If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
It’s amazing how half the developers on earth live on a completely different planet now. There are plenty of new challenges, sure but we are far past the point where we can have a debate about “is it useful?”
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
The question most of us are asking isn’t “is it useful”, but “is it worth it”. Engaging with these tools involves no small amount of self-debasement and long term degradation of skills; do I want to sacrifice myself on the altar of productivity?
For me the answer is still absolutely resolutely “no”.
You're not an outlier. The anti-AI stance is likely to be vocal online. They're quite incentivised to talk about it. Most programmers have adopted AI assisted programming (my own assertion) and most will feel like you and I, that it is useful. I know of a few programmers personally who hate it, but even they use it. There is no going back.
It is pretty obvious that when you come into a large incomprehensible codebase (which most are), AI will be able to reason about it more quickly and guide you through it.
I switched away from my work for a few minutes, but at the very moment I'm using AI to summarise some spaghetti code in a particular area in our codebase, so I can refactor it.
And that is my style of working at the moment. AI coding is useful, sometimes amazing, but sometimes irritating, and from experience I think just telling it to refactor this area would result in something I'm not happy with. So instead I'm getting a handle on it, I'll form the design I want, then tell it to do it. I have a feeling a lot of complaints are from people who won't bother to do that.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
jeremyjh · · focus · HN ↗
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
vermilingua · · focus · HN ↗
For me the answer is still absolutely resolutely “no”.
akerl_ · · focus · HN ↗
Why is using AI tools self-debasing or degrading?
timacles · · focus · HN ↗
almost every developer i know is fully aware, we are degrading every aspect of our skills.
The code writing, code reviewing, code understanding.
The more "time" passes and the more the code base grows, the more disconnected we become.
akerl_ · · focus · HN ↗
AI has radically improved my ability to parse and understand new codebases, to validate my hypotheses, and to work in complex systems.
I wish I knew what I was doing differently than almost every developer.
munksbeer · · focus · HN ↗
It is pretty obvious that when you come into a large incomprehensible codebase (which most are), AI will be able to reason about it more quickly and guide you through it.
I switched away from my work for a few minutes, but at the very moment I'm using AI to summarise some spaghetti code in a particular area in our codebase, so I can refactor it.
And that is my style of working at the moment. AI coding is useful, sometimes amazing, but sometimes irritating, and from experience I think just telling it to refactor this area would result in something I'm not happy with. So instead I'm getting a handle on it, I'll form the design I want, then tell it to do it. I have a feeling a lot of complaints are from people who won't bother to do that.