u/dzimazilla

I thought nullable DTO fields were enough for PATCH.

My rule was simple: if a field is missing or null, treat both the same. Client sends only what it wants to update.

That worked until it didn’t

We accidentally wiped a production value because the client updated one field and omitted another intentionally. :(

After deserialization, I couldn’t distinguish “not sent” from “explicit null,” so my code cleared a field that should have stayed untouched. So we had to roll back. No problem

I am looking at a few alternatives like nullable fields, explicit field_present flags, JSON Patch, and wrapper types that preserve field presence.

Curious how other people handle “missing vs null” in PATCH without making the client payload ugly?

It actually looks a lot like WordPress dev Sound wrong but just think about it We spent years chasing clean code: typed stuff, pure functions, neat modules etc

AI dev is kinda the opposite. It's messy. You chain tools that you don't fully control, deal with random APIs, webhooks from everywhere, stuff breaks, you patch it. The one real question is: does it work together and how long?

That's basically Wordpress!!!!

Foe years dev people lookd down on WP devs for doing "glue work"... Turns out...that was the future.

Plugins = tool orchestration APIs = llm comnnectors Hooks = event-driven pipelines Multiple vendors =multi-agent chaos Same Same Same Same mindset! Same instincts! Same tolerance for messy things. Framework engineers aren't bad at this, just not used to it.

The dev who wins in AI era isn't the cleanest coder. It is the one who is okay making broken things talk to each other until they kinda work

and yeah, I'll probably get killed on this hill today :-)

I bet half of montreal's uber/lyft taxis are just guys who paid 200 cad to use bus/taxi lane during rush hour. That's not a taxi business, that's commute hack

hahaha, 200 and you got a TRPA permit (yellow shiny sign).

Honestly suprized more people haven't caught on. the lanes are half-empty anyway and Montreal has bigger enforcement problems to deal with

also heard somewhere that a budget airline CEO who registered a taxi company to use a reserved bus corridor.