nobody confident in their own abilities is panicking

[drahardja@sfba.social]

@Viss The real victims here are the juniors and people recently entering a new field. LLMs teach you nothing (you have to do the learning yourself, like you always do), yet they give the illusion of productivity. The game is rigged so that junior devs are rewarded for pretending to gain understanding, when all they do is lean on the LLMs and hope they don’t fuck up.

[deedasmi@mastodon.online]

@Viss Hey now, Claude found an SQL injection in my code and I like to think I have a pretty good practice of secure coding.

It thinks the statically typed i32 is an injection vulnerability and wants to fix it with more than a hundred lines of crud because it doesn’t understand how to make parameterized statements in my SQL library. It also made all of that crud public API in ways it could easily be called out of order and make new state issues. But that’s exactly the point.

[thomasareed@infosec.exchange]

@Viss When I got into security something like 15 years ago, it was so different. At that time, in the Mac community, I could make a difference, and do meaningful things. That’s so much harder to do now, with so many stupid, bureaucratic roadblocks, and I’m glad I’m looking at a career in the security industry in the rear view mirror.

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@Viss @cR0w @da_667 People who have contempt for everything outside of their overengineered virtual machine really grind my gears, because when their abstraction inevitably leaks, this sclerotic industry will prevent them from suffering the consequences of their actions. But I ran into people like this ten years ago. LLMs just kicked the dilettantism into hyperdrive.

[catsalad@infosec.exchange]

@Viss "Oh you know IOS? Which one–the fruit or the trash fire?"

[jackeric@beige.party]

@catsalad @Viss @jackryder
obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWFrgjFb56E

[rayendumeldust@sueden.social]

@catsalad @Viss what's my uptime again?

[neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org]

@Viss getting supremely annoyed at that headline and how much bullshit it's carrying

[pseudonym@mastodon.online]

@Viss

Don't hold back Viss. Tell us how you really feel.

But seriously, to the point of the original article, yeah, no.

If I'm being very generous and allow that a "spicy linter" might be a halfway decent SAST (static application security testing) tool, that best case scenario would still be overwhelmed by the new and interesting security bugs introduced by their code generating brethren, "spicy autocomplete."

Full agree with Viss on the main point about folks with deep technical view.

[spinnyspinlock@infosec.exchange]

@Viss on but I will panic, just not for the reasons they think.

[kevingranade@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Viss the people who might be panicking for good reason are software maintainers at companies where thes agents are going to be given free range to fix usually inconsequential yellow flags by inserting reams of unreviewed code.

[shafik@hachyderm.io]

@Viss

apropos

Shafik Yaghmour (@shafik@hachyderm.io)

@carnage4life@mas.to What does it mean to modernize COBOL? The problem of why we have COBOL has nothing to do w/ COBOL itself. It is because there is zero cost incentive to port these core but totally working systems. Changing any of these systems would create way more systematic risk than any value you would gain by replacing the systems themselves. It is the same reason why any legacy system is hard to replace. Same goes for FORTRAN in the science community. Could you replace, yes of course you could. Can you be sure it will replicate all the decades of papers that were written using that software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Does anyone have the incentive or money to figure it out, NO! Why are we listening to any of these people, they are talking nonsense.

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

[viss@mastodon.social]

@kevingranade then the leadership of those companies are going to suffer quite largely when all their engieers quit, and their product catches fire, and all their customers leave.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@shafik there will be, at some point, enough people willing to deal with the pain of moving off ancient stuff like that. it may suck at first, but it will basically have to happen at some point because nobody is exactly teaching fortran and cobol these days, so soon as those engineers age out, the shit becomes egyptian heiroglyphs

[cr0w@infosec.exchange]

@jackryder @Viss @da_667 Part of the problem is how many stakeholders are involved with every decision, including upstream and unaffiliated with your own org. It's maddening and difficult since it's gotten so out of hand.

[shafik@hachyderm.io]

@Viss

It is basically already like that, I think Vernor Vinge got it right. If we are still around ages from now it will be layers and layers of legacy code no one understands all the way down.

It is a very interesting thought process for someone who is in the depths of software development in big tech to really plan out what such a long term migration would look like just for one company. Once you get it, it is very humbling to realize how hard it really is.

[shafik@hachyderm.io]

@Viss

I am also read "Thinking in Systems" and it is a good book to read if you are thinking about this kind of stuff:

Shafik Yaghmour (@shafik@hachyderm.io)

Reading “Thinking in Systems” “Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals” We often get stuck on what is said and forget to look at results. If the results never match what is said then you need to realize maybe what is said is meant to mislead. It could also be lack of skills but that is not much better.

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

[cr0w@infosec.exchange]

@hal_pomeranz @jackryder @Viss @da_667 Fair. We're so far into it that it's almost impossible to fight that one with a reasonable amount of resources. But it's still frustrating. It's the part of the whole "microservices" or "serverless" that I like. You don't have to inherit a bunch of dependencies and vulnerabilities the same way you would if you had to spin up a Windows or RHEL or Ubuntu machine just for your simple needs.

[0xtero@ohai.social]

@Viss oh great, so this hyperactive, severely ADHD, junior intern who requires very detailed instructions to do anything useful and still promptly forgets their own name and what they were doing every 15 minutes is going to replace me?

I'm not panicking. I'm laughing. A lot.

[diazona@techhub.social]

@Viss Yeah, as a security-minded devops engineer, this is dope. (Well, y'know, aside from all the general ethical/environmental/etc. concerns about LLM use.) Having more "eyes" out looking for security vulnerabilities is a good thing, and especially so when one set of "eyes" is biased in a different way than typical human reviewers and thus is well placed to notice some subset of problems that humans would probably miss.

Of course, that only applies as long as it's used sensibly. Which means using LLMs to report issues for human review and validation, not letting an agent loose on a code base with the ability to automatically file security reports for anything it finds. (I have little confidence that the tool will actually be used sensibly in most cases.)