AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt (spectrum.ieee.org)

It’s frustrating to have all these 0days and CVEs to patch for now, but in the long run perhaps we’ll leave with more robust software.

It totally feels like the former if you watch it find and fix vulnerabilities or other debt-tasks one after another.

But only so many of these "technical debt" issue are little off-by-one errors that get remedied by a surgically narrow patch.

Many enough require some kind of restructuring or redevelopment of their own and it's going to take time to figure out if AI faces the same dilemma as human developers: where each non-trivial change carries the risk of some new issue, ad infinitum.

If that happens to be the case, and AI isn't able to magically produce perfect software in finite time, then what's really happened is that the threat of hostile AI exploiting our technical debt will force us to always be burning and churning code just to remain a moving target.

It's another "we'll see" thing for now, I think.

[0] https://www.bugsink.com/blog/http2shell-timeline/

Yes, AI developed code might have vulnerabilities or bugs, but so already has your JSP based web server that has Oracle and God knows what else among dependencies.

Everybody in the industry knows that we've been building on quicksand. Moore's law meant that we could just sacrifice performance and add a dozen layer on top of technology from the 90s (if not older) and keep the thing chugging along.

Look at the PHP situation:

- HTTP is an old and quirky protocol with a lot of surface open for attackers that are rarely useful nowadays and might be better left off to higher layers. But of course, we can't break compat, so everybody still implements all the naughty parts, just in case.

- PHP was a joke language from the start, we were making fun of it in the early 2000s, the fact that over 20 years later it still powers a huge chunk of the web is enough to demonstrate that we're not serious people. Cue the PHP fans telling me that "it's good now". Maybe, I don't really care, the effort that went into making it good should have gone into ditching PHP for a better language 20 years ago. The bandaid mentality is what got us in this situation.

- And of course to add insult to injury, PHP, this security-critical language, is still implemented in garbo C using things like setjmp/longjmp. Just to make sure to absolutely maximize the damage if a vuln is discovered, I suppose. Brilliant.

- Oh and all of this is still running overwhelmingly on top of x86 which is its own bag of legacy garbage. "No but you don't get it, modern CPUs are really more like RISC CPUs, the RISC ISA is translated internally" yeah exactly that's my point let's stop doing things like that.

We're a clown industry. We only made it this far because, usually, buggy code doesn't kill people and we can iterate and patch things quickly. We never had to do things correctly, we could flourish with abysmal levels of quality acceptance. This may not be true anymore.

Of course the reason things are done this way is generally to maintain backward compatibility and make transition easier. At least now that we have LLMs this excuse will hopefully vanish: porting even huge codebases to a new language/framework, something that was a tremendous undertaking mere months ago, is now vastly easier and faster. We can leave the 1990s behind us.

My approach is https://tix.im/ - not launched yet. But from expedience: modeling everything as workflows of composeable nix flakes (expert systems from programs, skills, agents, workflows and their snippets, DBs blobs, service descriptions, ...) and then run everything in highly isolated environments. It is not only so much more efficient, reduces errors, increases quality, reduces unnecessary cognitive load, ...

I start to move more and more daily tasks into the systems. Even UI programs become interactive workflow steps, which allow me to attach from anywhere back to a task in an environment optimized for the task.

Dependency updates for example, a workflow. A subgraph from a security scanner expert checks each change in the dependency tree.

my webserver never needed a million lines of code just to pass bytes to other people

Just consider how laughable some working conditions in software are and then come to realize how architecture is shaped by the organization communication patterns and not reality. You will see it in a different light then.

All those "paying down" technical debt with AI, I would advise reading the code _very_ carefully. Sometimes the "solution" which passes some test or adheres to some described functionality is incredibly narrow / brittle, and/or has failure cases that are non-obvious.

Yes I'm using $latest_model on high, its still not there. Unless your threshold for "fixed" is "the 1M line lean proof runs, we don't know how it works", it still requires a lot of attention, hand-holding, and scrutiny, especially when fixing issues / working around failures (where it tends to shortcut or invent workarounds).

So, the headline should read,

"AI is helping us eliminate 40 years of technical debt."

Since AI found the bug, and probably also generated the patch at this point.

An abundance of solutions is a problem for people who sell solutions.

Well now, Great Responsibles, it's clear you too were out of your collective depth and were all paying for your smug hubris. Perhaps take a bite out of that humble pie you've obviously never tasted?

I've been bullish on Rust for years because memory safety is simply too important and Rust can essentially prove an implementation correct and solve a certain class of very important bugs. It doesn't solve every problem and there is a complexity cost.

I've also said that writing multithreaded code is simply too complex. In an era of out-of-order execution, different levels of caching, asymmetric cores, hyperthreading (although this is largely dead now?), branch prediction and having to support multiple architectures it's simply too hard for most people to write correct multithreaded code. Period. If you find yourself as a non-library developer creating a mutex or spawning a thread, somebody has screwed up.

This is also why I think the single-threaded async/await model with post-request teardown of PHP is the correct choice for most people.

We're going to go through a dark period of a lot of 0days. As the article notes, this is paying 40 years of technical debt. It will result in a more secure ecosystem however. I believe this will ultimately also hamper black markets, governments and 3 letter agencies who trade in those 0days.

As painful as this all is, it will ultimately be a good thing, one of the few to come out of AI (IMHO).

I fear it's only going to get worse.