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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Sidekick part 4: safety as honestly labeled ceilings

Sidekick Part 4: safety as a stack of ceilings, each honestly labeled Most agent safety I've seen is a paragraph in the system prompt: "be careful with destructive commands." Small models ignore system prompts — we established that in Part 2. So Sidekick's safety model assumes the model will disobey and enforces the boundaries in code instead. This is Part 4: approvals, hard refusals, egress control, and the audit ledger — plus the ceilings, stated rather than hidden. Reads auto-run. Everything else sits in APPROVAL_TOOLS — writes, deletes, general shell — gated behind inline [y/N] prompts, wi

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

I built my friend a Spanish tutor that runs on her laptop and never phones home

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend I built a Spanish practice partner for a friend who is learning from scratch and freezes when a real person talks to her. Ordering food is the specific thing: she can read a menu, but when the waiter asks "¿algo más?" she has to stop and translate in her head, and the moment passes. So I made LingoBuddy — a terminal program she talks to instead. It holds a conversation with her in Spanish at her level, translates every line into English so she can check her own meaning, and corrects her when she drops an accent. I

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Tuning a Local Qwen Coding Agent: What Changed, What Still Fails

On eight development coding cases repeated three times, a local Qwen3.8-27B agent went from 5/24 to 23/24 functional and delivered successes across sequential output-budget and reasoning rounds. That is promising development evidence. It does not establish generalization or show that xhigh alone caused the difference. The next experiment was less encouraging: lowering temperature to 0.8 on two selected difficult cases preserved 5/6 functional successes but reduced delivered successes to 4/6. The reused temperature-1.0 controls scored 5/6 on both metrics.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Bilal Masala POS App

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend I built Bilal Masala POS — a fast, intuitive, and modern Point of Sale (POS) mobile application designed specifically for my good friend Bilal, who operates a local spice and masala store. Running a spice shop comes with unique retail challenges. Spices are sold in multiple fixed package sizes (50g, 100g, 250g, 500g, 1kg) as well as custom weight amounts requested on the spot by customers. During peak hours: Calculating prices manually caused long queues and customer wait times. Frequent manual calculation errors

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

n8n's Postgres Node Doesn't Send Parameters. My Dry-Run Did.

The n8n docs for the Postgres node say you can use $1, $2 and $3 in a query "to build prepared statements to use with query parameters." On September 18 I found out what that means in practice, from a failure that my own dry-run had told me couldn't happen. I was running an end-to-end test of a workflow I maintain that books a callback. One Postgres node stores when the callback is due, and the number of minutes comes from earlier in the flow. Sometimes there is no number, so the value is an empty string. Simplified, the node's query looked like this: SELECT CASE WHEN $1 = '' THEN NULL ELSE ma

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

I built 62 image tools that never upload your photos. Here's what was harder than expected.

I do a lot of SEO and web work, which means I touch images every single day. Compress this one for a page, remove the background from that one, convert a HEIC someone sent me, resize something for a blog post. And every day it was the same routine. One site for compressing, another for background removal, and another for converting. Half of them hit me with "upgrade to Pro" after one or two images.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

I Built Paano: An AI Problem-Resolution Engine

Most AI interfaces assume you already know what to ask. Paano is an AI-powered problem-resolution engine designed to work from situations rather than perfectly formulated questions. Understand → Investigate → Act → Reassess Instead of immediately generating an answer, Paano tries to determine: What is known? What is unknown? What could explain the situation?

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

ColdFusion cfspreadsheet vs Apache POI: Handling Large Excel Files Without Memory Crashes

cfspreadsheet and Apache POI are not really rivals — ColdFusion's Office/spreadsheet handling is built on Apache POI, so the real question is which POI mode your code ends up using. The classic ColdFusion spreadsheet functions work on a workbook held in the JVM heap, and Apache POI's own documentation says the standard XSSF (.xlsx) API "gives access to all rows in the document" and has a higher memory footprint than the older .xls format. That is why a .xlsx with hundreds of thousands of rows can end in java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded. The fix is to switch to a streaming

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

My friend's kirana store runs out of milk every Sunday. So I gave it a voice.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend My friend Surya runs a kirana: the small neighbourhood grocery store you'll find on almost every street in India. Milk, bread, sugar, dal, biscuits, soap. His shop is a few steps from my house. Two problems keep coming back. On Sundays and during festivals, demand jumps: Indian festival sweets and snacks are made from milk, flour and sugar, so those run out first.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Run AI Locally on Your Mac with Ollama: Chat, Tools, RAG and a Custom Model (Real Numbers from a Mac mini M4)

I wanted to know how far a plain Mac mini M4 with 16 GB can go with local AI. No cloud, no API key, nothing leaving the machine. So I installed Ollama and built five small projects with it: a chat app, the OpenAI SDK pointed at localhost, tool calling, RAG over my own notes, and a custom model. Everything below is from that real run. The full step-by-step video is here: What Ollama is (in one paragraph) Ollama is a small app that downloads open models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma and more) and runs them on your own computer.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Finally, an AI that won't oversell my friend's resume. It shows the proof instead.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend My friend Pranshu is job hunting. Like everyone, he's staring at a job post with twenty requirements and a two-page resume, wondering which line actually proves what. The AI tools he could use either rewrite everything with confident claims that aren't his, or hand back a "92% match" that explains nothing. So I built ProofPrep, a resume coach with one rule: no claim without a quote. Add details: Upload a resume, paste the job post.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Using SCP on Windows: Install OpenSSH and Transfer Files

Need to copy a file from a Windows machine to a Linux server? Windows includes scp.exe as part of its OpenSSH Client optional feature, so you can transfer files from PowerShell, Windows Terminal, or Command Prompt without installing a separate SCP tool. The main things to get right are whether OpenSSH is installed, which side of the command is remote, and how each operating system formats its paths. scp is available In PowerShell, run: Get-Command scp In Command Prompt, use: where scp If Windows finds it, the result will usually point to C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\scp.exe. If neither command

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

I Built a Customer Support AI System to Help a Friend Find Answers Faster

I built a Customer Support AI System to help a friend who was practicing customer-support workflows and needed a faster way to find accurate answers from support documentation. A common problem in customer support is that the information already exists, but finding the right piece of information can take time. Support teams may have FAQs, refund policies, account policies, payment documentation, and other reference documents spread across multiple files. Instead of manually searching through those documents, I built a system that allows support knowledge to be uploaded and searched using seman

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

CVE-2026-96361 in Context: How This Drupal Batch Compares with Core Security Releases

CVE-2026-96361 in Context: How This Drupal Batch Compares with Core Security Releases Vulnerability overview CVE-2026-96361 is one of 36 identifiers in CERT-BUND advisory WID-SEC-2026-3554, published on 23 September 2026 and rated high risk. The advisory names 16 contributed Drupal projects and its identifiers run from CVE-2026-96355 to CVE-2026-96398. The record describes remote exploitation and confirms that patches exist. Its outcome classes are arbitrary code execution, extended privileges, bypass of security measures, data manipulation or disclosure, and cross-site scripting. It does not

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Another Rule for Using AI Without Losing My Skills

When code breaks, you can't simply say, "AI did that." You're responsible for the code you ship. AI is fast, but over-reliance makes you lose your mental models and context—that's just one of the problems with AI. To protect my skills, I've set one rule: Don't let AI touch your code directly. It might feel unproductive. To test this rule, I recently tried finishing a task using as much AI as possible.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

What's in My Fridge? — An Open-Source AI Cooking Assistant I Built for a Friend

The problem A friend of mine has a habit: they open the fridge, stare at a handful of random ingredients — some eggs, half a chicken, a bag of rice — and just... close it again. Not because there's nothing to cook, but because turning "what I have" into "what I could make" takes a kind of mental effort that's easy to skip when you're tired. So for this weekend's Hacktoberfest challenge — Build for a Friend — I built them exactly that: What's in My Fridge? Tell me what you have.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Laravel Middleware: Route-Level, Groups & Ordering Pitfalls

Laravel middleware is where most "it works locally but not in production" routing bugs hide: a route that should require login but doesn't, a rate limit that counts the wrong user, a model that loads before the permission check that was supposed to guard it. Part 1 showed that web.php and api.php differ because of the middleware group wrapped around them, and Part 2 covered route model binding. This part covers how middleware is registered, how it is ordered, and the mistakes that come from getting either one wrong. Middleware is a layer a request passes through on the way to your controller,

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Creator Compass — A Private AI Advisor for a Creator's Real Life

What I Built I built Creator Compass, a personal AI advisor for a friend who recently started her Instagram creator journey while pursuing her PhD at IIT. She's a talented singer, plays tennis, enjoys spending time with friends, and loves creating reels, carousels, memes, jokes, sarcasm, and self-love content. The problem wasn't that she had no content ideas. The problem was deciding when to create, what to create, and when not to create at all. She wants to grow as a creator, but she also worries about: Whether a post will actually fit her personality and audience Constantly worrying about vi

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