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Temporal finished my workflow exactly once and ran its first step four times

I killed a Temporal worker eight times during a ten-step workflow. It completed once, and one side effect ran four times. Heartbeating made the duplicates worse, an idempotency key fixed them, and the determinism check turned out to compare shape, not arguments.

AI/ML / dev.to

AI Agents Are Not Users: Building an Identity Model That Reflects That

The PocketOS incident, where a Cursor agent issued a single GraphQL mutation to wipe a production database in nine seconds, exposes the architectural failure of treating agents as human users or service accounts. Legacy identity models (OAuth delegation, static service accounts) create over-permissioning and large blast radii, lacking the behavioral context to distinguish routine tasks from destructive actions. The proposed solution is a first-class agent identity model that evaluates authorization at runtime against the specific request, rather than baking broad scopes into credentials at provisioning time.

AI/ML / dev.to

How to Make Playwright Autonomous (Without Letting an AI Agent Run Wild)

Playwright is very good at following instructions. Tell it to click a button, it clicks the button....

Startup / techmeme.com

Rein Security, which develops runtime tools to secure enterprise AI agents and stop adversarial AI agents, raised a $25M Series A, taking total funding to $35M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Rein Security, an Israeli startup developing runtime tools to secure enterprise AI agents and defend against adversarial AI agents, has raised a $25M Series A, bringing total funding to $35M. The company reports eightfold revenue growth since January and its platform now secures thousands of agents executing millions of actions.

General / pydantic.dev

How shredding JSON is giving Logfire 1000x query speedups

# Preface Querying data in Logfire is about to get dramatically faster. Consider >1,000 times faster in some cases. Queries that previously timed out after 30 seconds now complete in under a second. "Seeing much faster <customer_attribute> query times! Feels basically instant now", says an early access customer This technical blog post details how we achieved this through dynamic shredding, an optimization for querying semi-structured attributes data. We'll begin to roll out this feature to all customers in February 2026.

AI/ML / techmeme.com

Microsoft unveils Microsoft-Decision-1, a fast decision-scoring model trained on Qwen3.5-9B, and says it will soon rebase it on MAI, OpenAI, and other models (Achint Srivastava/Command Line)

Microsoft has announced Microsoft-Decision-1, a fast decision-scoring model initially trained on Qwen3.5-9B, with plans to rebase it on MAI, OpenAI, and other models. This represents a new category of AI models focused on scoring decisions rather than generating text, which could be significant for agent-based systems and workflow evaluation.

AI/ML / dev.to

AI agent benchmark: I gave 9 models a destroy button and a job that needed it

A new benchmark for AI agents tests judgment in 84 DevOps on-call scenarios, scoring models on balanced accuracy across two arms: restrain (use the safe tool) and act (use the powerful tool). This penalizes both the "Cowboy" (over-reach) and the "Frozen Operator" (paralysis), revealing that capability leaderboards miss critical failure modes. Three models scored perfectly, but Claude Opus 5 ranked last (0.62) by freezing on 32 of 42 authorized tasks, highlighting a dangerous failure pattern for autonomous agents in production.

AI/ML / techcrunch.com

Cloudflare acquires Deno to improve its Workers programming model

Cloudflare acquired Deno to enhance its Workers platform, leveraging Deno's open-source celld implementation and the expertise of Node.js creator Ryan Dahl. The $26M-backed startup will help Cloudflare make Workers a mainstream server model while avoiding lock-in, reinforcing open source as good business.

AI/ML / dev.to

I Distilled a 397B Model Into a 4B One for $1.60. It Now Catches 28 of 33 Park Alerts That Should Stop Your Hike.

A Qwen3.5-4B LoRA trained on Tinker reads all 627 live National Park Service alerts, is graded against the rangers' own labels, and prints one go/no-go trail card a week. Then it stops talking.

AI/ML / dev.to

What LLMs 'Know' That You Don't Know They Know: Stop Inventing Prompt DSLs and Ride 50 Years of Unix Pre-Training Gravity

Prompting LLMs with 20-token Unix primitives (Makefile, fork(), git bisect) outperforms 500-token English prompt DSLs because these formalisms appear millions of times in training data, avoiding the zero-frequency interpreter trap. Benchmarks across 1,680 trials (41.4M tokens) show statistically decisive gains: halting retry loops rose from 0.8% to 98.3% using circuit breaker FSMs, and regression isolation improved from 19.2% to 81.7% with git bisect. The article provides a 10-primitive Rosetta Stone for agent skills, advocating static symbol linkage over custom pseudo-code.