WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 166 Sycophancy, Zip bombs and AI Native Development

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 9-11/7/25 - get 15% off using code devdigest

Hello fellow developer, remember when "prompt engineering" was the most promising way to save our jobs in an AI world? Turns out, it's pretty much obsolete now. Also, what is "AI Native development" and how is Sycophancy the first dark pattern of AI? These questions and more will be answered in this edition and you learn how one line of code cost $8k in traffic. But first, one of the talks of our AI and WebDev Day:

Tessl is a company made up of an all-star team of former Google and Snyk folk and they promise to short-cut the AI hype and go directly to a new way of thinking about software development. Simon Maple explained to us what that means and how to do it. So go and check the video to learn about "The power of prompting with AI-native Development".

What's happening in AI

• Sycophancy is the first LLM “dark pattern”  and what OpenAI is doing about it
• Does RAG make LLMs less safe? - a Bloomberg research paper.
• AI Horseless Carriages
• The Hidden Cost of AI Coding

Security and Privacy

• How I made $64k from deleted files — a bug bounty story
• iOS and Android juice jacking defenses have been trivial to bypass for years
• TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days
• 2025’s Top OSINT Tools: A Fresh Take on Open-Source Intel
• 10 Bugs Found in Perplexity AI’s Chatbot Android App

Software Development

• Impossible Components
• Say no to abstract code
• Serving streaming video that adapts to bandwidth from your own website
• Understanding Why COUNT(*) Can Be Slow in PostgreSQL.
• Contextual logging with console.context()
• Tauri vs. Electron: performance, bundle size, and the real trade-offs

Tips, Tricks and Tools

• Enhance - upscale and improve image quality directly in your browser
• Vibe Draw - Cursor for 3D Modeling
• Online photo editor
• MCP Containers
• Open-source & local-first collaboration workspace that you can self-host

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

• Colossal Cave Adventure - the first text adventure written in Fortran
• A digital pet with a simple neural network [research project]
• This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wi
• Invisible jumpersi

• The Hottest AI Job of 2023 Is Already Obsolete
• Researchers secretly experimented on Reddit with AI-generated comments.
• One line of code generating over 2 petabytes of network traffic at $8,000 cost.
• Why performance optimization is hard work
• I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server

Companies to check:

• Fullstack Engineer at MARKT-PILOT
• Senior Backend Engineer (80-100%) - Sophia-Antipolis - Hybrid Work at SMG
• C++ / Python Software Engineer at Televic GSP
• Senior Linux Engineer (x64/ARM,Operating System) – REMOTE at Stratodesk Software
• Eclipse RCP Entwickler:in at qualitype

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria