AI Coding Tools Frequently Recommend Nonexistent Packages, Opening Door to Attacks

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A study presented at USENIX Security 2025 found that nearly one in five code samples generated by AI models imported packages that do not exist on PyPI or npm. Researchers tested 16 models across 2.23 million samples, with open-weight models hallucinating far more often than commercial ones. A later 2026 re-test of five frontier models still found hallucination rates between 4.62% and 6.10%, with 127 invented names recurring across all five. To show the risk, a research team registered 107 hallucinated names on npm for about $496, and over six months real developers installed them. The issue is compounded by agentic tools that install dependencies automatically, often without a human noticing the fabricated name.

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DeadCode Whisperer: A Locally Run AI Persona Channels the Spirit of ALGOL

A developer built an offline AI project called The DeadCode Whisperer for a Hacktoberfest challenge themed around the 'Ghost in the Machine.' The assistant adopts a restless, archaic persona that mourns lost structural programming ideas and sees modern languages as chaotic. It runs entirely on the developer's own machine using Ollama and open-weight models, so it needs no cloud service and keeps user queries local. The developer argues that open-weight models avoid the risks of closed APIs, such as deprecation and shutdowns. The project's code is publicly available on GitHub.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Five-Tool Pipeline Used to Model a 64-Acre Closed Pennsylvania Mall Site

A planner spent seven weeks building a planning-level model of a 64-acre shuttered mall in Pennsylvania using five software tools. The team relied on a 1998 survey, which had to be converted into an existing-ground surface and checked against a 2021 aerial image, with flat areas matching within 0.1 foot. Block-scheme software initially reported 610 units, but roughly 80 of those fell inside the 100-year floodplain and had to be excluded. Problems included block IDs renumbering after edits and the need to generate terrain and buildings for an unsurveyed 12-acre parcel using AI. The author concluded that early exclusion polygons and a frozen street layout would have saved time, while consistent coordinate setup kept the tools aligned.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Ghostlight: an offline, browser-based tool for writing remembrances of the dead

Ghostlight is a remembrance studio that runs entirely in the user's browser, turning answers to six questions about a loved one into a written portrait, a Día de Muertos-style virtual altar, and a self-contained HTML keepsake. Its text is generated by an open-weight Gemma 2 model via WebGPU, or users can opt for a candle mode that arranges their own sentences without any model. The archive is stored locally in IndexedDB, with no backend, accounts, analytics, or cloud inference, so no data is uploaded. The project's creator frames the stored memories, rather than the model, as the true archive, keeping them portable if the model changes. The demo archive shown in the project is fictional and was written by the creator.

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