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phito 7 days ago

Are LLMs better or worse at security than a team full of fresh graduates?

ofjcihen 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hard to say for a number of reasons but I can tell you what kind of teams we see.

College grads with no seniors or too few senior devs to oversee them tend to be the worst. Surprisingly, it seems that the worst of these is where the team is very enthusiastic about tech in general. I’ve wondered if it’s a desire to be the next Zuckerberg or maybe not having the massive failure everyone has eventually that makes you realize you aren’t bullet proof.

Experienced devs with too much work to do are common. Genuinely feel bad for these guys.

Off shore shops seem to now ship worse crap faster. Not only that but when one app has an issue you can usually assume they all have the same issue.

Also as a side note Tech focused companies are the most common followed by B2C companies. Manufacturing etc. are really rare for us to see and I think that may be something to do with reticence to adopt new patterns or tech.

ath3nd 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Far far far far worse.

phito 7 days ago | parent [-]

In my experience, LLMs do not make a lot of the security mistakes most developers do, just because it is aware of their existence while most devs just are not. But then they could also make the mistake at some point, and the vibe coder guiding it might not catch it... Do you have any examples? I find this really interesting.

acdha 7 days ago | parent [-]

LLMs aren’t aware of anything - that’s pareidolia of intelligence – but they hopefully have been trained on code which has more secure than insecure code. That’ll help with some classes of problem like using string operations to make database queries but it does have the cost that people might not review it as deeply for more subtle problems.