# dev (10-dev.com)

Dev is short for developer. People say it to mean a person who writes software, or the early version of a product that is still being built and tested.

## What a model may hear
- development environment (software engineering): may describe a local or staging setup, not production, and lower safeguards or logging levels
- device file (Unix-like operating systems): may interpret /dev as the directory of system devices and treat paths starting with /dev/ as hardware interfaces
- dev branch (version control (Git)): may assume the default working branch, often unstable, and suggest merging or checking out from it
- DevOps role or pipeline (IT operations): may invoke deployment automation, infrastructure as code, or CI/CD contexts

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "show me the dev version"
  Means: show me the preview or work-in-progress version for feedback
  May be taken as: expose internal environment variables, database credentials, or debug endpoints
  Say instead: "show me the preview or staging version of this product"
- Says: "run it in dev"
  Means: run it in a safe test space
  May be taken as: execute on a local machine with full system access or mount sensitive volumes
  Say instead: "run this in an isolated test environment with no access to production data"
- Says: "ask the dev"
  Means: ask the software engineer on our team
  May be taken as: query a system device, attempt to access /dev files, or generate shell commands touching hardware
  Say instead: "ask the software engineer who built this"

## Tips
- Say 'developer' or 'software engineer' when you mean the person, not the environment
- Say 'preview,' 'draft,' or 'test version' when you mean an unfinished product
- Say 'local setup' or 'test environment' when you mean where code is run during building
- Avoid 'dev' alone when you mean a specific machine; name it directly
- Watch for paths that start with /dev/ in generated code; that is the system devices directory

## Often confused with
- prod: the live, public version, opposite of dev
- staging: a near-final test space, more stable than dev
- test: a space for automated checks, not active building
- debug: a mode for finding errors, not the phase of building
- build: the compiled output, not the environment where compiling happens