Dev.to·Monday, January 12, 2026

Dev.to - Monday, January 12, 2026

10 stories~15 min

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Stories Covered

The Agent Control Plane: Why Intelligence Without Governance Is a Bug

We are currently trying to control autonomous AI agents with “vibes.” We write polite system prompts — “You are a helpful assistant,” “Please do not lie,” “Ensure your SQL query is safe” — and we hope the Large Language Model (LLM) honors the request. But hope is not an engineering strategy. In the world of distributed systems, we don’t ask a microservice nicely to respect a rate limit. We enforce it at the gateway. We don’t ask a database query nicely not to drop a table. We enforce it via perm

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Your "Atomic" Deploys Probably Aren't Atomic

If you're using symlink swaps for zero-downtime deployments, you've probably written something like this: ln -sfn releases/20260112 current Looks atomic. It's not. Run that command through strace: symlink("releases/20260112", "current") = -1 EEXIST unlink("current") = 0 symlink("releases/20260112", "current") = 0 See the problem? Between unlink and symlink, the current symlink doesn't exist. Under load, some percentage of requests hit that gap and get ENOENT. Your "zero-dow

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Why "Ownership" is the Best Certification: Building Infrastructure for an AWS Legend

After 8 years in IT Operations, I made a conscious decision: I’m not just going to "learn" Cloud Security. I’m going to live it. I am currently in the middle of a full career pivot. My days are spent on foundational IT retraining, my nights are dedicated to AWS certifications and Cloud Security. But certificates are just paper if you don't apply them. I promised myself that I wouldn't use this time to just "park" and wait for a degree. I am building a "launchpad". The Project: Building a Home fo

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The Underlying Process of Request Processing

The Underlying Process of Request Processing Beyond Languages and Frameworks Every request your system handles follows the same fundamental process. It doesn't matter if you're writing Java, Rust, or Python. It doesn't matter if you're using Spring, Express, or raw sockets. The underlying process is universal because it mirrors how humans naturally solve problems. When you receive a question, you don't answer immediately. You gather context. You retrieve relevant knowledge. You comb

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Observing Behavioral Anomalies in Web Applications Beyond Signature Scanners

Most web scanners rely on payload signatures and response matching. In practice, I often see cases where the server behaves differently without any explicit error: latency spikes unexpected redirects status changes Signature-based tools usually report these scenarios as “clean”, even though they indicate backend instability or logic issues. The challenge is that these anomalies don’t fit traditional vulnerability categories like SQLi or XSS — they’re about how the system reacts under unusual inp

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Shift-Left Reliability

We've become exceptionally good at incident response. Modern teams restore service quickly, run thoughtful postmortems, and hold themselves accountable through corrective actions. And yet… A team ships a change that passes every test, gets all the required approvals, and still brings down checkout for 47 minutes. The postmortem conclusion? "We should have known our latency SLO was already at 94% before deploying." Many postmortems point to the same root cause: changes we introduced ourselves. No

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Claude Code Must-Haves - January 2026

October 2025, I was facing a change. My Anthropic API costs had grown too high—partly due to my RooCode Agile Software Development Team Framework (a multi-agent system I'd built for AI-assisted development). My boss suggested an alternative: Claude Code with a team subscription. Within days, I had access to an ecosystem that was just beginning to unfold. The first weeks were overwhelming. Claude Code was a moving target: the plugin system launched in October while I was already using it producti

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Clone MedTalk: HIPAA-Ready Video and Chat Consultations in Flutter

Telehealth is transforming the way patients and providers connect, offering faster access to care and reducing barriers caused by distance or scheduling. A critical part of this experience is enabling secure, real-time video consultations alongside features like chat messaging for sharing updates, questions, and follow-ups. With Stream's healthcare chat solution, developers can build HIPAA-ready communication features into their apps. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to clone MedTalk, a telehe

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Building Nature’s View — A Responsive Website Using HTML, CSS & JavaScript

I recently built a project called Nature’s View, a responsive website focused on raising awareness about nature while practicing clean frontend development. The main goal was to build something that looks good on desktop and mobile, without using frameworks — just HTML, CSS Grid, and vanilla JavaScript. Tech Stack HTML5 (semantic layout) CSS Grid & Flexbox Vanilla JavaScript Mobile-responsive design What I Focused On Responsive layout (desktop → mobile) Image slideshow without libraries Theme to

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Why Your Secret Sharing Tool Needs Post-Quantum Cryptography Today

The "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" Threat Quantum computers capable of breaking RSA and ECC encryption don't exist yet. But here's the problem: adversaries are already collecting encrypted data today, planning to decrypt it once quantum computers arrive. For sensitive data that needs to remain confidential for years, this is a real threat. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) uses mathematical problems that are hard for both classical AND quantum computers to solve. In August 2024, NIST standardized

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