I think LLMs are a gamechanger. I was just talking to a friend of mine, last night, and he pointed out that it would have been quite difficult for a human (on their own) to find the PHP2Shell issue, but he thinks that multiple LLMs probably found it (it seems that some people knew about it before it was initially "discovered").
I think that we, as programmers, need to run LLMs on our own code -no matter what we think of them, for authoring the code- and do everything we can, to batten down the hatches.
There is tons of old software still around you can use your LLM to poke at. You'll see that it was crap too. Software has always sucked, very little of it has been formally verified or built.
I remember accidentally finding buffer overflows in Netware in school but I had no idea what that actually was at the time.
Now imagine you are an inspector. You enter these homes one by one and discover suboptimal electrical wiring, misaligned trimming, nonsensical handle placement, lazy tile jobs, etc.
Is it a problem? Only once it becomes one. There might be 10 things in your house right now that need fixing, but you will probably not become aware of them until they reach a critical point: a leak, a fire, a collapse.
The human body is similar, no? How many ticking health time bombs are you sitting on?
Maybe this is a reminder for you to go get that exam, haha.
Way too many people do the parallel LLM assistance = vibe-coding, opponents call it slop, proponents claim increased productivity. But vibe coding is just one aspect, but to me, analysis is where it shines, at least when quality matters.
We have static analyzers and sanitizers, sometimes fuzzers, which I think are essential to serious development work. Now, I think we can add LLMs to the list.
We blame AI for many evils, like a lack of understanding, code ownership, poor quality output, etc... This is the complete opposite, here the AI is not there to do the thinking for you, instead it says "here look, have your thought about this?", what to do next is up to you, you are in full control of the situation. It also makes development slower instead of faster, again, the opposite of what people claim AI does. But to me, it is the good kind of slow, as in "slow and steady wins the race".
What I’m getting at is that this PHP bug was adorned with marquee lights and sirens and a giant sign saying, “Hey, look here!”
That said, when that code was written 20 years ago they could perhaps be forgiven for this approach to handling OOM. The alternatives apparently come with a pretty decent performance penalty, and culture around memory safety wasn’t as strong then as it is now. But in 2026 there is an argument to be made that exploits are so common and damage potential is so high that we need to take the same mindset that flight control software developers have in their coding standards: some ways of doing things are dangerous enough that simply using them is a defect, even when they work exactly as intended, because they are just too hard to reason about.