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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The featured blog post where one of their senior engineering PMs presented an allegedly "production grade" Matrix implementation, in which authentication was stubbed out as a TODO, says it all really. I'm glad a quarter of the internet is in such responsible hands.

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It's spreading and only going to get worse.

Management thinks AI tools should make everyone 10x as productive, so they're all trying to run lean teams and load up the remaining engineers with all the work. This will end about as well as the great offshoring of the early 2000s.

there was also a post here where an engineer was parading around a vibe-coded oauth library he'd made as a demonstration of how great LLMs were

at which point the CVEs started to fly in

Matrix doesn't actually define how one should do authentication though... every homeserver software is free to implement it however they want.

the main bit of auth which was left unimplemented on matrix-workers was the critical logic which authorizes traffic over federation: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/server-server-api/#authorizat...

Auth for clients is also specified in the spec - there is some scope for homeservers to freestyle, but nowadays they have to implement OIDC: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/client-server-api/#client-aut...

Thats a classic claude move, even the new sonnet 4.6 still does this.

It’s almost as classic as just short circuiting tests in lightly obfuscated ways.

I could be quite the kernel developer if making the test green was the only criteria.

Wait till you get AI to write unit tests and tell it the test must pass. After a few rounds it will make the test “assert(true)” when the code cant get the test to pass

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