{
  "id": 2279373,
  "title": "Four words of Python killed every sentence after first",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/21/four-words-of-python-killed-every-sentence-after-first",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-21T01:54:55.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/mycmdhub/four-words-of-python-killed-every-sentence-after-first-18pd"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The DEV Summer Bug Smash challenge featured a bug report stating that an AI receptionist connected to a landline call, greeted callers, but then stopped responding entirely. The agent appeared to be listening but was effectively disconnected. The bug persisted every time without any errors or alerts. The issue was traced to Python code within a WebSocket request handling function that contained a single finally clause. This clause marked the connection as disconnected every time the loop was broken out of, even if the connection was still healthy. The fix was to move the cleanup step to when the connection genuinely ended rather than relying on a consumer's decision to stop iterating. A better approach would be to stop depending on artificial tests and instead implement direct communication with the provider using a standalone script that sends real prompts and prints all messages received, bypassing any internal parsing or interpretation that could introduce bugs.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . The bug report was: \"it says hello, then it goes deaf.\" My AI receptionist answers a real landline. Caller dials, agent greets them properly, caller says \"hi, I'd like to check my booking\" and then nothing. Forever ♾️. The call stays connected. No error, no exception, no warning. The WebSocket to our speech…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}