WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 147 - It's a wonderful time for 3.1415926…

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

Hello fellow developer, last week we had our WebDev and AI Day and as part of this I moderated an amazing panel with Angie Jones, Kent C Dodds and Liran Tal discussing the impact of AI on developer careers, security of our code and how we learn things. You can watch the video by activating the image below, on YouTube, you can listen to the audio version on our podcast page and we wrote a summary on the magazine.

What's happening in AI

The big news this week is that Github Copilot is now free (with a few limitations), and OpenAI's API users have full access to the new o1 model. Transformers.js is a powerful tool to use AI in the browser, for example to summarise content or remove the background of images. You can learn more about this in the Web AI Summit state of client-side machine learning video and could have seen it at the Webdev and AI day! Other AI bits:

AI can't read tables is an odd reason to refuse a PR adding documentation
Generating worlds explains how to generate 3D world from a single image
How Nightshade works - how to "poison" images to make them unusable for AI
15 times to use AI, and 5 not to

Security and Privacy

Software Development

Douglas Crockford Is Not Your Dad - a post promoting alternative JSON parsers.
The secret life of DNS packets: investigating complex networks.
"Rules" that terminal programs follow to make them useful for everyone.
Storing times for human events is hard - we know, we currently build a new event app!

Tips, Tricks and Tools

fun - a local serverless function λ development runtime.
TypeScript Console - an add-on to browser developer tools to use TS instead of JS
CursorChat Downloader - don't lose your conversations in Cursor.
MarkItDown - convert files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc).

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

Pi is playing Pokémon on Twitch - check it on YouTube.
Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when Pi is not 3.14159…
Git map - see Git as a world of different languages and frameworks.
Scroll marathon - how far can you scroll in 30s? As high as a Giraffe? Or a building?

Career and Culture:

Joan Westenberg doesn't hold back in her modern work sucks essay complaining about us using that many productivity tools that it actually hinders work. It is scary to compare how we work to a 1944 CIA manual on how to sabotage companies to make them less efficient. There is a modern update in case you feel mischievous. More career bits:

Are you looking for opportunities or fancy a change?

Companies to check:

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria