Why saving tokens still costs you, what language agents prefer, which VPN extensions to avoid and what your browser tells about you.  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

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Issue 235: Tokens vs. cost, the 1/3 AI web & a button to fix everything

23-25/09/2026: WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America

25-26/11/2026: WeAreDevelopers Conference India - CFP India

14-16/07/2026: WeAreDevelopers World Congress Europe

Get 15% off your tickets with code "devdigest" for Europe, North America

Hello fellow developer, quite a lot happened this week, NVIDIA is showing interest in buying Hugging Face, Perplexity launched an on-device AI agent and 0x Alpha took the AI world by storm even when it was not known who actually created the model. Other than that, we are less than a month away from the first WeAreDevelopers World Congress across the pond and we hope we will see some of you on the 23rd in San Jose! 

Why Token reduction isn't cost reduction - Dave Anderson and Sarel Weinberger

There are quite a few tools that promise to save you on tokens by packing, sorting or cleaning up your prompts and requests. Another one that made the rounds was that talking to your LLM like a caveman or a senior developer is the way to go. As it turns out, reducing tokens does not always mean that you also save money. PointFive did some in-depth research on the topic and we chatted with Dave Anderson and Sarel Weinberger to explain us why that is. Learn about why token reduction isn't cost reduction. 

What's happening in AI

  • What language are agent skills written in?
  • The summer of open weights
  • Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
  • How to Make LLMs 3X Faster
  • A third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched were written by AI

Security and Privacy

  • Everything I own, owned - smart devices are a mess
  • 737 Chrome VPN Extensions impersonated brands and redirected browser traffic
  • Hacking your life with AI can get you hacked 
  • AliExpress used silent audio to fingerprint - here's a detailed analysis.
  • Glassbox - every measurement a website can take from your browser

Software Development

  • A faster way to calculate the day of the week
  • Network Efficiency Guardrails: Detect Web Performance Issues
  • We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
  • A new way to bring native Windows APIs to JavaScript
  • CSS Infinity Use Cases

Tips, Tricks and Tools

  • Native macOS screenshots, recording, annotation, and editing from the menu bar.
  • See your site on desktop and mobile at the same time.
  • Every local project gets a real address.
  • Bumply is a Mac app for keeping npm, pnpm, Yarn, and Bun projects current. I
  • Microlighter - ultra small and fast syntax highlighter

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

  • Make everything OK
  • Public Domain Image Archive
  • The public gallery of animated pets for your coding agents.

Career and Culture:

  • The Wicked Reason Removing Code Beats Better Scheduling
  • A team of "Full Stack Builders" is like a band of only drummers
  • Working With AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding
  • How to Take Feedback without Getting Defensive
  • The State of Devs survey
Are you looking for opportunities or fancy a change?

Companies to check:

  • Senior Product Manager - Mobile at Patronus Group
  • Senior AI/ML Engineer at PagerDuty
  • Technical Product Marketing Manager at Comet
  • Senior Software Engineer at WALTER GROUP
  • Software Entwickler Python DevOps at ROSEN Technology and Research Center
  • Eltemate
  • Erste Digital
  • Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund Servicegesellschaft
  • Riverty
  • Burda

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria

WeAreDevelopers, Schottenfeldgasse 23, Vienna, Vienna 1070, Austria

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