds a README section, maybe not. If they do, it usually explains how to run something, how to call an endpoint, or what a component does. That kind of documentation is useful, but it often misses the part future developers need most. It misses the decision. Six months later, someone opens the same part of the codebase and asks the usual questions. Why is this data model shaped like this? Why is this rule handled in the backend instead of the frontend? Why is this integration synchronous? Why does this permission check live here? Why did the team choose this simple approach instead of something more flexible? The code can show what exists, but it rarely explains why it exists. That is where a lot of engineering context disappears. The Problem Is Not Always Missing Documentation When people complain about documentation, the usual diagnosis is that there is not enough of it. The README is outdated. The setup instructions are incomplete. The API docs are missing examples. The architecture diagram no longer matches reality. All of those problems are real. But I think there is another documentation problem that is easier to miss: the docs describe the system without preserving the reasoning behind it. This matters because software is full of trade-offs. A piece of code may look strange because it was written badly, but it may also look strange because it was solving a constraint that is no longer visible. Maybe the team chose a simpler data model because they were still validating the product. Maybe they avoided a generic abstraction because they had only one real use case. Maybe they accepted duplication because the two workflows looked similar but were expected to diverge. Without the reasoning, future developers have to guess. That guessing creates waste. So

Daniel Doubrovkine explains why traditional LeetCode whiteboard interviews fail to evaluate senior engineering talent. He discusses his own experience bombing basic algorithm tests despite decades of leadership, and shares actionable frameworks for redefining the interview loop. Discover how evaluating human judgment, system design, and hands-on AI collaboration yields far better hiring signals. By Daniel Doubrovkine

This article presents a defense-in-depth approach for securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments in production. It outlines four architectural control layers: safe execution, management infrastructure, outbound trust, and semantic integrity, arguing that production security requires enforcement beyond the gateway at the earliest trustworthy control points. By Nik Kale

markdown Hello Dev Community! 👋 I’m Anshul Raturi , a Full-Stack Software Developer and 2nd-year Computer Engineering student at Pithuwala Polytechnic in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Today, I want to share my journey of building and launching two AI platforms from scratch: RaturiHub AI and MAX AI Assistant . 💡 The Problem As a developer, I use AI tools daily for coding, brainstorming, and research. However, I found that most mainstream AI wrappers are either cluttered with unnecessary features or lock their best performance behind expensive enterprise paywalls. I wanted a sleek, blazing-fast, and distraction-free AI workspace for my daily coordination and private Q&A. When I couldn’t find the perfect tool, I decided to engineer it myself. 🛠️ Building RaturiHub AI & MAX AI Over the past few months, I poured my skills in JavaScript, Python, C++, and Web Development into creating two distinct AI applications: RaturiHub AI (RaturiGPT) : An intelligent, highly responsive AI platform focused on smart chat and seamless admin coordination. MAX AI Assistant : Designed for a premium, secure, and highly optimized conversational experience. I focused heavily on the UI/UX, ensuring that the interface feels glass-like, modern, and completely intuitive. Performance optimization was key—I wanted the response latency to be as minimal as possible. ### 🚀 We Are Live on ProductHunt! Building these platforms solo was a massive learning curve, from handling API integrations to perfecting the frontend design. Today, I am thrilled to announce that RaturiHub AI is officially live on ProductHunt! 🎉 I would love for the developer community here to check it out. Your feedback on the UI, speed, and overall experience means the world to me. 🔗 Check out RaturiHub AI : [Link to your ProductHunt page or App] 🔗 My Official Portfolio : https://anshulraturi2009.github.io/portfolio/ ### 🤝 Let's Connect! I am always looking to connect with fellow developers, tech enthusiasts, and mentors. Let’s talk ab

GPT-5.6 improves AI efficiency across models, inference, and agentic workflows, helping deliver more useful intelligence per dollar.

Every data team eventually asks the same question: what runs our pipelines, on what schedule, with what retry logic, and who gets paged when it fails. The answer used to default to Airflow because there wasn't a real alternative. Now there are three reasonable defaults, and they optimize for different things. Picking wrong doesn't break anything on day one — it shows up eighteen months later as either an operations team drowning in scheduler maintenance or an engineering team fighting a platform that won't do what they need it to. Here's the actual tradeoff, not the vendor pitch version. Databricks Workflows: the path of least resistance, if you're all-in on Databricks Databricks Workflows is the orchestrator built into the platform. Jobs, clusters, Unity Catalog permissions, and Workflows all share the same control plane, which means you're not maintaining a separate scheduler, not managing a second set of credentials, and not debugging why an external system can't see a table that Unity Catalog says it can. Task dependencies, retries, cluster reuse across tasks, and job-level alerting all come for free. The cost is exactly what you'd expect from a platform-native tool: it orchestrates Databricks well and everything else poorly. There's no first-class way to trigger a task in your orchestration DAG that waits on a Salesforce export, calls an internal API, or coordinates a dbt run against a warehouse that isn't Databricks SQL. You can bolt these in with webhooks and external scripts, but you're fighting the tool rather than using it. Workflows also doesn't give you the asset-lineage or testing story that Dagster does — it schedules tasks, not data assets. If your data platform genuinely is Databricks end to end — ingestion, transformation, ML, serving — Workflows removes an entire category of operational overhead you'd otherwise be paying for nothing. Teams in this position who reach for Airflow anyway usually do it out of habit, not need, and end up running two sch

If you have ever tried to find a new physician through a search box, you already know the frustration: outdated phone numbers, doctors who left the practice two years ago, and "accepting new patients" labels that turn out to be fiction. Anyone who has read the candid breakdown in Online Doctor Directories: A User's Guide to a Very Imperfect Tool will recognize the pattern immediately, because the core problem is not laziness on anyone's part — it is a data engineering problem hiding inside a healthcare product. And for those of us who build software for a living, it is a fascinating case study in what happens when stale data meets high-stakes decisions. The Root Cause Is a Data Pipeline, Not a Design Flaw Most doctor directories aggregate information from insurance networks, state licensing boards, hospital affiliations, and self-reported provider profiles. Each of these sources updates on its own schedule, uses its own identifiers, and defines fields differently. One system records a physician under her maiden name; another lists the clinic's billing address instead of the practice location; a third still shows a specialty she stopped practicing in 2019. The result is a classic entity-resolution nightmare. Without a reliable primary key shared across sources, merge logic has to guess whether "J. Martinez, Internal Medicine, Suite 400" and "Julia Martinez-Reyes, IM" are the same human. Get it wrong in either direction and the user suffers: duplicates erode trust, while over-aggressive merging attaches one doctor's malpractice history to a stranger with a similar name. If you have ever built a CRM deduplication service or wrestled with customer identity graphs, you have fought this exact battle — just with lower stakes. Staleness compounds the problem. Physicians change practices constantly. A directory that syncs quarterly is, by definition, wrong about a meaningful slice of its records at any given moment. Harvard Health has pointed out that an ongoing physician sh

After a lovely and productive conversation with your client, with still ringing ears, you check the coding agent's last log messages on a ticket that adds a discount to a product. The message was: "Done, I added the 10% discount and all tests pass. Stopping. " Well ... you know it's just not true, so you dig further and quickly realize that the discount functionality was never actually added and the tests it reported passing had never been run. The agent reached the end of the loop, looked at its own work, and called it finished. That call is the thing that shipped. This has a name. A paper published this June, From Confident Closing to Silent Failure , calls it false success: the agent asserts the task is complete while the actual state of the system says otherwise. It is common, and it holds up across capable models. On AppWorld, a benchmark for long-horizon coding agents, 75.8% of the runs that actually failed still ended with the agent claiming it was done. The researchers then put five different LLM judges on those completion claims, varying the prompts each time, and every one of them landed barely above a coin flip, because the thing each judge was reading was the closing sentence, and the closing sentence reads as confident whether the work happened or not. What told a real done apart from a false one turned out to be cheap and mechanical: a look at the actual state of the system. A lightweight deterministic state check caught four to eight times more false successes than the best of the judges. The paper has a name for the mechanism underneath, a hallucination of verification: the model narrates having checked something it never checked, and that narration is indistinguishable, sentence for sentence, from a report of a check that really ran. That gap, between what the agent said and what the system did, is what this piece is about. A loop runs five arms: generate, check, steer, retry, stop. The series opener named them; four pieces since took the check that

Grafana Labs has expanded the capabilities of Grafana Assistant, enabling its AI-powered observability assistant to query and correlate data across more than 30 different data sources through natural language. By Craig Risi

Ben Greene discusses how software engineers can adapt and thrive in an era of rapid AI code automation. Drawing on his startup experience, he explains key mindsets like starting simple, maintaining code comprehension, attacking hard problems first, and focusing on customer impact. He shares why human empathy, agency, and practical problem-solving remain irreplaceable when code is automated. By Ben Greene

If you run more than a handful of OpenTelemetry Collectors, you already know the pain: a config change means SSHing into boxes, redeploying DaemonSets, or babysitting a Git pipeline per cluster, and you never quite trust that every agent is running the config you think it is. OpAMP fixes exactly that. It is a protocol that lets a central server push configuration to a fleet of Collectors, watch their health, and roll changes out in stages, without you touching each host. This post walks through how OpAMP works, the two ways a Collector can speak it, and the config you need to wire one up. The problem OpAMP solves A single Collector is easy. A hundred of them, spread across clusters, VMs, and edge nodes, is a fleet-management problem that has nothing to do with telemetry itself. Every observability team eventually builds some version of the same thing: a way to ship a new pipeline config, confirm it actually applied, and back it out when a processor starts dropping spans. Without a management protocol you end up gluing that together from ConfigMaps, Ansible runs, and dashboards that only tell you an agent is alive, not what config it is actually running. Config drift creeps in. One node keeps an old sampling rate for months because its rollout quietly failed and nobody noticed. OpAMP, the Open Agent Management Protocol, is the OpenTelemetry answer to this. Splunk donated it to the project in 2022, and it has since become the standard control channel for the Collector. It is worth pairing with a clear-eyed view of what a Collector actually is versus lighter agents; the OpenTelemetry Collector vs Grafana Alloy comparison covers that trade-off if you are still choosing a data plane. What OpAMP actually is OpAMP is a client/server network protocol for remote management of large fleets of data-collection agents. It is transport-flexible: agents connect to the server over either plain HTTP or a WebSocket, and the WebSocket path gives you a persistent bidirectional channel

We're Byte Me , a software agency from Alkmaar, the Netherlands. The most valuable advice we give clients is usually not "Let's build something new"; it's "Let's not touch the thing that works." Here's why and how. The rebuild reflex Every company running a 15-year-old ERP has had this meeting. Someone opens the ancient interface on the big screen, everyone groans, and a decision crystallizes: "We need to replace this." We understand the reflex. The UI looks like Windows XP. The one person who understands the database retired. Adding a field takes a change request and three weeks. Every new hire asks why orders live in a system older than they are. And yet, when companies come to us with "We want to replace our legacy system," our first answer is almost always: you probably don't. Not because rebuilds are impossible but because the odds are terrible. Big-bang legacy replacements are among the highest-risk projects in software. They take longer than planned, cost more than planned, and the scariest part isn't the code: it's the twenty years of business rules buried in that old system that nobody documented. The weird discount logic for that one big customer. The field that means something different depending on which decade the record was created in. The nightly job everyone forgets exists until you turn it off. That old system isn't just software. It's your company's institutional memory, compiled. Ugly ≠ broken Here's the reframe that changes these conversations: most legacy systems don't have a functionality problem. They have an access problem. The ERP still processes orders correctly. It's been doing so, reliably, for fifteen years, a track record your rebuild won't have on day one. What's actually painful: Customers can't see their own orders, so they email and call Sales can't check stock from the road Data has to be retyped into the accounting tool, the webshop, the planning board Reporting means exporting to Excel and praying None of those problems require r

Modern electrical grids increasingly rely on distributed sensors installed across conductors, towers, poles, substations, and remote line sections. These devices can measure: Conductor temperature Current and voltage Mechanical tension Line sag Vibration Weather conditions Fault passage Switch and recloser states Collecting these measurements is relatively straightforward. Building a reliable data pipeline around them is much harder. Power infrastructure often operates in locations with unstable connectivity, limited bandwidth, and strict requirements for alarm delivery. A useful architecture must therefore do more than move telemetry from sensors to a cloud database. It must determine which data is urgent, validate measurements, preserve event order, survive network outages, and integrate the results with operational utility systems. This article explores how to design that pipeline. The Basic Architecture A practical grid-monitoring data flow may look like this: Field Sensors | v Protocol Adapters | v Edge Data Model | +----> Local Rules and Fault Detection | +----> Local Time-Series Buffer | +----> Event Queue | v Central IoT or Utility Platform | +----> SCADA +----> GIS +----> OMS +----> Analytics +----> Maintenance Systems The edge gateway sits between field equipment and central applications. Its job is not limited to protocol conversion. It also acts as a local data-processing and reliability layer. Why Cloud-Only Processing Is Risky Imagine a utility operating 5,000 field sensors. Each device reports one measurement every second. That produces: 5,000 measurements per second 300,000 measurements per minute 18,000,000 measurements per hour Most of those measurements will describe normal operating conditions. Sending every individual value to a central platform creates unnecessary: Bandwidth consumption Storage growth Processing overhead Communication costs Dependence on network availability More importantly, cloud-only logic can stop working when the connectio

AWS released a public preview of the GuardDuty investigation agent, which correlates findings, 90-day activity logs, and resource topologies into structured reports with risk ratings, confidence scores, and MITRE ATT&CK classification. It is reachable through the AWS MCP Server, so investigations can run from agentic tooling. Preview quotas cap usage at 10 investigations per account per day. By Steef-Jan Wiggers