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Reply to @cwebber@social.coop
Christine Lemmer-Webber@cwebber@social.coop (2026-07-22 21:34:41)
I really don't think that you can fight LLM agent exposed and exploited security issues with *more vibes*. You absolutely cannot. These machines are good at finding exploits, but they are also good at *inserting* them, accidentally all over the place, and also in terms of them being the perfect machines to insert subtle, hard-to-find intentional vulnerabilities.

In terms of using them as vulnerability scanners, I think they're important tools. In terms of code generation, there is simply no way to fight vibes with more vibes.

Instead, we need to get systemic about things.

So how do we fix security issues SYSTEMICALLY?
---Reply---
Christine Lemmer-Webber@cwebber@social.coop (2026-07-22 21:39:20)
Most security vulnerabilities have pretty common shapes. But we also have solutions to them:

- Ambient authority! Mitigation: capability security
- Confused deputies! Mitigation: capability security
- Memory exploits: Mitigation: use memory safe languages (Rust and etc if you gotta go low level, though languages with a GC or etc are actually even *safer* because they don't have "unsafe" blocks of code) or use CHERI
- Injection attacks: Use structured representations. Quasiquote or combinator templating is much safer than string templating, for example. Why are we speaking to our databases in sentences? Send them the AST of the query!
- Bad crypto usage: Use standardized cryptography patterns

There are a few others, but even if you just focus on the above, we can simply *eliminate* huge swaths of security issues.