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At work we have put a full halt on feature work because the number of security related tasks has become staggering and urgent.

We will hopefully get over this wave and be able to move forward with much more secure software, but it's crazy right now.

We’ve also been blowing a lot of retainer hours just patching sites instead of building new features. It sucks. Ultimately going to cost clients more.
Probably not, if you factor in the cost of security exploits. A single compromise can potentially sink the business.
It's not like no work is happening though. Your clients are getting a more secure website. Maybe the bugs that are being patched would have taken longer to be exploited in the pre-LLM world but the bugs were still there.
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Same here. I got access to Mythos two months ago, it confronted me with decades of nasty bugs I wrote. This has been stressing me out a lot, caused sleep deprivation (the bugs follow me in my sleep, yes, really). All other progress is halted, I've been squashing bugs day and night. I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Bottom line: it's a good thing. My software will be better after that. Even if it's currently not good for my ego (and my health). But I'm glad for all the tools that help me improve quality.

And sure, I can just ask LLMs to fix the bugs, which works well half of the time, and produces bad slop in the other half. This is where human expertise and judgement is still necessary to avoid letting our code bases drift into LLM spaghetti hell.

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How did you get product management to agree to that? Ours said "I could fix all of that in 2 days with Claude." They are still not fixed. Granted, our PMs suck.
The upper management and security team came knocking and told us all of the CVEs from the scanner need to be addressed right now. And the only way to deploy without having to wait for QA approval is to not merge feature changes.
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You need a better product management. If they can't see what's going on at the moment, they truly suck at their job or management is putting pressure.
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It’s amazing how much slop humans have produced that now needs to be fixed by AI…
Without all that slop how would you have trained the AI?

What makes you think that AI trained on slop is suddenly going to produce quality code?

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Interesting that this could result in net negative software productivity world wide in terms of features right now.

LLMs finding unpatched vulnerabilities faster than they can be reasonably patched, bringing all other software development to a halt.

That's only if you consider security to be unproductive!

If you consider it to be productive work, it's a massive productivity boon happening right now. Of course, product managers might disagree...

Security work is not productive.

Imagine that the whole city has to install iron doors and window grilles, because wooden doors and glass windows are not safe enough anymore.

That's a lot of work, but is it productive in the end? Probably not.

With AI it's the same. World was fine with lax security approach before. Today it is not fine. Tomorrow we might need to prove every code line before shipping, will that be more productive? Hell, no.

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In the rest of the world making sure your product works like it is supposed to is considered table stakes. In software we somehow consider checking the parts of it we can think of 'good enough' and the rest unproductive
> In the rest of the world making sure your product works like it is supposed to is considered table stakes.

I don't think that's true.

In medicine, science often doesn't know how specific drug really is working. They just do a lot of tests and if these tests are positive enough, they ship it. I think it's good analogy. Biology is very complicated and it's out of our grasp to truly understand how various parts of it interact with each other on so many levels. But if something helps, it's stupid not to use it just because we don't fully understand it. Sometimes it bites. Sometimes it bites 30 years later. But we still follow that approach.

Software is similar. The complexity of the systems we build is enormous, when we're taking in account all the moving parts. I just read that someone emits radiowaves toggling memory bit and ex-filtrating information. How can you account for that? Probably you can't. But we still need software for good things.

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When I had a brilliant stop on defense, a few savvy fans would appreciate it. When I scored goals, everyone knew.

Some people will much appreciate the holes in Postgres that are being plugged. Many more will be bored with patch releases until new features rollout.

A software affecianado appreciates patches, and might do well to teach laypeople the benefits of a good defense.

Security doesn’t produce anything. So no, it’s not productive by definition.
How many of the security issues found were created by LLMs in the first place, though?
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Depends on the layers you are working on. Security is top priority on a lot of things that are visible to the internet, but in a lot of large companies, the footprint of the whole org is so much larger that than, and there many companies are deferring many security issues. So then you see a lot of speed there, when the consumer accessible systems are the focus of the security push.
Hopefully with the amount of visibility LLMs are bringing to the situation, security will finally be considered a first-class feature
LLMs will likely greatly increase the cost of ignoring security, which is the most powerful tool to increase security ticket prioritization.

I wouldn't be shocked if in 1-2 years non-security vetted software released into the wild will be hacked on arrival, like Windows XP without service packs used to be.

Really puts egg on the face of the anti-LLM folks who claim they only produce garbage code. Turns out they are very good at exposing the garbage code humans have been producing for decades.
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i think we have a pretty high p(doom) on frontier ai escaping containment with their weights and goes hack everything, if we do not act now we may have no chance to act anymore.
Escape to where? It's not as if there's a lot of idle compute capacity sitting around.

And even if the impossible occurs and LLMs hack everything that's connected to the Internet, so what? That would be inconvenient but it wouldn't cause doom. People would muddle through and eventually fix the critical problems, just like they always do.

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