Tech

The “API First” Illusion: Why Your “Simple” Endpoints Turn Into Technical Debt (And How to Fix It)

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It started as a harmless Slack message at 4:30 PM on a Friday. “Hey, frontend needs a quick endpoint to show user preferences. Just return the JSON blob from the DB. Should take 10 minutes.” Six months later, that “10-minute endpoint” has mutated into a monolithic /v1/user/stuff route. It returns 4MB of data, mixes camelCase and snake_case, … Read more

Musicians are getting really tired of this AI clone ‘bullshit’

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William Basinski says the current system is “a mess.” | Image: Getty Images for Prada “Not ideal.” “Completely unacceptable.” “Shameless.” “Predatory.” “Some bullshit.” “Total bullshit.” This is how musicians, producers, and others in the industry are describing the relentless spread of AI clones. Of course, AI fakes aren’t new, but as the scammers have gotten … Read more

How To Send .NET Crash Dumps To Slack From ECS Fargate Task

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Sometimes .NET applications crash in production, and nobody knows why, because logs and metrics are ok. It’s quite bothersome and makes debugging very unpleasant. In such cases, memory dumps might simplify debugging and reduce troubleshooting time from days to minutes. This article explains how to configure dumps for .NET applications deployed to AWS ECS Fargate … Read more

Feeding the machine

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When he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. … Read more

UX Research for Agile AI Product Development of Intelligent Collaboration Software Platforms

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The rush to adopt AI collaboration tools has created a paradox. Teams deploy intelligent assistants, LLM-powered meeting summarizers, and AI-driven project management features at record speeds, yet few organizations systematically measure whether these tools genuinely improve collaboration. I’ve watched teams celebrate velocity gains while missing subtle ways AI changes decision quality, team trust, and collaboration … Read more

Automating Content Tagging in Laravel Using OpenAI Embeddings and Cron Jobs

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It is tedious, inconsistent, and frequently incorrect to manually tag blog posts. With AI embeddings, Laravel can automatically determine the topic of a blog post and assign the appropriate tags without the need for human intervention. This guide demonstrates how to create a complete Laravel AI auto-tagging system using: The OpenAI Embeddings API Laravel Jobs … Read more

What I Learned from Scanning Dozens of Small Government Websites (and Why the Same Bugs Keep Coming)

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Legacy CMSes, tiny IT teams, and the same five security mistakes on repeat. Most of the security work I do is not glamorous. There are no red team hoodies, no zero-days, no dramatic “we hacked the mainframe” moments. Instead, there’s a lot of curl, headers, and very old PHP. I’m based in Chicago and I’ve … Read more

The AI Agent Reality Check: What Actually Works in Production (And What Doesn’t)

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As we close out 2025, everyone’s been calling this “the year of AI agents.” But here’s what nobody wants to admit: most of these agents aren’t actually working. I’ve spent the last year building production AI systems—speech recognition for enterprise clients, fraud detection models, RAG chatbots handling real customer queries. And the gap between what … Read more