Comment by mncharity
2 days ago
> write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about [something else] [...] defects [...] written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to [their focus]
For whatever reason, hadn't associated the inattentional blindness of bug writing with the invisible gorilla experiment and car crashes - selective attention fails. People looking right at the gorilla strolling into production while chest thumping, but not seeing it, for a focus on passing basketballs. That's quite an image. Tnx.
I've noticed even people who do offensive security for a living frequently leave gaping holes in their own code. If you're not actively primed to scan the landscape for the gorilla, you will often miss it even if you're a gorilla inquisitor.
Thank you in turn for making the issue much more salient to me by explicitly connecting it to the gorilla/basketball experiment. This is definitely going into my "clippings".
And it so happens that the flood of code coming out of tools like Claude is almost certain to bring a whole zoo invisible gorillas along for the bananas. The kinds of bugs that people already struggle to catch because of inattentional blindness flow like a torrent in code generated by these tools.
Did you notice the missing word in the previous paragraph?