DEV Community: Hemanshu Upadhyay

I have built the same pipeline five times. The fifth took 68 minutes.

Hemanshu Upadhyay — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:22:13 +0000

On 11 June I wrote a program to find contract manufacturers for a supplements brand launching in India. The folder was created at 11:35 in the morning. There was a finished, scored report sitting in it at 13:55. Two hours and twenty minutes, most of which was me arguing with the scoring weights.

Three days later I wanted marketing agencies instead of factories, so I copied the shape and repointed it. 13:47 to 15:56.

On 23 June I wanted packaging and branding studios. That folder did not exist at 10:48 and there was a scored report in it at 11:56. Sixty-eight minutes.

Then one for remote jobs priced in dollars, nineteen commits between 14:19 and 15:15 on a Sunday. Then, on 14 August, one that finds companies who might buy from my own studio.

Underneath, they are the same program. Read a brief. Search. Open the actual pages rather than trusting the search snippet. Score each candidate against the brief. Write out the reasoning for every score. Flag the rows that look thin.

I get asked, in a slightly suspicious tone, why I automate so much of my own work. The assumption inside the question is that this is about speed, and that speed is a shallow thing to want.

Speed is real, and it is the least interesting part.

The machine keeps a file. I don't.

Last week I ran a verification pass over the fifth pipeline, the one that finds my own prospects. It went back through what it had already qualified and opened each company properly.

It disagreed with itself. Of the 58 companies it got through, it disqualified 21. Thirty-six percent.

I published that number, and a few people read it as an argument against building the thing in the first place.

Compare it to the handmade version. Earlier in August I wrote six outreach messages by hand. One company at a time, real research, a specific observation about each business, hours of work across a week. Every one of the six was delivered and read. Zero replied.

Now tell me my error rate on those six.

There isn't one. There is no file. There is no column where a past version of me wrote down what he believed about each company and why, so there is nothing to check the outcome against. All I have is a memory of feeling careful, and feeling careful is not evidence of anything.

That is the whole bias in one line. I would rather run a process that is measurably wrong 36% of the time than one that is unmeasurably wrong by an amount nobody will ever know.

A measured error is a Tuesday afternoon of work. The scoring model was reading "no marketing person listed on the team page" as "no marketing person exists," which is a different claim, and once it is written in a file you can see it and fix it. An unmeasured error is not a bug. It becomes a personality. It sits there for years being called judgement.

Human work does not produce receipts unless you force it to, and almost nobody forces it to. Automating a task is the cheapest way I have found to make my own reasoning legible enough to be proven wrong.

What 68 minutes does to which ideas you try

The second half of the bias is more boring and probably matters more.

The first pipeline cost two hours and twenty minutes. The third cost 68. That collapse changes which ideas are allowed to exist.

When a small system costs a week of evenings, you only build the ones you are already confident about, which means you only ever build things you already believed. When it costs an hour, you build the stupid one. In June I built a thing at one in the morning that takes a photo of a dress and finds similar ones across Indian stores, because my girlfriend asked and it was thirty-four minutes of work. It is running. It is genuinely useful. It would never have survived a business case.

Roughly a third of the ones I built on a whim turned out better than the ones I picked carefully, and I do not think that is luck. Careful selection filters for ideas that are easy to justify in advance, and the value in this stuff is rarely where the justification is.

Where the bias is wrong

I want to be honest about the failure, because the version of this argument without it is marketing.

I sent from the wrong stage. I looked at discovery output that had not been enriched or verified, decided the rows looked right, and sent ten emails. Two hard bounced on a sending domain that was nine days old. You do not get to undo that. The system was not wrong there. I was impatient with a system that was still working, which is a specific failure mode automation creates rather than solves.

And a second thing, which is the real boundary. Two of fourteen prospects died at a layer no pipeline can see: one founder wearing an OpenToWork banner, one correct decision maker with five connections and no posts, ever. Neither is discoverable from company data. No amount of pipeline reaches it.

So the rule I hold now: automate the collection, never the conclusion.

Every one of these five stops before the send. The step that has caught more real problems per minute than anything upstream is me opening one human being's profile and reading it for thirty seconds. That step gets more expensive as everything around it gets cheaper, and it should, because it was always the actual job.

The unglamorous version

I am not biased toward automation because it is impressive. Most of what I have built is a few hundred lines that reads pages and writes a CSV with a reasons column.

I am biased because it turns my opinions into artifacts. An opinion in your head cannot be audited, cannot be handed to someone else, and cannot be wrong out loud. The same opinion written as a scoring function can be all three by lunchtime.

Thirty-six percent wrong and improving beats an unknown number and a good feeling. That is it. That is the whole argument.

An AI Agent Found a Bug Nobody Wrote a Test For

Hemanshu Upadhyay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:48:23 +0000

An AI agent found a bug that let a hotel check a guest into a room someone was already sleeping in.

Nobody wrote that test.

Nobody told it where to look.

We pointed it at the repository and gave it no test plan, no selectors, no "click here, assert that."

It figured the product out on its own.

It read the routes, API modules, services, and database schema, then reconstructed the business workflow:

• Book → Check-in → Night Audit → Checkout
• Group Reservations
• Cancellation → Availability Release

Then it executed those workflows end-to-end.

Not fake data.

Not mocked APIs.

Real reservations.

It verified data on the backend—not just whether the UI looked correct.

It completed 364 steps for $1.79.

And it found a critical production bug:

The check-in endpoint never validated room occupancy.

That isn't a broken button.

That's a guest arriving at 11 PM, walking into an occupied room, and your hotel paying for refunds the next morning.

Why this isn't another "AI testing your app" demo

Most browser agents only know how to click buttons and compare screenshots.

If the UI looks fine, they assume everything is fine.

Real products don't fail that way.

They fail in the gap between what the UI claims happened and what the backend actually persisted.

Our approach changes two things.

1. It reads the code before touching the UI.

Instead of following a human-written script, it derives its own test plan from your routes, services, and schema.

2. It verifies the backend, not just the browser.

It drives the UI with Playwright while validating state through authenticated API calls.

A green toast message isn't enough.

If the reservation wasn't actually saved, the test fails.

Three mistakes we made building it

1. Agents aren't deterministic.

One run found zero bugs.

The next found five.

Same repository.

Same commit.

The solution was to execute flows multiple times and merge the findings.

2. Agents hallucinate.

One run invented an API endpoint, received a 404, and confidently concluded the feature didn't exist.

We fixed that by giving it the application's real endpoint map instead of letting it guess.

3. Agents never know when to stop.

"Please wrap up when you're done."

It ignored us.

103 tool calls later, it was still exploring.

The fix wasn't a better prompt.

It was enforcing hard execution limits inside the tooling itself.

That's the real engineering challenge.

Getting an AI agent to click through a website is a weekend project.

Building one you'd trust to file production bug reports takes months of engineering guardrails.

This doesn't replace your existing test suite.

It finds the failures your test suite was never written to look for.

It's open source under the MIT license.

If you have a product with a real backend and want us to run it against your application, comment "run it" and we'll set one up.

Codedamn is changing the way of Learning how to Code

Hemanshu Upadhyay — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 12:00:39 +0000

Web development is one of the highest paying tech domain in 2022.
And there are many Free and Paid Resources are available around the Internet yet so many Developers/students face issues while learning it, because they realize the coursework for the most of programming Resource/Program is too intense/Unstructured, or they don't get satisfactory outcomes from their learning. but there's Perfect Blend of learning Web development and Getting the results of your learning and that is called Codedamn.

Let’s explore how Codedamn can help you to improve your Learning experience and can make you a better developer.

What is Codedamn?

Codedamn is an interactive learn-to-code platform where you can learn different Technologies and languages with structured Learning path. Codedamn is building the largest interactive coding platform. Learn to code, build projects and deploy apps right from your browser. with Codedamn learn different concepts and test what you learn by practicing it on your browser itself.

Advantages of using Codedamn

There are many Advantages that Codedamn provides you over any other learning platform and here are some Key advantages

Detailed Learning Paths
Codedamn's Playgrounds
Track Your Learning Progress
Learn by building Projects
Community Support

Let’s explore the advantages that Codedamn provides and learn how it makes your learning experience Superior.

1.Detailed Learning Paths

As Previously mentioned there are many Resources for Learning Web development but they are not Well structured. Therefore Codedamn provides you very structured Learning path/Curriculum curated by Experienced developers according to the market demand. Now learn Frontend, Backend or FullStack Development in a structured way and the way it matters most.

2.Codedamn's Playgrounds

Codedamn's Playgrounds enables you to have a real development experience minus the development setup. Playgrounds Is a platform which runs in your browser connected to computers in the cloud.
Codedamn playgrounds helps you to get out of Tutorial hell.
Main objective of Playgrounds is to Code and run your own experiments, try things around and build something new from what you have learnt without ever leaving the Browser.

Playgrounds currently supports these Coding languages.

Html/Css
ReactJs
VueJs
NextJs
Nodejs
Solidity
Python and
Swift

3.Track Your Learning Progress

Web development is very broad and complex topic, for that reason keeping the track of what you have learned is very essential.
Codedamn provides you the Dashboard functionality which assists you to keep track the track of what you have learned till now.
Dashboard helps you to track your learning, Track your Learning activity and set learning target for yourself. so you can achieve your goals more quickly.

4.Learn by building Projects

Building Projects is a practical and hands-on way to reinforce your learnings from learning paths. building the Projects to Enhance your skills to is the best practice you can do. On Codedamn Learn the skills by Building Industry standard projects available in your dashboard with detailed guide to how to get started with your preferred Project.

5.Community Support

Learning Web-development alone is difficult. You might run into some error or might not understand the specific topic, Therefore Codedamn has tightly integrated the learning platform with Codedamn's Discord community of learners and teachers. Codedamn's Discord Community will always be with you in your learning journey.

What The Users Think About the Codedamn

Get Started with Codedamn!

Try out Codedamn today, and enjoy the Learning experience like never before.

Getting Started With Codedamn's Playgrounds

Hemanshu Upadhyay — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:17:47 +0000

About Codedamn🚀 : Codedamn is an interactive learn-to-code platform where you learn by practicing concepts in-browser on real-world dev environments🧑‍💻.

Overview
Ever got stuck in Tutorial Hell??, Most of developers goes through this phase while Initially learning to code. to Get rid of the Tutorial Hell you can use Codedamn's Playgrounds. With the Playgrounds Build Awesome Stuff while Learning how to code without ever leaving your browser.
Playground Is a Platform which runs in your browser connected to computers in the cloud🌩. With the Playgrounds code in React, NodeJs or any popular language while learning with the codedamn's different [learning paths]🤓(https://codedamn.com/learning-paths).

Getting Started With Playgrounds.

Follow these Simple Steps To get started with Playgrounds

1. First Visit the Playgrounds Page by Clicking This link

2. After Clicking the Link Above You will be Redirected to the Playgrounds Home page which Looks like This image💻.

3.Now You can Select any language in which You want to start coding.👀

4.After Selecting your Preferred you will Be Redirected to the IDE in your browser With The All the Dependencies pre-installed for your Selected language.🚀⚛️

5. After Getting into the IDE You can start the coding And changes will be Reflected live into the secondary(browser Screen) Just like your In-Pc ide.🧑‍💻

Note💡 You can also use all the terminal commands in Playgrounds integrated terminal for example npm/yarn commands for installing any third party packages🤩.

That's all you basically Need to Know about Getting started with the Playgrounds, It's as simple as that🙌.
Try it Now

Thanks for Reading this Article..😊