Occasionally I see real security researchers on HN complaining that no one takes the disclosure seriously, or that people reply immediately with a cease and desist. But from the receiving end it's just because the spam is unmanageable.

One flipside to this is that, because many of these bugs are "shallow" to LLMs, it's actually easier than ever to moderate the worst participants in your vulnerability program -- if someone sends you slop, you can just ban them and wait for the next, better orchestrated LLM to send you a better report for the same vulnerability.

Hopefully at the end of this decade, a ton of software practices have been overhauled to eliminate classes of problems. Memory-safe language use is a great start - but it’d be great to see innovation in checking for TOCTOU problems, improper/missing authn & authz, and many others.

This is an engineering problem. It won’t be solved by models that “only do dumb shit 1/10th as often, only 0.01% of the time now not 0.1%!” It won’t be solved by adding more models to do even more double-checking before and after the work. It won’t be solved by hoping humans catch it in review. It isn’t solvable by adding outer loops of any sort - though we may get close. To truly solve this will take serious CS research.

> A requirement for staying sane while working in public as an open source maintainer is realizing that every issue, PR, and piece of feedback is a present, not an obligation. You can accept it, ignore it, and use it partially or not at all.

> Except…

> For years, as lead of the Go Security team at the time, I’ve told new team members that it doesn’t apply to vulnerability reports. No, vulnerability reports are special. Security researchers are doing us a favor by reporting things confidentially instead of doing full disclosure, so we owe them something, which is not true of regular issues opened on the issue tracker.

[...]

> It’s 2026 and none of the premises are true anymore.

I respectfully disagree.

The premise is absolutely still true: if someone discovers a critical, exploitable vulnerability in your software, the impact and tradeoffs are exactly the same as they were before LLMs started finding bugs. There are just more of them now, so they're easier to come by.

But that won't last forever, either. As LLMs find increasingly difficult-to-find vulnerabilities, there will be fewer of them to report. This is just chugging through the backlog.

All of that said, I don't think finding vulnerabilities has really been the difficult security problem for most companies (or open source projects). The difficult problem is dedicating resources to fixing those vulnerabilities instead of building software, products, and/or infrastructure that people want. That problem is absolutely still here today, but I'm optimistic that agentic security developers will be able to take the burden off of development teams in the near future.

For tokens, of course.

Is this even a question? You triage and fix the vulnerability just like any other one. Are truths spoken by folks one dislikes — even for perfectly valid reasons — any less true?

The only way I can imagine this somehow applying is if someone has a habit of reporting vulnerabilities which do not exist, or of exaggerating their severity. Is crying wolf a CoC violation? If so, then I can imagine that particular sort of bad behaviour justifying some consideration before acting on a report.