alt Hacker News> Firstly, the cost of fixing a bug once you know it exists is usually minimal compared to the cost of discovering that bug.
Boy, I wish!
> Like you say, you typically only die of one thing, so if you know the patient won't die of a particular diagnosis because something else is more likely to kill them, then it might not be worth making that diagnosis.
You can't know someone didn't die of X until after they died, that's the entire point of this dilemma.
It is generally easy to fix a bug that has already be found and can be reproduced (has been diagnosed, so to speak) than to find that bug in the first place. That's one of the reasons that LLM security scanning has become so important recently: it massively reduces the cost of finding those vulnerabilities.
As to your second point, you don't know exactly what a person will die of, but you can make statically sound estimates. You generally won't test unlikely potential causes of death (either because the chance of a positive result is too small, or because you know there are other, more serious conditions). But once a vulnerability is known, it is infinitely reproducible, which means the chance of the vulnerability being "fatal" (assuming the conditions exist for it to be exploited) is essentially 1.
The other flaw in the analogy is that in medicine, the patient chooses to do the tests on themselves. But in software security, there is an adversarial attacker as well as the "doctor" trying to defend the software. And in general, if the defender can find a vulnerability, they must assume that an attacker could already have found the same vulnerability (because the attacker and defender have largely the same tools and information at their disposal, especially in open source contexts), in which case, as discussed previously, that vulnerability also needs to be assumed to be fatal.