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Posted by pseudolus 3 hours ago

AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt(spectrum.ieee.org)
323 points | 210 commentspage 4
amelius 2 hours ago|
I'm sure the NSA has an eye on the groups that are asking AI about security issues in various popular softwares ...
eecc 2 hours ago||
I'm not going to lie, I'm having a great time thinking at the endless discussions around unsafe languages and the relentless smugness of many practitioners claiming everything was fine as long as the responsible and the skilled (them) were in charge; and let's not forget the formulaic "with great power comes great responsibility" closers.

Well now, Great Responsibles, it's clear you too were out of your collective depth and were all paying for your smug hubris. Perhaps take a bite out of that humble pie you've obviously never tasted?

sva_ 3 hours ago||
Better sooner than later, to be honest.
amelius 3 hours ago||
Yeah but AI also helps in lowering the debt ...
daveguy 2 hours ago||
That's a weird way to say creating 40 years of technical debt per year.
worble 2 hours ago||
Yep, the takeaway from this should be that we move to leaner applications that can be actually be formally verified. But what I imagine will actually happen is that we'll patch over these vulns with AI that produces 10x the amount of code, just for the next generation of AI to find vulns in that so we can patch that with more code, repeat ad infinitum.
contravariant 2 hours ago||
The most pessimistic interpretation is that AI is superhumanly good at exposing technical debt and not that good at avoiding it.

We'd be replacing decades of technical debt with debt we'd have no hope of paying.

trkaky 2 hours ago||
luckily it will help us paying it off too
sevenzero 3 hours ago||
While we're at it, I'd appreciate easy secure authentication of a device without having to pull in a third party authentication provider. Thanks.
anovikov 2 hours ago||
It also inflated almost all of that debt away, though. So in a way people who built "just ship it" buggy things in the last few years, made the right bet.
jmyeet 2 hours ago||
I think we'll look back at this moment as peak C/C++ before they begin a long, slow decline into irrelevance.

I've been bullish on Rust for years because memory safety is simply too important and Rust can essentially prove an implementation correct and solve a certain class of very important bugs. It doesn't solve every problem and there is a complexity cost.

I've also said that writing multithreaded code is simply too complex. In an era of out-of-order execution, different levels of caching, asymmetric cores, hyperthreading (although this is largely dead now?), branch prediction and having to support multiple architectures it's simply too hard for most people to write correct multithreaded code. Period. If you find yourself as a non-library developer creating a mutex or spawning a thread, somebody has screwed up.

This is also why I think the single-threaded async/await model with post-request teardown of PHP is the correct choice for most people.

We're going to go through a dark period of a lot of 0days. As the article notes, this is paying 40 years of technical debt. It will result in a more secure ecosystem however. I believe this will ultimately also hamper black markets, governments and 3 letter agencies who trade in those 0days.

As painful as this all is, it will ultimately be a good thing, one of the few to come out of AI (IMHO).

malka1986 2 hours ago|
The real slop was the human slop we made along the way.
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