Brought travian-elephant-finder, a Node tool that hunts the best oases to raid in Travian, back from three years dead in a weekend with an AI agent. It handled the boring rewrites (dead token scrape to a real login API, report cleanup), but the ideas that actually made it better were still mine. Short honest take on where AI helps and where it does not, with a demo video in the post.
dev.to/tegos/hunting-elephants-again-reviving-a-dead-travian-bot-with-an-ai-agent-4b4l
A year ago I wrote that Laravel Services should be stateless and side-effect free; then I counted mine, and maybe a fifth are. Rewrote the article around the rule that survived: direction decides the layer, not purity, and a Service never dispatches.
dev.to/tegos/laravel-actions-and-services-360d
bcrypt truncates at 72 bytes - not characters. For multi-byte passwords (Cyrillic, emoji), the effective limit is much shorter, and if the cut lands inside a character, the emoji becomes load-bearing: the original password works, but anything that strips it locks the user out. Laravel's built-in validator doesn't catch this.
dev.to/tegos/bcrypt-and-laravel-72-bytes-not-72-characters-3jb1
Built a CLI tool that turns any site's Wayback Machine archive into an MP4 video - one command, years of design history in a scroll animation.
Playwright renders each archived snapshot, aHash deduplicates identical-looking years, ffmpeg stitches it together.
Worth trying if you're curious what your favorite site looked like 15 years ago.
dev.to/tegos/wayback-video-turn-any-sites-history-into-a-video-3542
youtu.be/uMpdUJKFfbo
The Laravel-Lang supply chain attack ran silently at autoload time and stole SSH keys, AWS tokens, and .env files from developer machines - not databases. Wrote up what actually happened and the composer workflow I changed after it (composer audit, jack raise-to-installed, exact version pinning).
dev.to/tegos/composer-update-is-not-safe-anymore-2bcf
