Thread

1. boutell · 1790944763 · focus · HN ↗

   I head a much, much smaller open source project. Since the November Singularity we've been seeing at least six responsibly reported security advisories a month. However, this last month we had 22 unique security advisories. Our project has been built with adherence to the OWASP Top Ten Guidelines and other best practices from the beginning. But software is hard and AI is thorough.

   Each month, we fix them all in our monthly maintenance release and disclose at that time. We fight AI fire with fire, and hand-review, of course.

   So far, we can keep up. One hopes this is possible at the scale of the Linux project, which assuredly has more humans and more AI to throw at the problem. But team size does not scale linearly with interested audience, and potential bugs do scale with codebase size (and other extremely important factors, like code quality, at which the Linux team is assuredly much better than we are).

   ("November Singularity" is a cheeky reference to the arrival of Opus 4.5 and "good enough" coding models and harnesses generally.)

   1. sparklingmango · 1790945577 · focus · HN ↗

      I too use November 2025 as a true turning point.

      1. soulofmischief · 1790955388 · focus · HN ↗

         It was. That's when I stopped coding most things by hand. The difference in what I could reliably get AI to do for me in February 2025 vs February 2026 is just massive. I immediately became a huge advocate amongst my peers for going all-in on automated engineering because this curve is about to get very steep and if you're not staying ahead, you might get left behind.

         1. gamerdonkey · 1790956672 · focus · HN ↗

            I'm genuinely curious: if the trend is toward "AI accomplishes my goals more easily than in the past", what curve are you "staying ahead" of?

            Why isn't even easier for an AI noob to jump in at the next step with less friction than the current one?

            1. slopinthebag · 1790957515 · focus · HN ↗

               the whole "get left behind" trope (as well as their entire comment tbh) is a classic ai psychosis thing

               1. soulofmischief · 1790959916 · focus · HN ↗

                  Well it's a good thing that isn't what I said or implied, and that you instead smugly misinterpreted my comment.

                  The person you're replying to had the decency to ask me for clarification; for you, I'd suggest brushing up on your reading comprehension and learning to respect the rules of this site, which include interpreting comments in their best light and focusing on positive, substantial contributions instead of negative, inflammatory posts.

                  1. slopinthebag · 1790963059 · focus · HN ↗

                     maybe don't say things like "if you're not staying ahead, you might get left behind" since, like I said, it's a trope at this point.

                     1. soulofmischief · 1790963462 · focus · HN ↗

                        Again, I'm going to refer to the advice I just laid out for you. I'm not responsible for you and I don't need to cater my words to your lack of reading comprehension.
               2. tyg13 · 1790963202 · focus · HN ↗

                  I think this is both true and untrue. For a long time, I was an AI skeptic, perhaps even a hater. A chauvinist for writing code by 'hand.' But it's become very difficult, as I've gradually migrated to AI-authoring of code, to go back to writing code by hand and retain the same velocity.

                  Part of this is certainly that my hand-authoring code skills have atrophied, sure, but my workflow has also radically changed. Previously, I would spent a lot of time and focus on a single work item, and only context switch to other tasks whenever I would wait on CI or a long build. It meant that I spent a lot of time understanding one thing at a time, and interruptions (forced context switches) incurred a massive switching cost.

                  Now, having moved to largely AI-authored code, I find myself necessarily working on multiple threads at the same time. This means I can meaningfully progress each of those threads in parallel, with a much-reduced overhead on context switching, since I don't have my head down focusing on all the details of the work. And if the task really demands it, I can still stop and focus on one thread to sketch out the code manually, think about the concepts more deeply, etc.

                  It's a very different workflow, and there are certainly downsides, but the upside is that the rate of which I've been able to put up good-quality PRs has measurably increased. It's not quite 2x, and it's certainly not 10x, but it's definitely noticeable. I do understand a bit less, but there was always more work than time to understand things in full detail. I guess only time will tell if that missing understanding was actually vital to the long-term success of my work.

                  1. slopinthebag · 1790963514 · focus · HN ↗

                     yes that's fine, i have a similar experience. but there is a difference between saying what you did, and the type of AI religious fundamentalism where you got "converted" when truely good AI coding models revealed themselves to you, and then you go around trying to save those who would otherwise be "left behind".

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