alt Hacker News> the developers learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future
No. Humans learn from mistakes and try to avoid them in the future, but there is a whole pile of other stuff in the bag of neurons between our ears that prevent us from avoiding repetition of errors.
I have seen extremely talented engineers write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about the problem they were trying to solve, and not the pitfalls they could fall into. I would argue that the vast majority of software defects in released code are written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to the problem they were trying to solve, or was for an edge case that was not considered in the requirements.
Unless you are writing a software component specifically to be resilient against memory corruption, preventing memory corruption issues aren't top of mind when writing code, and that is ok since humans, like the machines we build, have a limit to the amount of context/content/problem space that we can hold and evaluate at once.
Separately, you don't necessarily need to use different models to generate code vs conduct security checks, but you should be using different prompts, steering, specs, skills and agents for the two tasks because of how the model and agents interpret the instructions given.
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I think a similar thing comes into play when you ask a developer to write tests for the feature they just implemented. They’re going to have selective blindness for the edge cases (or requirements) that they failed to consider during implementation, unless they’re good at context switching into a testing mindset. And that’s something that benefits from training.
The problem is you as a person are not incentivized to introduce bugs in your code. If I am a company that provide provides an LLM/agent, and I know that the more bugs you have the more money I’m going to make, then I am not exactly incentivized to make my LLM/Agent better at preventing bugs. I don’t even have to explicitly make it introduce them. The incentive structure is simply out of whack.
> write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about [something else] [...] defects [...] written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to [their focus]
For whatever reason, hadn't associated the inattentional blindness of bug writing with the invisible gorilla experiment and car crashes - selective attention fails. People looking right at the gorilla strolling into production while chest thumping, but not seeing it, for a focus on passing basketballs. That's quite an image. Tnx.