AI wants to eat your code, let it.

1. My core belief is essentially: "This is fine, good actually!"#

Yeah, it's true, there's going to be blood. But I think we survive when we look and go "oh shit i'm fucking bleeding! quick, get me a bandage ASAP!" rather than "oh, a small trickle, i'm sure it's fine, i should focus on other stuff first". A slow bleed out is a slow death, a fast bleed out is a quick response.

AI forces us to have a very fucking fast bleed out. Everyone, even your retarded neighbor's even more retarded kid, can ""hack"" your shit now. Good. Because you have the same tool they have.

God made man, Sam Colt made them equal.
Humans wrote code, AI made it safe.

We are not going back to yesterday, so you need to update your systems to face tomorrow. In this process, we will find that a lot of our systems are fucking horrible. Again, good. I do not want to go into tomorrow with something horrible. Let's rip the band aid off now.

"This is so cold & cruel because you aren't-" Shut up.

Of course it's "cold", you know who else is cold on this topic? Criminals. Bad actors. People who intend to do you harm. They won't care about what happens to you. They never do. Fundamentally, when you engage in this topic, you must suspend your empathy for victims, because the victims will exist in any outcome: They either exist now, very rapidly, or they will exist in a slow stream over the next 5, 10, 20 years. The victims will exist all the same, however.

To be "cold" about this, is just to be realistic. It's not to be cruel. My heart goes out to all those who have lost what feels like unrecoverable amounts of finance, time, and energy with the recent ColdCard Bitcoin hack. I know how it feels, because in the past I too have lost what was at the time my entire savings from a stupid fucking software bug. It hurts knowing you didn't do anything dumb, you didn't send your PK to anyone, you didn't download any malicious software, you didn't get robbed (physically). You just used what you were told to use and then it all got taken from you.

I empathize with your pain. My belief stands regardless. Pain now is not the same as pain later. We need to fix this shit fast. Maybe 1,000,000 people are about to feel pain while we do so. That is better than 1,000,000,000 over the next decade as we pretend to be "not cold" about it.

If you think that we are in a "uniquely bad time for software bugs", tell that to NASA. Tell that to the 6 people who died from the Therac-25. Tell that to 28 dead from the patriot missile failure. Tell that to the hundreds dead from the 737 Max. Tell that to Elaine Herzberg.

Software bugs have always been capable of death, ever since the Harvard Mark II moth. It is inescapable.

Red teaming Bitcoin is great. Pretty sure this was already happening, but perhaps it died down over time because, foolishly, the thought was it was completely solid. Sure, maybe it was solid against rocks. But we have nukes now, so get back to red teaming!

2. Developers, it's time to upgrade your toolbox.#

I know, sorry. I too lament the days where Notepad++ was your entire home. But then you wanted to be more serious, so an ""official"" IDE found its way onto your desktop. Followed, perhaps, by a thirdparty debugger, or packet inspector, or build tool, or compiler, or doodad, or fizzlestick, or cocktickler. We always need new tools in the software world, and tomorrow asks for yet another.

This time it's called AI. I'm not saying you have to code with it, but I am saying it's important to use it as an assistant/reviewer/one-of-many checks before releasing code into the public "everyone has nukes" arena. Get a harness together that understands your domain, intimately knows your project, and is capable enough to AT LEAST find common bugs you may have missed. Because other people won't miss it, and when they see it they will kill you with it. I'm not saying a simple "fix all bugs" prompt solves everything, but simply asking a frontier model to review your work is a good first step.

Learn how to ask it to review. Don't attempt to feed it 80 million lines of code in one go. You should ALWAYS know how your codebase works, regardless of how it was assembled, which means you should always have the ability to break it down into bite-sized pieces and go over it step-by-step with your AI, while asking very pointed questions, and giving it very clear expected outcomes. Think of it as a new way to create tests. You should be able to give your AI small pieces of your code, tell it exactly what it should and, most importantly, should not do, and then instruct it to find any edge case you might have overlooked.

3. In spite of everything, when your moment of pain comes, the severity will be determined by your past.#

Wow, how zen-master of me to write. But it's true.

If you put in the work, your pain will be lessened.
If you behaved gracefully, you may even be forgiven.

Never underestimate the effect your past has on your future. The God you should be obeying the commandments of, is called tomorrow's consequences.