Comment by david_shaw
2 months ago
It's easy to be cynical because, yes, both the problems and solutions seem dead obvious in hindsight. But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."
It's great that there's so much momentum in fixing the glaring problems with supply chain systems like npm, but I'm concerned that we're entering a new era of security-related problems caused in large part by agentic development.
I'm not just talking about Mythos/Glasswing surfacing vulnerabilities in pretty much everything it touches; I think the way we're developing software, pulling in dependencies, and potentially losing human thought modeling of complex systems is going to lead to a lot of hacked together software and infrastructure that humans won't fully understand.
I hope in a few years we don't look back at today and wonder how we could have been so naive -- how we failed to actually plan for the long-tail of AI development in a way that doesn't solve problems by attempting to just use AI to rebuild complex systems.
But the article was funny.
> But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."
Was it? I thought Zuckerberg coined this horrible phrase.
He certainly popularized it (maybe coined it), but I've seen a lot of organizations and developers repeat that mantra.
Even without the specific words, look to product teams debating tradeoffs of going to market vs. waiting for better security controls. They're pushing for faster product release every time, at pretty much every org.
In any case, not really a hacker's creed. This has always been withinin the realm of corporations, especially Silicon Valley or adjacent.
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Joel Spolsky.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
I love that article, but the words "move", "fast", and "break" don't appear in it.
1 reply →
https://www.google.com/search?q=sposky%27s+worst+essay&sclie...
We don't need hindsight for the problems of supply chain security to be obvious. Security people were writing and doing talks about this stuff over 10 years ago, just (like most things in security) things start getting addressed once the pressure of incidents gets high enough :)