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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by corford on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:16AM (#50365127)
There was always, in my mind at least, a tension with Linus's Law ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow).

It's true but the problem is assuming just because something is open source it has received sufficient eyeballs. AI now gives us near unlimited eyeballs so, if we survive the bumpy transition, open source should indeed become very secure compared to closed source.

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by Jyaif on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:59AM (#50368414)
> open source should indeed become very secure compared to closed source

I don't understand how you get to that conclusion.

Do you think that an open source project will receive more AI eyeballs than a closed source project?

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by tcoff91 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:16PM (#50370231)
The token budgets will be extremely unevenly distributed in scanning open source.

Linux kernel will get an insane amount of tokens burned on analyzing it. Most other open source, not so much.

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by ptmvp on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:31PM (#50370406)
I was thinking about this too, and think it will come down to incentives for attackers and defenders.

Assuming offensive and defensive capabilities are similar, and incentives scale roughly with project size but start from a non-zero value for attackers, I'd expect larger open projects to be well defended by plenty of motivated people, and smaller ones less so (depending on maintainers). Closed source will mostly just depend on maintainers.

Also assuming closed source is less exposed to AI auditing overall, I'd guess large open projects end up more secure than large closed projects, but small open projects possibly less secure than small closed projects, since attackers might have more incentive to target them than defenders do to audit them.

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by MisterMunchkin on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:39PM (#50371178)
Attackers are always far better resourced. You get six billion if you hack a crypto exchange, you get PIP if you spend time fixing bugs rather than pushing new features.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by pessimizer on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @04:33PM (#50371875)
I doubt this seriously. You're as vulnerable as your worst piece of software.

I'd lean more towards systems that only install diamond-hardened software at all - once you have one project in a class of software that has been analyzed to death, that's the one everybody is going to use.

The vast majority of the development of all projects is going to be (already is) LLM-assisted, so they're going to get analyzed every time they're touched. The odds that huge bugs are going to be lying everywhere to be exploited are bad imo.

I'm starting to rewrite an open source project just because I don't want it to be buggy anymore. I barely want to change anything about it (especially not the licensing.) All I'm doing is porting it to rust from c++ and refactoring it like crazy. I just want to make it easy to audit and extend, and hard to crash, that's it. Once I'm done, I'm already have another (buggy) project in mind to do the exact same thing to. Great UIs and usability, just thwarted by the time that the developers had to invest in them. You could think of them as almost purely security-oriented rewrites.

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by corford on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:48AM (#50377636)
>Do you think that an open source project will receive more AI eyeballs than a closed source project?

Net net, yes. Or at least with an open source codebase i think it is easier to assume multiple AI eyeballs will have looked at it.

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by Terr_ on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:23PM (#50373346)
[delayed]
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by corford on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:02AM (#50377730)
>and that among those varied independent scans, different people will catch what others miss.

My point was more that very few brains were looking deeply at the long tail of open source code/projects (other than the maintainers of the code themselves); and for the marquee projects that did get proportionally more varied eyeballs (e.g. postgres), it seems even that level of attention was insufficient for code deep inside the project's core.

LLMs change this. They make it much easier for maintainers and motivated users to amplify the power of their eyeballs.