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▲ dspillett 4 hours ago

> People are saying the pace will settle down once LLMs find and fix all the bugs.

Only for projects that are in a maintenance state. New features will produce new bugs, unless everyone pays for the tokens to scan every release with the top-of-the-line agents or otherwise spends more time than many do ATM to ensure that changes and new code don't introduce significant exploit paths. Things will slow down once the low-hanging fruit from the past is mostly detected and pulled, but the level of vigilance will always have to be at least a little higher than it has been until recently.

Time between updates releasing and people installing them has been an increasing problem for some time, we are just going to have to be a lot more disciplined about that. This will be a problem for places that have strict availability requirements as they might have to compromise on the testing time they spend on new patches before updating their installations, and we might have to move to having more flexible maintenance windows (the old “an hour or two once a month after Patch Tuesday” hasn't cut it for some time and certainly won't going forward) to allow faster updates.

The bigger problem, compared to the patch-availability-to-general-use time which can be reduced somewhat via automation (though that might accelerate bad-patch based attacks…), is greater constraints for the time between bug discovery and patch release: as soon as there is a rumour of an issue many will start scanning for it (as that is easier now) so the time to wide exploitation is going to be much shorter. This might lead to buggy patches that add new issues of their own.

Perhaps we'll see a lot more projects having explicit LTS releases that only get security updates or signifiant bug fixes, which will reduce the attack surface area (and fault surface area) most users, letting those with less stability concerns deal with the bleeding edge.

> For people like me, this is just yet one more way LLMs are making my life materially worse.

I'm with you there…