Healthcare Assistants Should Rank Appointment Evidence by Policy Validity First

·4 views

The article argues that appointment-retrieval systems for healthcare assistants should prioritize policy and time validity before blending lexical, semantic, and operational signals. Answers should only be given when the top-ranked passages carry a citation a support agent can verify. The author recommends indexing PDFs and clinic databases with metadata such as clinic, locale, service line, and effective dates, and applying hard filters before ranking. A transparent scoring formula with gates is proposed, where candidates lacking policy match or citation readiness are excluded. The piece also stresses redacting patient identifiers in logs and warns that a correct-looking answer drawn from the wrong clinic is among the most serious failure modes.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

agentbelt: One Safe Toolbelt for Multiple AI Coding Assistants

The developer behind agentbelt built it because switching between AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code meant redoing setup and facing inconsistent permission rules. agentbelt is an open-source Model Context Protocol server that supplies git, testing, and workflow tools that work the same across apps. Its broker enforces policy-based limits, such as blocking destructive git commands, pushing, and access outside the project, and only a human can approve workflow steps from the terminal. Every action is recorded in a secrets-redacted audit log, and third-party plugins run only inside an OS sandbox. The project currently reports verified support for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, DeepSeek Harness, and LM Studio.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Ethical Hackers Versus Malicious Hackers: How the Two Differ

Hacking is often associated with crime, but in cybersecurity the same techniques can be used either to defend systems or to attack them. Ethical hackers are security professionals who, with the owner's permission and within an agreed scope, test websites, applications, and networks to uncover weaknesses before criminals exploit them. Malicious hackers, by contrast, gain access without authorisation to steal data, spread malware, disrupt services, or extort money, and they rarely disclose what they have done. The article explains that while both groups may share similar technical skills and tools, their intentions, permissions, and outcomes differ sharply. Ethical hacking is generally legal and strengthens cybersecurity, whereas malicious activity causes financial and privacy harm.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Task Graphs Help AI Coding Agents Split Features Without Merge Conflicts

Running several AI coding agents in parallel can appear efficient, yet each may finish its portion cleanly while still producing costly integration problems when their changes collide. The source argues the root cause is planning: features are often broken into flat to-do lists rather than task graphs that expose dependencies and shared interfaces. A task graph specifies which work can run concurrently, which steps must follow an order, and what proof of completion each agent must deliver. The article illustrates this with an invoice export feature, where a shared response contract should be settled before the API, UI, and tests proceed. It advises splitting work along stable seams such as module boundaries and agreed interfaces, and treating shared contracts as dependencies rather than overhead.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Retrying Client Errors Caused MuleSoft Production Noise; Fix Retries Only Transient Failures

A team shipped a MuleSoft API that retried every failed request three times, including 400, 401, and 403 errors that could never succeed on retry. This flooded the logs with repeated failures and led a downstream system to throttle them, which is how the problem surfaced. The article argues that client errors should fail fast and be logged once, while only transient errors such as 408, 500, 502, and 503 should be retried. Retries should also use increasing backoff, such as waiting 2, 4, and 8 seconds, to avoid overloading recovering systems. The team reported that switching to a status-based retry check took about ten minutes and immediately reduced production noise.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community