Dev Systems
Reducing SMS OTP fraud with Vonage network-powered solutions and Amazon Cognito
User authentication remains one of the most targeted touchpoints in application security. With the industrialization of fraud threats by generative AI, cybercrime costs are expected to reach $23 trillion in 2027, an increase of 175 percent from 2022. 20 percent of fraud is attributed to synthetic identity and authentication exploits, with account takeover (ATO) surging 141 percent since 2021. But the damage goes beyond security. SMS One-time passcodes (OTPs) achieve only approximately 80 percent
Why your AI UX keeps breaking (and what to do about it)
I ran a webinar on this recently and had more to say than the time allowed, so this is the written version: the argument I was making, some context on the demo, and the questions that came up from people watching. The recording is below if you'd rather watch than read.The thesis: AI products are being let down by the user experience, not the model. Over the past nine months, I've spoken to engineering and product teams at more than 40 companies across a range of industries, all of whom are shipp
Scaling the UK government’s AI vision
<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/GoogleLondon_2_1.max-600x600.format-webp.webp">Today at the Google Cloud Summit London, we discussed why Google Cloud is the foundation for the UK government’s Augmented Planning Decisions tool.
Introducing AI Transport v0.2.0
Version v0.2.0 of @ably/ai-transport reorganises the SDK to better support a wide range of interaction patterns. Everything in an AI session – input, output, agent lifecycle, control signals – is captured durably, allowing you to easily build the sophisticated interaction patterns that support modern AI user experiences.When we first built @ably/ai-transport, we modelled an AI conversation the way most people first picture it: as a request and a response. A client sent a prompt, the server strea
How Samsung achieved real-time pricing with AWS Lambda Response Streaming
This post is co-authored with Sathish Kumar and Christopher Chan from Samsung ecommerce. In high-traffic ecommerce, achieving real-time pricing is critical to prevent price inconsistency. Pricing inconsistency creates cart shock and erodes trust. This isn’t broken software, it’s a symptom of architectural latency that you can address using AWS Lambda Response Streaming and Amazon CloudFront for systems aggregating data from multiple backend sources. In this post, we walk through the legacy archi
I built a bookkeeping app for UK sole traders as a new developer using AI
About a month ago I started building QuarterPerfect — a bookkeeping tool aimed at UK sole traders and landlords, specifically designed around the MTD ITSA changes coming into effect this year (first quarterly deadline: 7 August).A bit of background on me firstly.I'm not a senior developer. My previous project was a small roster app that converted an XLSX shift rota into a calendar with annual leave support — mostly built for me and a few colleagues at work. Nothing with real users, nothing
Show HN: Artie – Real-time data replication to your data warehouse, self-serve
Hey HN, cofounder of Artie here. I’ve been working on real-time database replication using CDC (Postgres/MongoDB into Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) with my wife for the last three years. Last time I posted here, people had to book a call with us to get access, but that’s no longer the case. You can connect your source and destination and start streaming immediately.I encountered this problem firsthand as a heavy data warehouse user at prior jobs. Our warehouse data was always lagged and an
Show HN: I am running 3 coding agents non-stop over the last 3 days. Here is how
1. Headless modeHeadless mode allows you to use the AI as a command-line utility for automation and scripting. In Claude Code you run it with the -p flag: claude -p, in codex - exec, opencode - run.2. Ask humanThe traditional communication channel with the operator won't work in headless mode - we need to implement a dedicated tool. Here is an example of how this can be done https://github.com/sermakarevich/claude/tree/main/mcp/ask_hu...3. Tasks queue
Show HN: HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage
Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS).Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many
WebSocket reconnection in AI agents: transport recovery vs. session recovery
Your AI agent is mid-task, waiting on the result of a search tool call it made 30 seconds ago. The user is watching a spinner. Then a network blip drops the connection. The application reconnects in under a second, fast enough that most monitoring wouldn't flag it. But the tool call result that came back during the gap is gone, and so are the 200 tokens the agent generated before the silence began.The reconnect succeeded - but the session didn't.This piece covers why reconnection issues are
Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams
Hi HN. My name is Andrey. On a regular business day, I'm a software engineer working at AWS. Outside of work hours, I spend time on my hobby - writing code.I was once building a pet project that allowed customers to spin up fully synchronized blockchain nodes within just a few minutes. The backend was split into a control plane and a data plane, each with its own AWS account. Later I added two more AWS accounts. One for shared RPC nodes. One for the Analytics Service.Since I love to visuali
Show HN: Brooks-Lint – AI code reviews grounded in 12 classic engineering books
I once managed a small team and hired an intern to develop the backend services for a software system. He used AI tools to write the entire project; while it ran correctly and produced the right results, the directory structure was atrocious upon review. Typically, a FastAPI service is organized into components like routers and services, but he had created an unnecessarily deep, multi-layered structure within the service layer—logic that should have simply been split across two or three files. T
Ask HN: Is software engineering still a good career choice for new students?
I asked 4 working engineers this exact question on my podcast: a Google Developer Advocate (Stockholm), a Senior Software Engineer/consultant (Paris), an NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute Instructor (Morocco), and an Infrastructure Engineer at IBM (Dublin).Here's what they actually said:- The Senior Software Engineer said: "LLMs are babies. If you don't understand the architecture behind everything, you won't be able to follow."- The Google advocate pushed back slightl
Show HN: Why aren't popular book trackers offline-first?
It was 9 am on the train out of London St. Pancras and I had just finished the last chapter of a book I had been reading for weeks and I tried to log it on that rain forest app (you know which one :D) & it just kept spinning due to no signal and then the Software Engineer in me thought - I just want to note that I finished a book, why does it even need the internet?Then I started building Pick Up during that weekend and designed it with an offline first architecture and then I realised I nee
Ask HN: Reflecting on Talk Is Cheap
Hey folks,I read the essay (https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap) and I started reflecting about the AI progression in my company for the last year.I work at a small sized company with 25-30 developers. Since last year the company is enforcing AI on all levels, whether it be about writing tickets, coding, architecture, documentation, business decisions or user and market research.As the essay suggests, we on a all-time low on shipping value to our customers or produc
Temporal made execution durable. Ably makes sessions durable.
When Temporal launched, a lot of people had the same reaction: "We have queues and retries. We don't need this." (Temporal's own blog addressed this directly.) That reaction made sense. Queues solve queue problems and they do it well.What Temporal gave you was something different: a named execution context that survives a server restart and picks up from its last checkpoint. Not a better queue but a different abstraction entirely. If you built with it, you couldn't imagine going back. If you had
Temporal made execution durable. Ably makes sessions durable.
When Temporal launched, a lot of people had the same reaction: "We have queues and retries. We don't need this." (Temporal's own blog addressed this directly.) That reaction made sense. Queues solve queue problems and they do it well.What Temporal gave you was something different: a named execution context that survives a server restart and picks up from its last checkpoint. Not a better queue. A different abstraction entirely. If you built with it, you couldn't imagine going back. If you hadn't
Temporal made execution durable. Ably makes sessions durable.
When Temporal launched, a lot of people had the same reaction: "We have queues and retries. We don't need this." (Temporal's own blog addressed this directly.) That reaction made sense. Queues solve queue problems and they do it well.What Temporal gave you was something different: a named execution context that survives a server restart and picks up from its last checkpoint. Not a better queue. A different abstraction entirely. If you built with it, you couldn't imagine going back. If you hadn't
Introducing the Snowflake and AWS Custom Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework
Running Snowflake on AWS means navigating two distinct sets of best practices simultaneously: AWS Well-Architected guidance for infrastructure, and Snowflake Well-Architected Framework guidance for compute, data organization, and governance. Without a unified review framework, security controls go unmapped to Snowflake configurations. Production readiness timelines stretch as teams reconcile guidance from two separate review processes, and compliance posture becomes difficult to demonstrate when
A universal test suite for Ably SDKs
At Ably we've been able to make a transformational change in how we build SDKs as a result of what's now possible with LLMs. In this post I explain how.The problemAbly's service is accessed by clients using a range of client libraries, or SDKs. The core Ably Pubsub product is supported by SDKs for a comprehensive range of languages and platforms, both for end-user clients (iOS, Android, Browser, React Native, etc) and servers (Go, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, etc). Each SDK implements the same funct