Comment by Alive-in-2025
1 day ago
For personal projects, ok security is different. But get out of that, and I'd do it even for that, you need defense in depth. You think you sanitized your input but your C program has a bug and a vulnerability - or your Java program or whatever has bugs. Almost everything has some bugs, and thus your vulnerabilities will hit eventually in your C program, even if you were careful.
I'd say absent some temporary hack to do something, my bad experiences won't let me say something is low risk. I worked at Microsoft years ago, and after the zillions of vulnerabilities were attacked by people around the time of windows 95 and computers on the net, we did serious code reviews in my team of the data access libraries. There were vast numbers of vulnerabilities. A group of 3 or 4 of us would sit in a room for 3 hours a day, one person a scribe, and we'd go over this c code that was ancient even then - we found problems everywhere, it was exhausting and shocking. The entire data access infrastructure was riddled with memory leaks, strings that were not length limited, input parameters that were not checked or sanitized, etc. I'm sure it was endemic across all components, not just there. We fixed some things, but we found so much shit.
Thank got I wasn't on the team trying to figure out what to do about those problems. I think they end of lifed a lot of stuff.
>The entire data access infrastructure was riddled with memory leaks, strings that were not length limited, input parameters that were not checked or sanitized, etc. I'm sure it was endemic across all components, not just there. We fixed some things, but we found so much shit.
Sounds like the original vibe coding.
I mean, what I hear from that is that an LLM who you tell to write as safe code as possible is probably going to do a better job than your average human engineer at it, and you still have to do the same verification work either way. So why not have the LLM write the code and you instead just spend time verifying it? In other words, if I give an LLM and an average C developer the same task who will perform better? Even if the average C developer does better but takes N hours to write it and I still have to spend M cycles reviewing the average C developer's work, I'd rather have N be written by a machine since I have to pay M anyway regardless of whether it came from a machine or human.