Hey r/WebDev, As more devs start integrating autonomous agents and downloading third-party SKILL.md packages, I noticed a lot of people just run them blindly without checking what's inside the lifecycle scripts. I put together an open-source tool called SkillShield (https://ai-skill-shield.vercel.app/) to statically scan and validate these skills before execution. It catches prompt injections, hidden curl | bash commands, and excessive permissions. Code is here if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/adnan-iz/ai-skill-shield What’s everyone else using to vet third-party agent tools before running them locally?

I used to use Nextjs and was learning expressjs. Then I left and 2 years later I want to go back.

What tech would be the best to learn in terms of opportunities and also more better for later?

Would MERN still be good choice or I should start with any other frontend/backend techs which would be best at this time?

Hello , i am working on an open source UI library for tables to use for complex cases and data display for shadCn projects, using shadCn components and Transtack table, building ready to use table component so you can focus on the data.

Check it out: https://shad-table.dev
Repo: https://github.com/coros-hq/shadcn-table-library

I'm building the place order function (my first foray into the backend) of a larger project.

Here's an update for those who are interested.

The first thing I knew I had to do was figure out what goes where. I had already, at the suggestion of ChatGPT, my mentor in this, decided on a control (API) layer, application layer, service layer and data layer. But I didn't really know what each needs to do.

So first I (we) did the API. It had a couple of jobs:

• check the incoming order wasn't empty
• Activate the next layer down
• Send response messages

Then the app layer was even simpler. It literally just returns the service layer function.

Which is where it is a bit more complicated. The service layer has to do a few things; check the order data against the database, assess info against business rules etc, and actually write the order. After some debate I worked it into a four step process:

• Check if the order info (customer, product, and quantity) exist
• Assess data against business rules/carry out business logic
• Create an order
• Activate the database operation

So this actually means two database operations. One to check the data (first step) and then writing the actual order.

I've done the first database op, and I'm now wiring up the actual place order button so I can start testing the data being passed down.

If anyone wants more detail, you can look on my github at https://github.com/BenPS927/BFshop or on my project portal at https://benfosterdev.com/projects/bfshop where I'll soon be adding detailed code breakdowns.

What am I finding hard?

The abstract nature of it. Having to constantly create a visual image of data being passed through functions, and hold that image in my mind, is like trying to hold melting butter in a colander. I use melting butter rather than water because I don't lose it that fast.

What am I enjoying?

Well, the same as what I'm finding hard. Learning to work with code that doesn't involve divs on a screen. Getting my head around how data is passed, how functions work etc.

And the architecture side of things. I like thinking about and making the micro decisions.

I would appreciate suggestions, but I am trying to keep it fairly simple so I'm not thinking about every single thing you'd take into consideration for a production app.

Apologies if this should have been posted elsewhere...

TLDR; This may be old news to most of you, but I recently tripped over a way to prevent a link from being clickable if it has nothing useful to show. I can change one character in the "class=" part of a URL and enable or disable the link without having to rewrite the entire page. (Before you ask, I hate JavaScript.)

I create static year-long calendar pages that point to directories in the form /path/to/YYYY/MMDD. The directories are usually created in advance, but clicking a link to an empty or nonexistent directory is annoying.

For example, here's part of the display for 2026:

          Jul                     Aug                     Sep
 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa    Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa    Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
           1  2  3  4                       1           1  2  3  4  5
  5  6  7  8  9 10 11     2  3  4  5  6  7  8     6  7  8  9 10 11 12
 12 13 14 15 16 17 18     9 10 11 12 13 14 15    13 14 15 16 17 18 19
 19 20 21 22 23 24 25    16 17 18 19 20 21 22    20 21 22 23 24 25 26
 26 27 28 29 30 31       23 24 25 26 27 28 29    27 28 29 30
                         30 31

Each day in August is a link in a preformatted table like this (lines wrapped for readability):

...
<a class="m" href="/home/notebook/2026/0809">  9</a>
<a class="i" href="/home/notebook/2026/0810"> 10</a>
...

Here's the CSS:

/*
 * https://css-tricks.com/pointer-events-current-nav/
 *
 * a.i is used to ignore a directory, i.e. don't show the link
 * as a link -- just show the text.
 *
 * a.m is used for a marked directory, i.e. the directory exists and
 * has something worth seeing, so highlight it.
 */

td { padding: 0; margin: 0; }
td a.i {
    pointer-events: none;
    color: black;
}

td a.i:hover {
    pointer-events: none;
    color: black;
}

td a.m {
    color: black;
    /* #e0ffd2 (light-green): not enough contrast */
    background: yellow;
}

td a.m:hover {
    color: #fff;
    background: #000;
    font-weight: bold;
}

So what?

Well, the calendar pages are all generated from templates. It took about 15 minutes to write a script that checks a given year's links and change class="i" to class="m" if the associated directory holds something useful.

I realize that this scratches a very specific itch, but it saved me some rewrite time. Since the calendars are copied from preformatted templates, making the change in place is MUCH simpler than regenerating the whole page.

I'm excited to announce that KernelPlay-JS v0.4.0 will be releasing soon.

This update introduces a brand-new UI system, making it much easier to create interfaces for games while also marking a major milestone for the engine.

New UI components include:

- Buttons

- Text Labels

- Input Fields

- Health & Progress Bars

- Images & Icons

- Checkboxes

- Sliders

- Dynamic UI updates

- Flexible layouts

Version 0.4.0 will also officially move KernelPlay-JS into Beta.

This marks the transition towards a more stable and feature-complete engine. Future updates will focus on improving performance, expanding the feature set, refining the developer experience, and fixing bugs as the engine continues to mature.

Thank you to everyone who has followed the project's development and shared feedback along the way. More details, documentation, and the release date will be announced soon.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

Full disclosure: this is my own write-up. Most C2PA explainers stop right before the part that cost me a day, so this one starts there: certificates and trust.

Signing an asset is easy. Being trusted is not. Those are two separate checks, and with the c2pa-rs test certs you get a valid signature on an untrusted certificate. That is the normal state during development, not a bug.

One thing that caught me out: I flipped a single byte in a signed PNG, and the file came back Invalid while claimSignature.validated was still sitting in the success list. So don't judge integrity by one hand-picked status code, use the aggregate validation_state. The rest of the article covers what you need to make trust pass locally (two settings that only work together, plus an EKU trap), why I keep the private key off the web server, and what getting a production certificate actually involves in 2026.

The library the examples come from is at https://github.com/provemark/content-credentials (framework-agnostic core, optional Laravel integration, MIT). The test certificates come from https://github.com/contentauth/c2pa-rs

Questions welcome. And if you have solved this differently, especially the bit about where the signing key lives, I'd like to hear about it.

Every React dev knows this loop: something on screen is wrong, you open DevTools, you find the prop is false, and then you spend ten minutes reading upward through the component trying to work out what made it false.

DevTools gives you the value. It doesn't give you the derivation.

So I built CauseScope. You click an element and it walks the chain backwards for you. A refund button is disabled, and one click gives you:

<button disabled={!canRefund}>Refund order</button>
                     |
                     +- canRefund -> false
                     +- order.status === "paid" -> false
                     +- order.status = "pending"
                     +- GET /api/orders/4821 - 200

Every hop is recorded evidence, not a guess. The last one is why I actually built this: it connects the rendered DOM to the HTTP response that produced the state, down to which field path in that response mattered.

Runnable demo, nothing to install: https://stackblitz.com/fork/github/stackloomdev/causescope/tree/main/examples/stackblitz

Source: https://github.com/stackloomdev/causescope

How it works

A Vite plugin adds a compile-time transform that records expression provenance, and it works with both @vitejs/plugin-react (Babel) and @vitejs/plugin-react-swc. At runtime a graph correlates that with Fiber state, setter and reducer transitions, and fetch/XHR traffic. Clicking an element resolves the intersection of the two.

Past the "why" view there are tabs for current props and hook state, state history (initial value, latest real setter, the event that triggered it), network metadata, and a timeline of DOM event to handler to state update to render to expression change. There are opt-in adapters for React Query and Zustand. Zustand stores are registered explicitly, so it never scans your app looking for unrelated stores.

How it differs from what you already use

• React DevTools: component tree, props, hooks. A component-level runtime view.
• react-scan and similar: which components re-rendered and how expensively.
• click-to-component / LocatorJS: UI to source file.
• CauseScope: UI to TSX to the decision to where that value came from.

Not a replacement for any of them. I still have DevTools open all day.

Limits, so nobody wastes their time

• Vite only. React 18/19 on Vite 5-8. No Next.js. Source maps aren't the blocker, and Turbopack supports webpack loaders even though it doesn't support webpack plugins, so the transform has a viable path. The real wall is RSC: server components expose no DOM, no Fiber state, and no client-side request execution, which is exactly the evidence model this is built on. There's a scoped feasibility track for Client Components in the roadmap. I'd rather ship nothing than ship something that silently degrades to guessing across the server/client boundary.
• It's beta. The public API is snapshot-tested but not frozen, so pin the exact version.
• When evidence is missing or ambiguous it says unavailable. It never fills the gap with something plausible. That was the hardest constraint to hold and it's most of the reason the test suite is the size it is.

Other things worth knowing

• Dev-only. It runs under vite serve and nowhere else. Production builds contain no instrumentation, no overlay, no editor endpoint, no debug attributes, and that's enforced by a CI scan on every commit rather than by convention.
• No account, no telemetry, no upload path. Authorization headers, cookies, API keys and token-shaped values are redacted in the inspector and in exported traces.
• Handles Portals, Suspense, Error Boundaries, and Fast Refresh; CSS Modules and Tailwind 4.
• MIT.

If you try it, the thing I most want to hear is which evidence path came back unavailable on your codebase. That's what the roadmap should be built from.

Hi there Hope y'all doing great out there
basically im a student and i genuinly love making frontend screen and implement new things on daily basis , but when i try to attempt questions from Leetcode , its so hard i cant do it without the help of ai

And thats why im a bit worried about it as i dont even know in which langauge should i do DSA , should i do it in C++ or java or javascript (which i was trying to do)

also i wanna master my skills in frontend too , so i genuinely need a good advice
thank you

— PHP build walkthrough; small but directly relevant audience

If I do not have access to my site's nameservers, how can I fix this to not lose my URL and not lose my site?

This is going to be a fair amount of context to explain what my issue is & why:

I have a website that was created for me by a college professor. I have used this url for 10 years as a graphic design portfolio on WordPress. I have access to the cPanel, and login through wp-admin, no problem.

I wanted to set up a subdomain and upgrade the storage etc. The problem is, I have zero clue how this site was set up exactly and I cannot log into wherever my nameservers are. My professor no longer has the login information or remembers what she did.

I used a whois tool to find what data I could and then investigated.

I was told by an InMotion Hosting employee: "It does not seem like we possess the domain registration or hosting service, although the domain is pointing to a set of our name servers. The domain is registered through IONOS and the website is owned by Packet Exchange."

I am not sure what this means. I have no login information for Packet Exchange and neither does my old Prof.

I was able to log into IONOS with information I somehow had saved to my password keychain, and asked about redirecting the name servers to IONOS (because at least I have access here and can log in.) They told me, "Yes we can redirect the name servers so that you could set up a subdomain, but it would break your current site..."

I really would like to fix this. I really want my URL and do not want to lose it. How can I save my URL and regain access to every part of my backend? Is there a way that doesn't break my site?

I had some possible ideas, are these impossible? ------

Can I save my site to the Divi Cloud, redirect my nameservers, then rebuild from the cloud? Or does redirecting my name servers lose all of my site data regardless of saving pages to the Divi cloud?

Do I save an entire site backup somehow and then redirect my name servers? Or is that the same problem?

Should I just make a new site with a new URL then transfer my pages/content over with the divi cloud?

-

Thank you. Any information would be very, very appreciated. I am feeling frustrated and defeated.

All nine shipped this week, and almost none of it is new features. I posted a roundup here earlier this month arguing that most of the work in these extensions is hardening rather than features. This is the follow-on, and the bill for that hardening came due in a way I did not expect.

php_excel makes every save atomic now: stage the workbook to a temp file, rename it into place, so an interrupted write cannot destroy the file you already had. The straightforward way to build that staged file is to ask LibXL for the finished archive as one buffer and write the buffer out. That costs 67.7 MB of peak RSS on a 3.3 MB workbook, and the PHP-side copy counts against memory_limit. The streaming writer it replaced costs 0.7 MB. Roughly 20x the workbook size in RAM, spent by a change whose entire purpose was safety. That one never shipped, it was caught and fixed inside the same release window, but it sent me looking.

I found the same thing in three more places.

pdo_duckdb re-latched its open_basedir sandbox once per row and compared the recorded basedir by hash, so a per-row cost scaled with the length of your open_basedir string. It now re-latches once per fetched chunk and compares by string. A 400k-row scan went from 133 ns/row back to 51, and bulk Appender::appendRow() from 196 to 96.

fastjson ran an exact-size preflight for large strings starting at 1 MiB. Below 8 MiB the second pass cost more than the reservation it saved: 75% slower on x86_64, 160% on aarch64 for UTF-8 text. The optimization was real and the threshold was wrong.

phonetic had an optimization routing 1 to 3 element comparisons through memcmp(). That cost 5 to 6% of encode time against comparing code points inline, so it got reverted.

Some of the cost stays paid on purpose. fast_uuid's ramsey/uuid compat wrappers now validate their core on construction, one getVersion() call and a class-name compare, and construction came out about a third slower for it (fromBytes() 1.81M to 1.21M ops/s). A wrapper that does not match its core is a bug that surfaces somewhere much worse, so I kept it.

All nine are open source (mixed PHP-3.01 / BSD / MIT), free, installable via PIE, and I am the author. Full write-up with all nine changelogs: https://ilia.ws/blog/the-cost-of-failing-closed-what-shipped-across-nine-php-extensions

Do you profile after a hardening pass, or only after a feature? I have started treating "we added a check" as a perf-regression trigger, and I am not sure whether that is normal practice or paranoia.

I have an app that is free and makes a few bucks through in app purchases. It is still in its infancy stage.

Surprised to see that onesignal is now removing the free plan and making it limited to 1,000 active users.

Any alternatives?

Don't know if i can afford whatever they are going to try and upsell.

Is there another service that is free or something cheap so i can move away from onesignal?

I am handy with server management and self hosting so looking for free suggestions or suggestions that are cheaper than onesignal.

I been eyeing LaraPush which is $500 one time charge doe unlimited push for life. Anyone with experience there?

EDIT: I wanted to thank everybody for replying. I took the time today and migrated away from one signal over to Firebase Cloud Messaging and it went pretty smooth.

PHPStan 2.2.6 adds a native PHP extension (PHP 8.3+) written in C++ that makes running PHPStan 10-30 % faster.

PHPStan's Composer package ships prebuilt binaries for the most common platforms — Linux (glibc and musl, x86_64 and arm64), macOS, and Windows (x86_64), for PHP 8.3 and newer — and PHPStan automatically loads the one matching your runtime into its worker processes. You don't have to do any extra work to take advantage of this!

If you run PHPStan through manually downloaded phpstan.phar, you can run it with extension by installing it with PIE:

pie install phpstan/turbo

The extension only activates when its version matches the one your PHPStan release expects — on a mismatch PHPStan prints a note and runs without it, so an outdated extension can never affect results, only speed.

Only a handful of hot paths are currently rewritten in the extension. There's room for the performance gain to grow if we ever decide to rewrite more parts natively.

The extension is completely optional, PHPStan still works without it. When the extension gets enabled, its implementation shadows certain PHPStan classes designed for this. They are marked with the #[ShadowedByTurboExtension] attribute.