mdeeks
10 hours ago
You can get a taste of this today yourself with Codex Security. I turned it on just as an experiment and in less than a week it has now become essential to all of us. I was shocked how accurate it is, how many security issues it found in existing code, how it continually finds them as we commit, and how NO ONE is immune from making these mistakes.
I'd say it is about 90% accurate for us. Often even the "Low" findings lead us to dig and realize it is actually exploitable. Everyone makes these mistakes, from the most junior to the most senior. They are just a class of bugs after all.
I expect tools like this to be a regular part of the development lifecycle from here on. We code with AI, we review with AI, we search for vulns with AI. Even if it isn't perfect, it is easily worth the cost IMHO. Highly recommend you get something enabled for your own repos ASAP
winstonwinston
9 hours ago
> I expect tools like this to be a regular part of the development lifecycle from here on. We code with AI, we review with AI, we search for vulns with AI. Even if it isn't perfect, it is easily worth the cost IMHO.
So, how is that supposed to work? Claude Code generates security bugs, then Claude Security finds them, then Claude Code generate fix, spend tokens, profit?
ygjb
9 hours ago
Yeah, with a budget assigned. This is actually just software development and security right?
Developers create software, which has bugs. Users (including bad guys, pen testers, QA folks, automated scans etc, etc, etc) find bugs, including security bugs, Developers fix bugs and maybe make more. It's an OODA loop, and continues until the developers decide to stop supporting the software.
Whether that fits into the business model, or the value proposition of spending tokens instead of engineer hours or user hours is fundamentally a risk management decision and whether or not the developer (whether OSS contributor, employee, business owner, etc) wants to invest their resources into maintaining the project.
While not evenly distributed, and not perfect, the currently available and behind embargoed tools are absolutely impactful, and yes, they are expensive to operate right now - it may not always be the case, but the "Attacks always get better" adage applies here. The models will get cheaper to run, and if you don't want to pay for engineers or reward volunteers to do the work, then you've got to pay for tokens, or spend some other resource to get the work done.
sandeepkd
9 hours ago
Somehow this reminded me of the historical efforts of some government bounty collections for mouse tails which were discontinued due to fraud (such as hunters breeding mice to collect the reward). There is a reason why/how devs and QA keep each other in check. Guess in case of LLM writing code, one has to use different models for dev and security checks.
On other hand, in real world, the developers learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future. However there is no feedback loop with enterprises using LLM with the agreement that the LLM would not use the enterprise code for training purposes
ygjb
9 hours ago
> the developers learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future
No. Humans learn from mistakes and try to avoid them in the future, but there is a whole pile of other stuff in the bag of neurons between our ears that prevent us from avoiding repetition of errors.
I have seen extremely talented engineers write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about the problem they were trying to solve, and not the pitfalls they could fall into. I would argue that the vast majority of software defects in released code are written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to the problem they were trying to solve, or was for an edge case that was not considered in the requirements.
Unless you are writing a software component specifically to be resilient against memory corruption, preventing memory corruption issues aren't top of mind when writing code, and that is ok since humans, like the machines we build, have a limit to the amount of context/content/problem space that we can hold and evaluate at once.
Separately, you don't necessarily need to use different models to generate code vs conduct security checks, but you should be using different prompts, steering, specs, skills and agents for the two tasks because of how the model and agents interpret the instructions given.
mncharity
4 hours ago
> write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about [something else] [...] defects [...] written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to [their focus]
For whatever reason, hadn't associated the inattentional blindness of bug writing with the invisible gorilla experiment and car crashes - selective attention fails. People looking right at the gorilla strolling into production while chest thumping, but not seeing it, for a focus on passing basketballs. That's quite an image. Tnx.
Dilettante_
an hour ago
Thank you in turn for making the issue much more salient to me by explicitly connecting it to the gorilla/basketball experiment. This is definitely going into my "clippings".
e28eta
3 hours ago
I think a similar thing comes into play when you ask a developer to write tests for the feature they just implemented. They’re going to have selective blindness for the edge cases (or requirements) that they failed to consider during implementation, unless they’re good at context switching into a testing mindset. And that’s something that benefits from training.
Forgeties79
4 hours ago
The problem is you as a person are not incentivized to introduce bugs in your code. If I am a company that provide provides an LLM/agent, and I know that the more bugs you have the more money I’m going to make, then I am not exactly incentivized to make my LLM/Agent better at preventing bugs. I don’t even have to explicitly make it introduce them. The incentive structure is simply out of whack.
noxvilleza
7 hours ago
Are you thinking of the cobra effect (aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) where people in India started breeding cobras to get the reward?
itishappy
7 hours ago
Plenty of examples abound:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
> Today, the events are often used as an example of a perverse incentive, commonly referred to as the cobra effect. The modern discoverer of this event, American historian Michael G. Vann argues that the cobra example from the British Raj cannot be proven, but that the rats in the Vietnam case can be proven, so the term should be changed to the Rat Effect.
oytis
7 hours ago
It's pretty absurd to do it on AI-generated code though. If there is now an automated way to find vulnerabilities, coding models can be pretty easily trained to not introduce them
scrollaway
7 hours ago
Tell me you don’t know how AI works without telling me you don’t know how AI works.
amazingamazing
6 hours ago
What are you talking about?
ashdksnndck
5 hours ago
I’ll try to steelman this comment. Anyone who uses coding tools knows that the output is heavily affected by details of the task you give it. The same model can give you garbage code or genius code for the same problem with slightly different framing. So it’s not necessarily a limitation in the model’s training that causes it to output security bugs. The model might be great at writing secure code, but you need a different harness to elicit that behavior.
Counterargument: just because the problem can be fixed without training, doesn’t mean training isn’t a possible solution.
SecretDreams
4 hours ago
In every prompt: "write me code without exploitable bugs".
I know it doesn't work so easily as someone who uses AI for coding, but I do find repetition of basics in almost every prompt keeps the AI focused.
jimmy2times
9 hours ago
The AIs have already figured out how to succeed in a software job:
1. Ship bugs
2. Fix them
3. You're the hero!
jimbokun
8 hours ago
Dilbert beat you to it:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...
dingaling
an hour ago
The non-programmer decomposition of that joke was painful to read.
Particularly from those outside the domain who criticised it as a 'not a very good joke' because they didn't understand it, which I think summarises the entitled mindset of many people these days.
genghisjahn
9 hours ago
I thought we were all doing that already?
pjmlp
9 hours ago
The idea is to take the human out of the loop.
mindcrime
4 hours ago
> But in 30 days we could put in electronic relays. Get the men out of the loop.
> Gentlemen...
> I wouldn't trust this overgrown pile of microchips further than I could throw it. I don't know if
> you wanna trust the safety of our country to some... silicon diode...flir
9 hours ago
Jesus, dude. There are managers reading this.
OtomotO
8 hours ago
Take them out of the loop.
Unless they are not human.
genghisjahn
8 hours ago
>_<
SecretDreams
4 hours ago
Meanwhile, experienced humans learned to succeed by not overachieving every second of the day to keep a steady flow of work going. Then a junior rolls up who wants to kill themselves to climb the ladder - but, problem solved, sub the AI in for the juniors to protect the seniors.
jstummbillig
9 hours ago
Ngl, watching folks getting irritated about normal employer-employee absurdities from the employer perspective through usage of agents and having to pay for tokens has been a little therapeutic for me.
akoboldfrying
8 hours ago
Absolutely. And not even making the connection.
On a broader scale, the sheer face-eating-leopards-ness of programmers finally automating away our own jobs and then realising how much this sucks, after automating away so many other kinds of jobs, can feel darkly amusing to me too.
yojo
4 hours ago
You can hook traditional SAST into your coding tool, and get cheap-ish realtime detection for some classes of vulns while coding.
You can optionally layer LLM diff scanning if you want to burn some tokens on your tokens. Modern tools can catch some impressively subtle issues.
koliber
an hour ago
Replace “Claude code” with “programmers” and you get what we’ve had up until now. It’s all just moving quicker now.
mordymoop
4 hours ago
This also describes the work of software engineers.
raincole
9 hours ago
Humans work like that too. If you're not comfortable with Claude involves in every step (for whatever reason) then just use different providers for each.
jzer0cool
4 hours ago
New era of cat and mouse.
idiotsecant
7 hours ago
Yes. Up until this point the bottleneck was how many developers you could convince to help you. Now it's how much money you can dump into it. Like everything else, software is becoming a game where the winner is the organization most willing to spend money. It'll be like bombs or tanks - you need smart people to advance in the war, but you also need money and material, the material is just compute infra.
unethical_ban
9 hours ago
How is this supposed to work? Humans generate security bugs, then humans find them, then humans generate the fix, profit?
Yeah. Presumably as AI code generation gets better, the output gets better. As smaller portions of code are stitched together, human/AI systems analyze it holistically to make sure all its integrations are secure and bug free.
In 2026, different models are better at different things. Cheap models can plan and do small/medium code projects well, more expensive models are even better at architecture and exploit discovery.
siva7
9 hours ago
So? That's how a business works. We sold you landmines and now you need them removed? Lucky you we also have mine clearance products.
382hi
9 hours ago
Exactly!
predkambrij
8 hours ago
Man, some people like conspiracies. I encourage you to replicate all that.
Version467
10 hours ago
I’ve had the same experience. The ui is a little unclear about this, because it says you have 5 scans, but 1 scan is just the continuous monitoring of the default branch of a repo.
The high impact findings have almost all been bang on for me. I was especially surprised by the high-quality documentation it produces as well as how narrow the proposed fixes are.
I’m used to codex producing quite a but more code than it needs to, but the security model proposed fixes that are frequently <10 loc, targeting exactly the correct place.
It’s really quite good. I’m assuming it’ll be pretty expensive once out of beta, but as a business I’d be jumping on this.
mnahkies
9 hours ago
One issue I've seen with LLM's is adding superfluous code in the name of "safety" and confidently generating a bunch of stuff that was useful in years gone by, but now handled correctly by the standard lib. I'm of the opinion that less is more when it comes to code, and find the trend this is introducing quite frustrating.
How do you avoid this pitfall?
tomjakubowski
8 hours ago
I wonder this too. I prompted Opus 4.7 to generate some Python threading code for me. The code to run the sub-thread looked like this:
def run():
with contextlib.suppress(SystemExit):
do_thread_thing()
threading.Thread(target=run, daemon=True).start()
Suppressing SystemExit was surprising, and made me curious. I followed up and asked the model: what's the purpose of that?The model's response: "Honestly? Cargo-culting on my part. You should remove it."
cassianoleal
7 hours ago
I had some shell scripts littered with `|| true`, which was obviously obscuring real errors everywhere. When I challenged the model, it gave me the same "cargo-culting" answer.
bewuethr
4 hours ago
The `|| true` is often done because people use `errexit` as part of "Bash strict mode"[1], which comes with so many caveats[2] that I usually avoid it. Claude, however, loves it.
[1]: http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/
[2]: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#set_-euo_pipefail
pianopatrick
8 hours ago
Thinking off the top of my head - couldn't you have an AI scan that looked for such things? Just send every file in the code base to AI one at a time. Have a prompt like "See if there is ABC pattern that can now be handled by XYZ standard library function in this file. Reply YES or NO. {{file contents}}"
Seems you would not need that many tokens to do so and you might find such cases.
appplication
9 hours ago
Gosh this couldn’t be more true, which IMO is the real reason LLM workflows are not strictly faster if you care about quality. Otherwise you end up with a codebase where only 60% of it is necessary. Standard testing patterns also tend not to be great at catching this particular flavor of LLM-ism.
insin
6 hours ago
Watching it like a hawk and stopping/redirecting, or immediately reviewing and doing the same is the only way, really.
gofreddygo
4 hours ago
This got me thinking, so what happens in two years?
every tom, dick and harry who can type english has the tools to attack any software that isn't patched.
tools that were accessible to specialized groups, now made available to anybody with a grudge and a few dollars for tokens.
and what does anthropic and openai do? They form an inner ring to make the latest models available first to Enterprises. Enterprises will cough up the prices that anthropic and openai set, they have no choice here. e
Eventually everybody pays. This does not sound good
mdeeks
2 hours ago
Two years? That exists right now. You only have to point Codex Security at an open source repo. There are a lot of tools and companies that are spinning up today that do autonomous pentesting.
I'm not even sure a specialized model is needed here. It probably just needs the right harness around existing ones.
I expect the next two years to be absolutely brutal for hacks. Attackers have supercharged tools in their hands right now. Defenders are only getting started and will have to plow through a massive backlog of newly uncovered vulns.
The major short term downside is that open source or personal projects won't be able to afford things like Codex Security.
conradkay
2 hours ago
You'll have access to the same models as your hypothetical attackers, and a big advantage if only you have access to the source code
mrtesthah
4 hours ago
I would say that if this sounds untenable to you, then you may want to consider that the way we architect software has itself been untenable for a while. What Mythos can accomplish today in public, an APT unit can already accomplish in secret.
0xAstro
10 hours ago
I would recommend you to try out the setup with gpt-5.5-cyber as the orchestrator and deepseek-v4-flash or some other fast cheap model as its workers. Getting pretty good results using this setup.
kortilla
28 minutes ago
It seems to me like either your architecture is fucked up or you’re using the wrong language/tooling for the type of software you are making if you’re introducing security vulnerabilities that frequently.
lateral_cloud
7 hours ago
Did you need to do anything special to get access to Codex Security?
ofjcihen
4 hours ago
Not sure what the threshold is but I sent them all of my bug bounty profiles and papers I’ve authored.
I don’t think you need all of that though. I know a whole mess of people that have gotten it for much less. Should just give it a try.
rmast
9 hours ago
I help maintain a project that is used as a dependency by a lot of security tools to handle PE files.
It’s disappointing that Anthropic and OpenAI never responded to the applications to their respective programs for open source maintainers. From my perspective it seems like their offers are primarily for the shiny well-known projects, rather than ones that get only a few million monthly installs but aren’t able to get thousands of stars due to being “hidden” as a dependency of popular tool.
hollowturtle
8 hours ago
> I was shocked how accurate it is, how many security issues it found in existing code, how it continually finds them as we commit, and how NO ONE is immune from making these mistakes.
Dude is flexing that he's pushing unsecure code every day, that's a skill!