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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#101

As a security professional who makes most of my money from helping companies recover from vibe coded tragedies this puts Looney Toons style dollar signs in my eyes. Please continue.

Would love to hear more about your work and how you have tapped into that market if you're keen to share. Even if it's just anecdotes about vibe-in-production gone wrong, that would be really entertaining.

Absolutely.

Before vibe coding became too much of a thing we had the majority of our business coming from poorly developed web applications coming from off shore shops. That’s been more or less the last decade.

Once LLMs became popular we started to see more business on that front which you would expect.

What we didn’t expect is that we started seeing MUCH more “deep” work wherein the threat actor will get into core systems from web apps. You used to not see this that much because core apps were designed/developed/managed by more knowledgeable people. The integrations were more secure.

Now though? Those integrations are being vibe coded and are based on the material you’d find on tutorials/stack etc which almost always come with a “THIS IS JUST FOR DEMONSTRATION DONT USE THIS” warning.

We also see a ton of re-compromised environments. Why? They don’t know how to use CICD and just recommit the vulnerable code.

Oh yeah, before I forget, LLMs favor the same default passwords a lot. We have a list of the ones we’ve seen (will post eventually) but just be aware that that’s something threat actors have picked up on too.

EDIT: Another thing, when we talk to the guys responsible for the integrations or whatever was compromised a lot of the time we hear the excuse “we made sure to ask the LLM if it was secure and it said yes”.

I don’t know if they would have caught the issue before but I feel like there’s a bit of false comfort where they feel like they don’t have to check themselves.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#102

> After finishing the port, most of the agents settled for writing extra tests or continuously updating agent/TODO.md to clarify how "done" they were. In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop. Ok, now that is funny! On so many levels. Now, for the project itself, a few thoughts: - this was tried before, about 1.5 years ago there was a project…

Given there was a complete implementation it was porting, the simplest thing possible has a greater chance of working.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#103

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

I for one can’t wait. It will be absolutely spectacular!

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#104

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

Superfund repos.

What makes you so sure it will have a repo?

I don’t recall the last time Claude suggested anything about version control :-)

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#105

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

Developers do that too. Consultants have be doing rescue projects for quite a long time. I don't think anything has or will change on that front.

Agreed, sometimes it seems like there are only two types of roles. Maintaining / updating hot mess legacy code bases for an established company or work 100 hours a week building a new hot mess code base for a startup. Obviously oversimplifying but just my very limited experience scoping out postings and talking to people about current jobs.

Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites...

Surely that can't be our fate...

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#106
post #79

In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop. That is pretty awesome and not something I would have expected from an agent; it hints (but does not prove) that it has some awareness of its own workings.

It hints that a suitable auto completion of the input prompt is to output a pkill command

We, too, are just auto-complete, next-token machines.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#107

> After finishing the port, most of the agents settled for writing extra tests or continuously updating agent/TODO.md to clarify how "done" they were. In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop. Ok, now that is funny! On so many levels. Now, for the project itself, a few thoughts: - this was tried before, about 1.5 years ago there was a project…

I started building a project by trying to wire in existing open source stuff. When I looked at the build and stuff that would cause me to bring in, and the actual stuff I needed from the open source tools, it turned out to be MUCH faster/cleaner to just get Claude to check out the repo and port the stuff I needed directly. Now I do a calculus with dependencies. Do I want to track the upstream, is the rigging around t…

> If not, just port and move on.

Exactly the point behind this post https://ghuntley.com/libraries/

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both serious and a joke. The seriousness is that it works (to point) and the implications to our profession as software developers. The joke is just how stupid it is. Refer to the original story link above for proof of outcomes.

This reply is actually making this more confusing.

It gets kind of philosophical really fast. What does it mean when software can be automated through a bash loop? (Not to 100%, to 80%. What does that mean to software outsourcing in the consulting industry?)

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#110

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

> There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers

New? New!?

This is my job now!

I call it software archeology — digging through Windows Server 2012 R2 IIS configuration files with a “last modified date” about a decade ago serving money-handling web apps to the public.

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