WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 194: AI vs. Version Control, Password "Louvre" and cursed web development

Hello fellow developer, now it is official, you can buy tickets for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America to have the Berlin experience next year in September in San Jose. For me this means more late evening meetings and recordings, and getting more lights into my flat as recording in the dark is bad. Please enjoy a collection of resources including security news, the AI-native software engineer handbook and an explanation of how we got stick figures to fight on the internet in the past.

There is a lot of confusion on AI and version control. It is not fun to deal with huge pull requests with megabytes of vibe-coded cruft but it can be useful to let AI re-write some of our more cryptic comments of the past (also see the tools section for this). One person that's been living and breathing version control for years is Daniel Siegl of Syntevo, and we sat down with him to understand what AI can learn from version control.

What's happening in AI

• Agent Garden - Samples for learning, discovering and building
• A practical playbook for integrating AI into your daily engineering workflow
• Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced OSS Developer Productivity
• How to stand out when anyone can build anything
• We are in AI's Dial-Up Era

Join the Apify $1M Challenge from today until January 31. Develop AI tools such as data extractors, automation workflows, and MCP servers. Publish on Apify Store, earn recurring income, and compete for a share of $1M in prizes. In September alone, Apify paid out $563k to community developers, and that was before the challenge even began! Register now.

Security and Privacy

• Microsoft Whisper Leak’ Flaw, Exposing Encrypted AI Chats in 28 LLMs
• My AWS Account Got Hacked - Here Is What Happened
• The New 2025 OWASP Top 10 List: What Changed, and What You Need to Know
• Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads
• “Louvre” as a password, outdated software, impossible updates…

Software Development

• Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich
• import myModule from "./my-module.torrent": requiring Node modules from BitTorrent
• The Inner Workings of JavaScript Source Maps
• Error chaining in JavaScript: cleaner debugging with Error.cause
• setHTML(), Trusted Types and the Sanitizer API

Tips, Tricks and Tools

• AI-powered git commit message rewriter using AI
• URL Sheriff validate and prevent against SSRF
• A special build of curl that can impersonate the four major browsers
• image-dimensions
• A web component that renders YouTube embeds faster.

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

• The first ever banner ad: why did it work so well?
• When Stick Figures Fought
• Solving NYT's Pips Puzzle 

• European Commission GDPR modification to “KILL” cookie consent nightmare
• Get the core right and the resilient code will follow
• Is a Computer Science Degree Still Valuable in the Age of AI?
• Running 1:1s for Engineers
• Pull Request Templates

Companies to check:

• IT-Risikomanager at Dirk Rossmann
• Frontend Developer (Angular) at Picnic Technologies
• Team Lead DevOps at Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund
• Senior Software Engineer für App-Entwicklung at convivo
• Cloud Engineer at VECTOR Informatik

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria