Hacker News Reader

Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Quite the opposite, particularly when the biggest vendors of coding agents insist on not allowing their models to be used to check the code they generate for security issues.

View on HN

Why stop there? We should regulate who is allowed to write code in the first place!

Easily done if everyone can be convinced that learning to write code is pointless since you can just pay an AI company for access to a chatbot that will write it for you.

Fortunately there are people who write software for fun so there will always be some people who would rather do it themselves.

So, like professional orders in Europe? Thankfully everybody agreed that writing code is not engineering so this isn't mandated by law, but we were this close.

You don't need a permit or degree to draw up plans, just to write your name on the official version and get it implemented in the physical world. It's closer to deploying code than writing.

We have a lot of that in Europe. Parasite professions. Someone who does nothing but charges a lot for his signature.

“And that was how CS became a real engineering degree”

They sort of already do; the commercial American providers all require you to be 18 to sign up for a plan capable of agentic coding.

So, I guess people under 18 aren't allowed to learn to program anymore.

I've been able to use Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 for defensive security audits without any issues. They cannot do offensive tasks like pen-testing but in a lot of cases that's not a big shortcoming.

Any tips / online resources how to best utilize for defensive reviews?

I've repeatedly slammed into walls doing very basic tasks. It can do a dumbed-down security audit, but fails to do offensive tasks against my own codebase which is frankly how you use a model like this effectively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com