标签：#engineering

Jörg Schad explains how to tame the complex "data management hairball" to build scalable, safe architectures for AI. He shares how autonomous data products act like containers for data, encapsulating pipelines, schemas, and metadata. Discover how progressive tool discovery via protocols like MCP limits context rot, enforces governance policies, and ensures reliable, multi-modal access. By Jörg Schad

GitLost is a prompt-injection exploit discovered by Noma Security that tricks GitHub's new Agentic Workflows into leaking private data. By embedding concealed instructions within public GitHub issues, attackers can circumvent security safeguards and induce AI agents to reveal confidential information in public comments. By Sergio De Simone

Expedia Group has introduced STAR, an internal AI-assisted observability platform that helps engineers investigate production incidents using service telemetry and LLMs. Built with FastAPI, Datadog, Celery, Redis, and Langfuse, STAR follows structured workflows to analyze telemetry, generate root cause assessments, and support incident response while keeping engineers in the loop. By Leela Kumili

You give the AI two examples of a new task. It understands. It completes the third example correctly. It has not changed its weights. It has not been fine-tuned. It has learned from the context of the prompt alone. This is in-context learning. It is one of the most remarkable properties of large language models. But it is not learning in the human sense. It is pattern matching. It is using the examples as a template. It is not generalizing. It is adapting. This is the distinction that matters: in-context learning is not true generalization. It is a form of rapid pattern completion. The model does not update its internal knowledge. It simply uses the examples to adjust its predictions. What Is In-Context Learning? In-context learning is the ability of a model to learn from examples provided in the prompt. The Process: The prompt contains a few examples. The model uses these examples to infer the task. It applies the inferred task to a new input. The Mechanism: The model does not update its weights. It uses the examples as a template. It generates the most likely completion. A Contrarian Take: In-Context Learning Is Not Learning. It Is Pattern Completion. We call it "learning." But it is not learning in the human sense. It is pattern completion. The model is not generalizing. It is matching patterns. How Does It Work? The mechanism of in-context learning is still debated. But there are leading theories. The Pattern Completion Theory: The model has seen similar tasks during training. The examples activate the relevant patterns. The model completes the pattern. The Induction Head Theory: The model has "induction heads" that detect repeated patterns. These heads identify the relationship between examples. They apply the relationship to the new input. A Contrarian Take: The Mechanism Is Not Important. The Outcome Is. We debate the mechanism. But the outcome is what matters. The model can learn from examples. The mechanism is a technical detail. The outcome is a practical

Teams treat "externalize the rules" as two different decisions depending on the stack. In Node, it's "which npm package handles conditionals." In Java, it's "do we adopt Drools." Both framings are wrong in the same way — they turn an architecture decision into a product decision before anyone's actually designed the seam. The seam is the same regardless of language: rules become data instead of control flow, the boundary between your service and the rule layer is typed on both sides, and a contract test catches the moment a rule change would silently break what your code expects back. Get that seam right and it barely matters whether you're calling it from Express or Spring Boot. Get it wrong and you've just moved your if statements into a config file and called it progress. The seam: rules as data, not control flow The actual pattern is small. Instead of branching logic living inline in a handler or a service method, you define a typed input, a typed output, and a rule set that maps one to the other — evaluated somewhere the calling code doesn't need to know the internals of. That's it. That's the whole architectural move. Everything else — which engine, which language, how it's hosted — is an implementation detail on top of that seam. Most of the friction teams run into with a low-code layer in Node.js or a Java service isn't the rule engine choice. It's skipping the typed boundary and finding out three months later that a rule change silently returns a shape the calling code wasn't built to handle. Node.js: keeping the boundary typed Here's the seam in a TypeScript service. The route handler never sees a conditional — it sees a typed input going in and a typed decision coming out: interface PricingInput { userTier : " free " | " pro " | " enterprise " ; cartTotal : number ; couponCode ?: string ; } interface PricingDecision { discountPercent : number ; reason : string ; } async function evaluatePricingRule ( input : PricingInput ): Promise < PricingDecision > { c

The bottleneck in a mature SOC is rarely analyst triage; rather, it is the detection-engineering team's ability to keep the rule base aligned with a threat landscape that evolves faster than rules can be written. Learn how multi-agent system for production security operations has reduced mean times to detect and to respond by 40% and compressed the human work required by 12x. By Willem Berroubache

Remember the days when we used to dump all our CSS and JavaScript into a single index.html file? That's exactly what a "Mega-Prompt" is today: an unmanageable monolith. A few weeks ago, while working on the orchestration of Vibrisse Agent (my local AI agent), I hit this exact wall. I was trying to stabilize a complex task by adding instructions to a 500-line system prompt. The more rules I added, the more the model forgot the older ones. The industry has sold us the myth of the Mega-Prompt. Those famous "50 ultimate prompts" or massive blocks of incantatory text are a technical dead end. Creative writing doesn't scale in production. As a web developer, my conviction is simple: to build reliable applications, we must stop "talking" to the machine and start configuring it. This is the shift from Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering . Context Engineering: Typing and Structure The first mistake with LLMs is mixing instructions (the logic) and context (the data) into an unstructured stream of text. It's the cognitive equivalent of spaghetti code. The solution? A strict separation of concerns. A highly effective technique (documented by Anthropic, but applicable to any model, including local SLMs), is XML Tagging . Here is the "dirty" approach (classic chat): You are a security expert. Analyze this authentication code, be strict, don't write a summary, check for XSS and SQLi vulnerabilities. Here is the code: function login() { ... } And here is the "engineering" approach: <role> Application Security Expert </role> <instructions> 1. Analyze the code provided in <context> . 2. Identify vulnerabilities (focus: XSS, SQLi). 3. Do not produce an introductory summary. </instructions> <context> function login() { ... } </context> Typing the language via tags creates clear boundaries. The model knows exactly where the directive is and where the data is. The Power of Exemplars (Few-Shot Prompting) Even with clear instructions, AI can drift in output format or tone. This is wh

You gave the agent a failing test and told it to get the suite green. It came back green. Then you...

Most apps start their access control with something like this: function canEditReportsSummary ( role ) { return [ ' EDITOR ' , ' ADMIN ' ]. includes ( role ); } It works, right up until you have a dozen pages, each with a few sections, each needing independent read/write rules per role. Now you've got dozens of these little arrays scattered across the codebase, and adding a new role means hunting down every single one and hoping you didn't miss any. 0 There's a much simpler model that scales cleanly: a three-level permission tree — page → section → { r, w } - plus one generic function that walks it. No new library, no framework lock-in, just a data structure and ~5 lines of code. The shape of the data Instead of scattering role checks in code, define one permission tree per role . Three levels deep: Page — the top-level feature/route ( dashboard , reports , settings ) Section — a sub-area within that page ( overview , summary , billing ) Action — r (read) or w (write) { "dashboard" : { "overview" : { "r" : true , "w" : false }, "analytics" : { "r" : true , "w" : false } }, "reports" : { "summary" : { "r" : true , "w" : false }, "export" : { "r" : false , "w" : false } }, "settings" : { "general" : { "r" : true , "w" : false }, "billing" : { "r" : false , "w" : false } } } This one blob fully describes what a single role can see and do. Give each role its own tree, e.g. for three common roles: Page Section Viewer Editor Admin dashboard overview r r, w r, w dashboard analytics r r r, w reports summary r r, w r, w reports export – r r, w settings general r r r, w settings billing – – r, w Notice how this reads almost like a spreadsheet a product owner could fill in — that's the point. It's declarative data, not scattered if statements, so non-engineers can review it and engineers don't have to guess what a role does. The generic access-check function Once permissions are just nested objects, checking access is one small, reusable, framework-agnostic function: function

Jake Mannix discusses moving AI agents past chaotic "1970s BASIC" architectures. He shares how implementing an intermediate protocol layer allows engineering leaders to build versioned, encapsulated "virtual tools." This design enables interface mapping, dynamic schema projection, and runtime taint tracking to proactively eliminate data exfiltration risks without slowing velocity. By Jake Mannix

Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security of our email accounts.

A configuration change in AWS's bill computation system showed customers estimated bills in the billions and trillions of dollars for over 24 hours. AWS's own alarms detected the anomalies but failed to halt bill generation or page engineers; customer escalations alerted the company 4.5 hours later. Budget and cost anomaly alerts were disabled platform-wide during mitigation. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

The most dangerous overengineering does not look careless. It looks thoughtful. It has clean interfaces, reusable components, configurable behavior, extension points, and an architecture diagram that makes the system appear ready for anything. Then the next feature arrives. A change that should take one afternoon touches seven layers, breaks three abstractions, and forces the team to understand a framework built for requirements that never appeared. That is what makes overengineering difficult to recognize. It rarely presents itself as unnecessary complexity. It presents itself as responsible engineering. It Usually Begins With a Reasonable Fear Developers do not overengineer because they want to make systems harder. They usually remember an earlier project that became painful. Maybe duplicated business logic spread across several screens. Maybe a component could not support a second use case. Maybe an integration became impossible to replace. Maybe a narrow implementation eventually required an expensive rewrite. The next time a similar problem appears, the team tries to protect itself. What if this feature grows? What if another team needs it? What if product asks for configuration? What if we add more providers? What if the rules change? These are reasonable questions. The problem begins when imagined requirements receive the same architectural weight as real ones. A single approval flow becomes a workflow engine. Two similar components become a universal rendering framework. One pricing exception becomes a configurable rules platform. The team tries to avoid future pain and creates immediate friction instead. The first use case now has to support requirements that do not exist. Developers must understand extension points nobody uses, configuration nobody needs, and interfaces protecting boundaries that have not appeared. Thinking about the future is not the mistake. Building the future before there is evidence is. Reuse Is Expensive Before the Pattern Is Stable

I honestly thought learning REST APIs would be easy. At first, creating a simple GET or POST endpoint feels straightforward and you start thinking, "I've got this." Then reality hits. Every API needs middleware, validation, error handling, controllers, database integration, authentication, authorization, testing, pagination, CORS, environment variables, deployment and a dozen other things. Somewhere along the way, you realize you didn't just sign up to build an API—you signed up to build an entire backend ecosystem. 😂💻

Structural engineers evaluate ASCE 7 Chapter 2 load combinations on nearly every design. The factors themselves are not hard — the failure mode is a spreadsheet cell that someone “improved” six months ago, or a notebook that only checks one combination. loadcomb is a small, dependency-free Python library and CLI that evaluates the basic LRFD and ASD combination sets on scalar load effects you already have from analysis. pip install loadcomb loadcomb --D 120 --L 80 --S 40 --W 55 --method LRFD from loadcomb import LoadCase , governing g = governing ( LoadCase ( D = 120 , L = 80 , S = 40 , W = 55 ), method = " LRFD " ) print ( g . id , g . value , g . formula ) What it handles Basic LRFD and ASD combinations from ASCE 7 Chapter 2 (Lr or S or R) resolved to the roof variable with largest absolute effect Automatic ± envelope for wind and earthquake Governing combination by absolute value What it is not Not FEA, not member design, not every exception in the standard. Confirm the ASCE 7 edition and local amendments for your project. Links pip install loadcomb GitHub PyPI Blog: sybilgambleyyu.github.io/posts/loadcomb.html MIT licensed.

Over the past few months, I've noticed that most discussions around AI coding assistants focus on prompts. People share: .cursorrules AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md long prompt templates custom instructions The assumption is always the same: "If I explain my engineering practices clearly enough, the AI will follow them." For simple projects, that works. For real software projects, it eventually breaks down. The problem isn't intelligence. It's governance. Every AI coding assistant eventually produces something like this: giant functions skipped tests undocumented architectural decisions ignored security practices direct commits inconsistent commit messages missing pull request descriptions Not because the model suddenly became "worse". Because nothing prevents it from taking shortcuts. Exactly like humans. We already solved this problem... for humans. Professional software engineering has never relied on trust. Instead, we built systems that enforce discipline. We don't ask developers to: write tests We fail CI. We don't ask them to: use meaningful commit messages We reject the commit. We don't ask them: not to push directly to production Protected branches make it impossible. Engineering isn't based on trust. It's based on constraints. Yet with AI... ...we went backwards. Instead of constraints, we write instructions. We create increasingly sophisticated prompt files hoping the assistant will remember them. Always write tests. Always document architectural decisions. Use GitHub Flow. Follow OWASP. Keep functions below 40 lines. Never commit directly to main. Those aren't guarantees. They're suggestions. And suggestions are eventually ignored. Rules are not enforcement. Recently I came across an article making a simple observation: Rules without enforcement are just hopes. That sentence stayed with me. It perfectly describes the current state of AI-assisted development. An AI may fully understand your engineering rules. It may even agree with them. But unless something checks

If your Clio integration started returning 401 and you are trying to work out why, the first question is not about your code. It is which of Clio's two OAuth systems you are on, because they have different rules and most advice on the internet does not say which one it is describing. There are two, and they are not interchangeable Clio Manage is the older one. OAuth at app.clio.com/oauth , API at app.clio.com/api/v4 . Clio Platform is the newer one, covering Grow and the lead inbox among others. OAuth at auth.api.clio.com/oauth , API at api.clio.com . They differ on essentially every point that matters when a token dies. Manage Platform Access token lifetime 2,592,000s, 30 days 86,400s, 24 hours Refresh token expiry Documented as none No time expiry, but rotates Refresh token rotation Not documented, and the refresh sample returns no new refresh token Documented: rotates on every use, previous one revoked Revocation endpoint POST app.clio.com/oauth/deauthorize , Bearer auth POST auth.api.clio.com/oauth/revoke , Basic auth Treat the lifetime row as the documented default rather than a constant. Honour the expires_in you get back on each response instead of hardcoding 30 days, because there are field reports of accounts issuing much shorter access tokens, and a hardcoded assumption fails in a way that looks exactly like revocation. That rotation row is the one that decides your debugging. On Platform , every refresh gives you a new refresh token and kills the old one, so failing to persist the new value out of each response leaves you holding a dead token the next time you try. Clio's docs say it directly: store the new refresh token returned in each response. On Manage , the documented behaviour is a long-lived refresh token that does not expire and is not replaced. Their refresh response sample does not even include a refresh_token field. So on Manage, a token that suddenly stops working usually points somewhere else: revocation, or the wrong region. The region trap

Your resume tells people what you’ve done. Your GitHub shows what you’ve built. But your personal website tells people who you are. When I started learning web development, I believed that a good resume and a few GitHub repositories were enough. Like many students, I spent countless hours building projects, solving coding problems, and learning new technologies. Every new project felt like a milestone, yet all of them remained scattered across different platforms. A recruiter would have to open my resume, visit my GitHub, search for my LinkedIn profile, and perhaps never even discover the articles I had written or the experiments I had built. That made me realise something important. Developers need a place on the internet that they truly own. Not another profile. Not another social media account. A place that represents their identity, work, and journey. That’s what a personal website becomes. More Than Just a Portfolio Many people hear the words personal website and immediately think of a portfolio with a few screenshots and a contact form. A great developer website goes much further. It answers questions before anyone has to ask them. Who are you? What technologies do you enjoy working with? What problems have you solved? What kind of developer are you becoming? What have you learned recently? How can someone reach you? Instead of forcing visitors to jump across five different platforms, everything exists in one carefully designed experience. Your Name Deserves a Home Every developer works hard to build projects. Very few work equally hard to build their own identity. When someone searches your name, what should they find? Ideally, the very first result should be something you completely control. A website with your own domain isn’t just another webpage. It’s your digital home. Unlike social platforms, algorithms cannot redesign your identity overnight. You decide what visitors see first. You decide which projects matter. You decide how your story is told. Resume

Bhavuk Jain discusses translating foundational AI into scalable mobile products. He shares the engineering challenges behind AI Wallpapers and Circle to Search, detailing how to implement robust runtime guardrails, fine-tuning, and seamless OS integration. For engineering leaders, he explains balancing UX constraints with model latency and infrastructure cost to deliver safe, reliable AI. By Bhavuk Jain

Yelp has launched Training Orchestrator. This new internal framework replaces individual team Spark training scripts. Now, it uses a configuration-driven, DAG-based execution model. By Claudio Masolo