Comment by jillesvangurp

It will probably wipe out a few categories of issues, which is probably a good thing. And those things that still are still insecure can also be translated to some other language.

Translating things to Rust manually was already a thing before LLMs came into the picture. Now with LLMs that's only going to get easier and faster. The long term value is going to come from getting on top of the mountain of technical debt in the form of existing C/C++ code bases that is responsible for the vast majority of memory exploits, buffer overflows, and other issues that despite decades of attention still are being found across major code bases on a regular basis.

Mozilla finding these issues comes on the back of a quarter century of some very competent engineers trying to do the right thing and using all the tools at their disposal to prevent these issues from happening. I have a lot of respect for that team and the contributions it has made over the years to improve tools, testing/verification practices, etc. The issue is not their effort or competence.

The job of taking an existing system that is well covered in test, well documented/specified, etc. and producing a new one that can function as a drop in replacement is now something that can be considered. A few years ago that would have translated into absolutely massive project cost and risk. Now it's something you can kick off on a Friday afternoon. Worst case it doesn't work, best case you end up with a much better implementation.

It's still early days. There are still a lot of quality issues with LLM generated code. But the success/fail rate will probably improve over time.