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👋 Hey dev.to community, Last week I shipped a workflow I built for a friend who runs an online shop. He called me again a few days later with a new headache: he's drowning in Purchase Orders. Every single one gets opened by hand, the data typed into a Google Sheet, and that sheet uploaded into his ERP to update his numbers. Hours a week, pure copy-paste. So I built him something to kill that step. He uploads the PO PDFs through a simple n8n form, and a structured Google Sheet comes out the other end. He just downloads it and pushes it to his ERP. How it's set up: The form accepts multiple PDFs at once , so he can batch a whole stack instead of doing them one by one. Each PO loops through on its own so nothing gets jumbled. The extraction runs on the easybits Extractor node ( @easybits/n8n-nodes-extractor ). I set the field structure up in two parts: the header fields that appear once per PO (PO number, PO date, delivery date, mark for, PR number, reference no), plus an articles array for the line items, each holding article name, unit and quantity. That array is the key bit, it gives you one entry per row of the PO table, and I flatten it into one sheet row per article with the header details repeated on each. Two things I added because real documents are messy: Error flagging . If any field comes back empty, the completion screen lists which document and which field didn't extract cleanly, so he knows exactly which PO to double-check instead of trusting it blindly. Document name column . The original filename lands in the sheet next to every row, so if a number looks off he can jump straight back to the source PDF. Workflow JSON is on GitHub: https://github.com/felix-sattler-easybits/n8n-workflows/blob/c38749a68fd6ea4ae6ebff41789d35cceaacdef1/easybits-purchase-order-extractor-workflow/easybits_purchase_order_extractor_workflow.json Anyone else automating document-to-sheet data entry? Curious how you're handling the messy multi-line rows – that was the trickiest par

The conversation around Agentic AI often focuses on one goal: making agents more autonomous. More tools. More reasoning. More planning. More independence. It sounds like progress. But is more autonomy always the right answer? As software engineers, we rarely optimize for "more." We don't build distributed systems when a monolith is sufficient. We don't introduce microservices because they're fashionable. We choose architectures that balance capability with complexity. The same principle applies to AI agents. The question isn't "How autonomous can my agent be?" It's "How autonomous should my agent be?" Autonomy Is a Design Decision When people talk about autonomy, they often think of it as a feature that an agent either has or doesn't have. In reality, autonomy is a design decision. Every time we allow an agent to make another decision on its own, we are increasing its responsibility. That responsibility comes with benefits, but it also introduces new engineering challenges. More autonomy means the agent can adapt to situations that weren't anticipated during development. It can make progress toward a goal without being guided through every step. At the same time, it becomes harder to predict, validate, debug, and trust. Autonomy isn't free. Thinking in Terms of an Autonomy Spectrum Instead of treating autonomy as a binary concept, it helps to think of it as a spectrum. At one end are systems that simply generate responses. They have no authority to take action. As autonomy increases, agents begin suggesting actions, invoking tools, planning multiple steps, and eventually deciding how to achieve a goal with minimal human involvement. The important observation is that every step along this spectrum increases both capability and complexity. That's why the objective shouldn't be to reach the highest level. It should be to stop at the level your problem actually requires. More Autonomy Isn't Always Better Imagine building an internal HR assistant. Its primary responsibil

Silo is such a complicated show that even its showrunner gets confused sometimes. While filming the final seasons of the Apple TV sci-fi thriller, Graham Yost remembers two instances where he messed up details: once it was an actor who realized that a conversation they were about to shoot should've already taken place, the other […]

When going abroad, the right plugs are essential to keep your gadgets charged. These are my favorite travel adapters and chargers.

A company shifted from project- to product-thinking after their platform outgrew single-team use. The limitations that they felt with their platform were one-off deliveries, lack of product vision, and weak feedback loops. They have moved toward a self-service, API-driven, multi-tenant infrastructure with clearer ownership and better abstractions. By Ben Linders

Replay QA tells you what is broken before your users do Discussion | Link

Google tries balancing AI data center emissions with clean energy efforts.

Interesting paper: “ Cybersecurity Mission Creep .” Abstract: Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls “cybersecuritized.” Before this reframing, these issues present as important but not existential. But once cybersecuritization positions the issues as threats intensified by their technological nature, they gain access to the politics and law of urgency and exceptionalism and invite troubling governance responses...

The Bublue BuVortex V5 ditches conventional skimming for a vortex-powered design that’s fascinating to watch, even if it’s severely impractical.

Slate is the latest automaker to transition to lower-cost batteries perfected in China, driven in part by the repeal of EV tax credits that required materials to be sourced domestically.

Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. "My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here," Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website. "What's BitTorrent, Bram?" the founder of […]

I ripped open $892 worth of Pokémon packs on my phone in under 15 minutes and walked away with 62 cents. My adrenaline rush felt like the future of gambling.

Apple chose Google Cloud to run Private Cloud Compute outside its own data centers for the first time, using NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, Intel TDX, and Google's Titan chip. Apple maintains an independent append-only hardware ledger and dual-vendor attestation roots. AWS and Azure are not part of the collaboration. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Move from opens to conversions Discussion | Link

Your comments on a dangerous rule putting politicals in charge of science can matter.

New York City’s Summer of Ludd festival is teaching people how to live offline amid the suffocating presence of Big Tech.

I used to waste hours tweaking and re-tweaking my AI model prompts. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack—I'd make a change, run the code, wait for the results, and then... nothing. The output would be inconsistent, unhelpful, or just plain wrong. I'd try again with tiny modifications, rinse and repeat, until I was about to pull my hair out. It wasn't until I stumbled upon the concept of reusable prompt templates that everything changed. It was like a switch had flipped—my code started producing consistent results, and I finally understood why. No more guesswork, no more frustration. Just good old-fashioned productivity. A simple shift from writing one-off prompt strings to using reusable templates is the key to reducing prompt overhead, increasing consistency, and getting back to doing what we love—building amazing, AI-driven applications. From Chaos to Control: A Simple Example Let's make this tangible. Imagine you're building a feature to generate a short story, but for different characters. Before: The Inconsistent, One-Off Way Without a template, you'd likely write a new prompt each time, introducing small, unintentional differences that lead to wildly different results. Two separate prompts = inconsistent, unpredictable output prompt_for_alex = "Write a short story about a character named Alex who is trying to get to work on time, but keeps getting delayed in a busy city." prompt_for_jordan = "Generate a story about someone named Jordan. They're late for work and stuck in traffic in a big city." See the problem? The tone, wording, and details are different. You have no control over the consistency of the output. After: The Clean, Templated Way Now, let's use a single template. We define the core structure once and simply pass in the parts that change. Now, let's use a single template. We define the core structure once and simply pass in the parts that change. One template = consistent, predictable output story_template = "Write a short story about

Every blog post needs an OG image. Without one, your links look blank on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slack — just a plain URL that nobody clicks. Most developers solve this by spinning up a headless browser, loading an HTML template, taking a screenshot, and uploading it somewhere. It works, but now you're maintaining a Puppeteer instance, dealing with font rendering quirks, and burning server resources on something that should be simple. There's a faster approach: design your OG images as HTML templates and let a screenshot API handle the rendering. The Idea: HTML Templates as OG Images Think of your OG image as a tiny webpage. You already know HTML and CSS. Build a 1200×630 template with your blog title, author name, maybe a gradient background — whatever fits your brand. Host it or pass it as raw HTML. Then call an API to screenshot it. Done. A basic template might look like this: <div style= "width:1200px;height:630px;display:flex;align-items:center; justify-content:center;background:linear-gradient(135deg,#1a1a2e,#16213e); font-family:Inter,sans-serif;padding:60px" > <div style= "color:#fff;text-align:center" > <h1 style= "font-size:48px;margin:0" > {{title}} </h1> <p style= "font-size:24px;color:#8892b0;margin-top:20px" > {{author}} · {{date}} </p> </div> </div> Replace the placeholders on your server, then send the resulting HTML (or a URL pointing to it) to the API. Calling the API With ScreenshotRun , a single curl request captures the rendered template as a PNG: curl -X POST "https://api.screenshotrun.com/v1/screenshot" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "url": "https://yourblog.com/og-template?title=My+Post+Title", "viewport_width": 1200, "viewport_height": 630, "format": "png" }' The response gives you the image file. Save it to your CDN, set the og:image meta tag, and you're done. No browser to manage, no Chrome binary eating RAM on your CI server. Wiring It Into Your Build If you publish with a static sit

Most AI agents fail because they are developed in a vacuum without access to the scale and complexity of production data. This context gap leads to agents that hallucinate your infrastructure and suggestions that break the moment they hit a live environment. Most agentic failures are context failures rather than intelligence failures. Traditional development workflows create fragmentation and failure points for AI. You can bridge this gap by using byte-level clones to provide agents with a machine-readable map of your world. Upsun allows every Git branch to trigger a byte-level clone of your production environment in under a minute. Copy-on-Write technology ensures you only pay for data changes and not for duplicating massive datasets. Logical isolation means your agents can run heavy queries without consuming cycles from your production cluster. Stop paying the devops tax and give your agents the deterministic sandbox they need to succeed. Solve the data context gap for AI agents | Upsun Stop AI failures caused by fragmented stacks. Use byte-level clones to bridge the repro gap and develop agents against production-grade data. upsun.com

A pre-install supply-chain gate returns ALLOW or DENY for each package your AI agent proposes, before npm install runs, keyed on provenance: is the name in a vouched snapshot or a popular baseline, and is the .npmrc registry trusted. An SBOM taken after resolve cannot answer that question. In this post's attack manifest, supply_chain_gate.py returns 2 DENY and exits 1. AI disclosure: I wrote supply_chain_gate.py with an AI assistant and ran it myself, offline, before publishing. Every number in the output blocks below is pasted from a real local run on Python 3.13.5, standard library only, no network. I checked the exit codes (0 / 1 / 2), hashed the STDOUT twice to confirm it is byte-for-byte deterministic, and edited every line. The external figures I cite (the USENIX 2025 package-hallucination study) are the researchers' numbers, not mine, and I link the source and say how they measured. I keep their numbers and my run's numbers in separate paragraphs on purpose. In short: An SBOM and a CVE scan run after npm install . They record what resolved and whether it has a known CVE. Neither can say whether your agent should have proposed that name in the first place. A coding agent recommends a dependency with the same flat confidence whether the name is real, hallucinated, or one letter off a real one. That confidence is exactly what a post-resolve scan cannot see through: a name registered yesterday has no CVE yet, so a known-CVE scan lists it as clean. supply_chain_gate.py reads a manifest (the packages the agent proposed, your vouched snapshot, and your .npmrc ) and returns ALLOW or DENY per package against a bundled popular baseline, before install. The result that carries the argument: the same 277-name baseline that ALLOWs express (exact match) DENYs expresss in a sibling manifest. One letter flips the verdict. What flips it is default-deny against a vouched baseline, not a static blocklist of known-bad names; the edit-distance check only labels the DENY ( TYPOSQU