📖 Article 1: Build an AI Agent And Win 💸

As explained by: Unknown Author  |  📅 Published: 2025-07-18T20:23:30Z

🔗 https://dev.to/portia-ai/build-an-ai-agent-and-win-3p3c

💡 Summary

“Everyone’s talking about AI agents. But what can you actually build?”

We (the team at Portia AI) keep hearing this — so we’re turning the question back to the community... and we're offering $$$ to the people who can come up with the best answer!

Announcing The "Agents Showdown"

For the next 4 weeks, we're taking submissions for our first ever online hackathon. Join us for a chance to earn £500

💸 Glory awaits!

Overview

Portia AI is an open source SDK that wants to stand out because it helps AI agents pre-express their planned response to a prompt, share their progress during execution, and solicit human input under defined conditions.

👉🏼 We want to build some cool examples that leverage our differentiators and add them to our examples repo on Github.

The Bounty

The best submission will win a £500 bounty and will be featured on our social channels.

Judging Criteria

Submission should be very current i.e. leverages the latest emerging technologies in AI (MCP, A2A etc). Example: Two Portia agents coordinating their plan runs with each other / kicking off other Portia agents.

Demonstrates Portia’s strong suit e.g. dynamic planning with reinforcement (user-led learning) and / or human-agent interaction (hooks and clarifications). Example: Use hooks to handle profanity, PII leaks, prompt injections and more.

Touches on regulated spaces where mistakes due to agents going off the rails are very costly e.g. healthcare, finance, legal, insurance

Quality of submission (dem...

📖 Article 2: You Don’t Need AI to Automate This

As explained by: Unknown Author  |  📅 Published: 2025-07-18T14:41:57Z

🔗 https://dev.to/snappy_tuts/you-dont-need-ai-to-automate-this-1cfo

💡 Summary

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“AI is overkill for what a script can do.”

In 2025, everyone wants to slap AI on everything—from task managers to to-do apps to “smart” wrappers around GPT. But here’s the punchline:

Most of the automation you need doesn’t require AI.

It just needs a script you wrote once—and forgot.

In this article, we’ll walk through:

🧠 Why AI is not always the smartest choice

⚙️ 5 dead-simple automations you should’ve built already

🛠 Scripts that replace hours of manual effort

🚫 When AI is actually slowing you down

🎁 Bonus: Copy-paste ready examples for devs

🤖 AI Is the New JavaScript: Overused

We’re seeing tools that:

Use ChatGPT to rename files

Use LLMs to format Markdown

Use AI to summarize emails (badly)

Add “AI” to things a bash script did in 2003

The hype is real—but so is the waste.

Before reaching for OpenAI, try opening your terminal.

🛠 What You Actually Need: Scripts

1. Daily GitHub Repo Backup

#!/bin/bash gh repo list your-username --limit 100 | while read -r repo _ ; do git clone --mirror "https://github.com/your-username/ $repo " done

No API keys. No AI. Just safety....

📖 Article 3: Everything You Need to Know About UTCP, the Alternative to MCP That’s Going Viral 🚀

As explained by: Unknown Author  |  📅 Published: 2025-07-18T16:25:11Z

🔗 https://dev.to/juan23/everything-you-need-to-know-about-utcp-the-alternative-to-mcp-thats-going-viral-52op

💡 Summary

TL;DR

UTCP is a zero‑wrapper, direct‑call protocol that lets AI agents talk to any tool (HTTP, gRPC, CLI—even legacy SOAP) without spinning up a proxy server. Think “DNS for tools.” Faster, cheaper, and simpler than Model Context Protocol (MCP).

1️⃣ Why MCP Feels Heavy

The “Wrapper Tax” in 20 seconds

Middleman servers for every tool → more code, infra + latency

for every tool → more code, infra + latency Custom auth / logging / rate‑limits duplicated in each wrapper

Two network hops (Agent ➜ MCP ➜ Tool) = slow

Bigger attack surface & maintenance overhead

2️⃣ UTCP in a Nutshell

Describe once, call direct.

// minimal UTCP manifest { "version" : "1.0" , "tools" : [{ "name" : "get_weather" , "inputs" : { "city" : "string" }, "provider" : { "type" : "http" , "method" : "GET" , "url" : "https://api.weather.example/?city={{city}}" } }] }

Agent downloads the manifest (one GET). Calls the tool’s native endpoint—no proxy, no extra hop. Uses the tool’s existing auth & rate‑limit rules.

3️⃣ Why Devs Love It

Fast list for your boss (or tweet‑thread).

Zero wrapper tax → just ship a JSON file

→ just ship a JSON file Latency‑free — single hop, native protocol

— single hop, native protocol Works with anything : REST, gRPC, WebSocket, CLI, SOAP

: REST, gRPC, WebSocket, CLI, SOAP Plug‑and‑play — copy/paste manifest, you’re done

— copy/paste manifest, you’re done Community‑driven — contributors from MIT, Cambridge & beyond 🌍

4️⃣ Whe...

📖 Article 4: 🎬 Introducing Ravgeek: Dev Concepts in 60 Seconds

As explained by: Unknown Author  |  📅 Published: 2025-07-19T02:41:33Z

🔗 https://dev.to/ravgeetdhillon/introducing-ravgeek-dev-concepts-in-60-seconds-54nj

💡 Summary

After years of writing code, debugging endlessly, and explaining APIs to teammates over coffee, I’ve finally taken the plunge into something new — bite-sized developer explainers on YouTube.

📺 My new channel is called Ravgeek (“t” dropped from my name)— and it's built around a simple idea:

Make technical concepts simple, fun, and fast.

Whether it’s understanding what a REST API is, how Git works, or when to use GraphQL, each video is designed to explain core ideas in under 60 seconds — in a way that’s accessible to beginners and still fun for experienced devs.

Here’s a video in which I explain - “What is prompt engineering”:

You’ll see:

⚡️ Rapid, to-the-point explanations

🎙️ Conversational storytelling (think devs talking over chai)

🎨 Animations, avatars, and a touch of humor

This has been a passion project for me — combining my love for coding, storytelling, and design — and I’m excited to finally share it with the world.

👉 Check out the channel: youtube.com/@ravgeek

💬 And if you like what you see, hit that subscribe button and let me know what topic you'd like me to cover next.

Let’s learn, laugh, and geek out together....

📖 Article 5: Why Your AI Agent Still Feels Like a Toy (And How We're Fixing It)

As explained by: Unknown Author  |  📅 Published: 2025-07-19T09:07:16Z

🔗 https://dev.to/contextspace_/why-your-ai-agent-still-feels-like-a-toy-and-how-were-fixing-it-506j

💡 Summary

I have a confession. For months, I was obsessed with prompt engineering.

I'd spend hours tweaking, rephrasing, and chaining prompts, convinced that the perfect input would unlock my AI agent's potential. But it always felt like I was building a sandcastle. One unexpected wave, a new piece of information, a forgotten detail, and the whole thing would collapse. My agent had amnesia, and my clever prompts were just a band-aid.

If you've been building with LLMs, you've probably felt this too. That nagging feeling that despite their power, our agents are still brittle, forgetful, and disconnected from the real world.

The "Aha!" Moment: It's Not the Prompt, It's the Context

Andrej Karpathy nailed it: “The future isn’t prompt engineering. It’s context engineering.” Then it hit me. We were all staring at the wrong problem. The magic wasn't in the question; it was in the information we provided before the question.

This is the core idea of Context Engineering, a term you're hearing more and more from people like Andrej Karpathy and Tobi Lütke. It’s the delicate art and science of building a rich, dynamic "world" for your AI to operate in, not just giving it better instructions.

Building the Infrastructure We Wished Existed: Context Space

This realization led us to build Context Space. We needed more than just another library; we needed infrastructure.

Context Space is a production-grade, open-source engine that handles all the gnarly parts of context management. It's the missi...

🎯 Final Takeaways

These summaries reflect key insights from the Dev.to community—whether it's cutting-edge tools, practical tips, or emerging AI trends. Explore more, experiment freely, and stay ahead in the world of prompt engineering.