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. soulofmischief · 1790959564 · focus · HN ↗

               I was referring to the amount of people in the future who might be employed at today's engineering wages, and the differential between those people and the average employed engineer today.

               What will that differential be? A large component will be social reinforcement: generational wealth, connectedness, and such. Things like merit might take more of a backseat. So people who do not have the necessary social capital may be fighting each other for very limited amounts of positions.

               That is the steepening of the curve for people like me: I was homeless at 16 and finished high school on my own, was given a full ride to LSU, grants, room and board and a job in the Comp Sci department, but lost all of it after an immature and vindictive high school teacher illegally modified my grade in a core class in order to fuck me over. I didn't have parents to back me up at the school board and make things right.

               Instead I suffered through years of homelessness and had to find my own path into the industry by starting companies with friends and doing all of the engineering. Since then I've led multiple teams, made some connections, shipped a lot of cool stuff and bring to the table a wealth of experience and a generalist skillset that is both wide and deep. Yet, I too wonder where my place in this changing industry will be once things settle a bit. Probably less engineering and more focus on business development.

               The flipside though is as you've said: The fruits of engineering are more accessible than ever to the layman, and individuals can currently possess an unprecedented amount of agency and leverage. I think that is amazing and am fully behind it. I do know that it means the process of renormalization is going to be very rough, given the similarly unprecedented rate of industry change these technologies are bringing.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.