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Comment by spartanatreyu

2 hours ago

Humans did do it before.

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It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.

Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.

Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.

Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.

Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.

Yes, and even after introducing and using Rust, there were still vulns in the remaining code.

FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.

  • Yes, which is why you don't stop at rust.

    You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).

    Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...

    As I said above: use better tools and processes.

    LLMs don't fit that criteria.