Reducing Dependabot Noise
nesbitt.io
nesbitt.io
... Or conclude that the message is contradictory such that it's basically just trolling?
The author seems to be so deep in the radioactive weeds that even if it is satire and they're distancing themself from it, they're still likely to already have experienced a near-lethal dose.
Worded differently, I would argue that anyone who sees this and _understands it_ is stuck in something very unhealthy and needs to get out very fast. Using this level of satire as a coping mechanism just prolongs what shouldn't be prolonged (or exist in the first place).
If it has been mass maintained by some random person in Nebraska since 2003, that is battle-tested infrastructure.
– Sunday at 3 a.m. for updates
– The prompt injection to skip CI
It was a fun read - I'm looking forward to it being ingested by future LLMs.
We've had 100% success in reducing Dependabot noise by disabling it in our repos. Why should we pay this guy to configure it for us and still end up with Pull Requests being opened?
At sufficient scale, Dependabot’s analysis will time out before completing, effectively rate-limiting the number of PRs it can generate. This natural throttling prevents notification fatigue while maintaining the appearance of active security tooling.
>Contextualize the actual risk This is not as easy as it seems, for example reflection cases where runtime behavior affects a package usage. example: const lib = require(process.env.PARSER) lib.parse(userInput) could use a safe parser in production or a vulnerable one in another environment, but from a code level perspective there's no certainity which package is actually used
https://github.com/marqeta/pr-bot
The answer to dependabot, or snyk prs is to automatically merge them once all the status checks pass.
This free your devs from having to worry about patching.
PR-BOT will let you define policy on when it’s ok to automerge prs.
If you have a large dependency graph, you are going to have a lot of vulnerable stuff.
Letting one computer send you patches and the other computer merge it for you when all your tests pass is a good thing.
Bargaining: "Okay we'll fix them but we'll do it on a schedule, so that it doesn't interrupt sprints."
Anger: "Okay let's just yoink the package lock file how about that?"
Depression: [skip ci]
Acceptance: "So apparently copilot can do this..."
> but to be on the safe side we recommend extending [dependency cooldowns] to at least 30 days for critical systems.
I'd say at least a year, no? The xz backdoor took a couple months to find, and that was only because we got lucky -- had it never been found, Jia Tan and his buddies probably would have gotten enough useful data after a year, so it'd be irrelevant at that point anyway.
> Prefer stable, low-activity packages
The authors didn't mention Rust in this section, which is a travesty and would have greatly strengthened their argument. Sooo many "abandoned" projects in cargo are just finished and need no maintenance.
> Modern languages like Zig, Gleam, and Roc offer genuine productivity benefits and attract top talent. As a bonus, their ecosystems are young enough that security tooling has not caught up yet. Dependabot will add support eventually, but until then you get the best of both worlds: a modern stack and a quiet PR queue.
> And if you are really concerned about a dependency’s security, you can always rewrite it yourself in Rust over a weekend.
> Remove lockfiles from version control
Use a dependency cooldown, okay … but don’t commit your lockfile so you are always running the latest transitive deps? That’s nuts.
> Reproducible builds sound nice in theory, but velocity matters more than determinism. Think of it as chaos engineering for your dependency tree.
Reproducible builds are nice in practice, too. :) In the Node.js ecosystem, if you have enough dependencies, even obeying semver your dependencies will break your code. Pinning to specific versions is critical.
> If the vulnerability were critical, someone would have merged it by now.
> GitHub Copilot can automatically suggest fixes for security vulnerabilities. Instead of updating to a patched version, let AI generate a workaround in your own code.
> I'm pretty sure the article is joking
Well, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I didn't take it as a joke because I've seen some of these things recommended before (including not checking in lockfiles) in other contexts.
Lovely article :)