How many of the security issues found were created by LLMs in the first place, though?
This wave is largely bugs found in pre LLM code. I'm sure there will be a smaller wave of bugs from llm code from the sonnet 3.5 - opus 4.7 era, and peeople will always write sloppy code/use dumber models under time or cost pressure, but since Opus 4.8/GPT-5.5 xhigh LLM code stopped being intrinsically worse than human code. At this point if you're shipping llm code that's lower quality than human code that's either because you don't have the money to spend on frontier models or because you actively choose a lower quality standard because of either various pressures or just not caring. if it's the latter your human code under those same conditions would also be really bad.
Astra writes a lot of security bugs too, the upside is that if you also use it to review the output it will find a lot (most?) of them.
This is one of the least talked about and most useful features in any harness I would say, the review feature. I have never not found issues (either security or implementation) running it, no matter the code base or language.
My job is seeing a similar deluge of security work and >90% of the bugs have been in pre-2024 code, and zero of them have been bugs introduced after we were first officially allowed to use LLM codegen.
Considering the software is much older than LLMs. Not many.
Also, in the article they mention a significant number of patches for older versions as well.
Software is incredibly complicated. When you get into areas like security and networking and the internet its even more complicated. We rely on layers upon layers of software and hoping they are all done perfectly with no issues. The amount of junior devs, or outsourced devs for $10 an hour working on security relevant code is very very high, and always has been. LLMs if used correctly should be raising the floor.
This wave is largely bugs found in pre LLM code. I'm sure there will be a smaller wave of bugs from llm code from the sonnet 3.5 - opus 4.7 era, and peeople will always write sloppy code/use dumber models under time or cost pressure, but since Opus 4.8/GPT-5.5 xhigh LLM code stopped being intrinsically worse than human code. At this point shipping llm code that's lower
An uncomfortable truth about the era of LLM code is that machine produced code is, on average, quite a bit more secure than human code.
Unsurprising to those of us that has been screaming from the rooftops that human code reviews were barely catching anything in your typical corporate environment. The majority of the value was pointing out missing tests, because breaking bugs got past human eyeballs on a regular basis, even in very good companies.
It's not that the LLM code is that great, but that many overestimated the human code and the human review.
I think it's more likely to be the same as average human-written code; which is what they were trained on, after all.
No it's far beyond average human code, and it's trained in RL environments on synthetic data etc now. The average human can't solve a millenium problem in mathematics but the LLMs are able to now. Anything with a verifiable output can be RLed on to make llms superhuman it seems, and the average human is not as persistent and thorough as e.g. gpt 6.1 sol at checking every edge case and hunting for bugs because that behavior is something that's just trained into the model. Frontier models perform farm above the average human at the categories of tasks they are RLed on like code and math.
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yet LLMs dont do off-by-one errors, typos mixing up variable names, interesting they seem unable to learn these human patterns
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Do you mean "created" as in LLMs were used to discover existing vulnerabilities, or as in LLMs wrote unsecure code? If it's the latter, then the answer probably is "very few". Frontier models have been better than the average programmer at writing secure code that follows up-to-date best-practices for some time now.