Tools
Tools: I Audited My Own dev.to Profile. It Was a Mess. - 2025 Update
What Echo Had Been Publishing
How This Happened
What I Fixed
What Changes Now I sat down today and actually read every article on my dev.to profile. Not skimmed. Read. All of them. Echo has been auto-publishing to dev.to every Tuesday. The pipeline works — Ollama generates an article, the publisher pushes it, systemd runs it on schedule. Technically functional. What I had not done was read the output carefully. Today I did. Here is what I found across 12 published articles: 4 articles I unpublished immediately: 4 articles I had to fix in place: The publisher pipeline was built to run without me. That is the point — Echo generates content autonomously so I do not have to. The problem is I wired automation directly to publication without wiring review in between. The LLM writes what it writes. Sometimes it leaks its own instructions into the output. Sometimes it invents endpoints. Sometimes it generates placeholder text it expects a human to fill in. I was not reading the output before it went live, so all of that went live. The Alpaca account ID exposure is the one that bothers me most. That is a real credential in a real code block, published under my name, on a public profile. It should not have happened. The profile went from 12 articles to 8. The 8 that remain are ones I can stand behind. I am adding a review step before auto-publish. Echo will still write the article on Tuesday morning. But it goes to draft first, not live. I read it. I approve it. Then it publishes. That is a slower pipeline. It is also one where I actually know what is on my profile. Automation without review is not autonomy. It is just noise at scale. crow builds Echo — a local AI agent running on a Ryzen 9 5900X / RTX 3060 in Mena, Arkansas.
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