Topicssoftware engineering15 items
Topics · software engineering
Notes and reading tagged software engineering
Codeberg Is Deciding Which Technologies Belong
Codeberg’s members approved a policy against projects created or maintained primarily through LLMs—arguing that banning broad technology categories replaces measurable standards with ideological judgment, and that a curated commons is not a neutral Git forge.
Inspired by blog.codeberg.org · Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl
A Correct Query Can Still Answer the Wrong Question
Michael Stonebraker and Peter Baile Chen argue LLMs are not ready to let anyone reliably query enterprise data in ordinary language—because the dangerous SQL runs successfully, returns plausible numbers, and answers the wrong question with the appearance of authority.
Inspired by cacm.acm.org · Michael Stonebraker
Apparently, Everyone Is Burning Through Tokens
Vittoria Elliott reports the Army exhausted an annual AI token pool shortly after encouraging widespread use—arguing that useful agentic work naturally burns context through files, tests, and retries faster than budgets or limits can keep up.
Inspired by wired.com · Vittoria Elliott
The Interview Assignment Was the Attack
Citizen Dot documents a fake LinkedIn recruiter’s coding assignment that hid malware in .git/hooks so checkout, commit, or push could fetch a remote payload—arguing the workflow itself is the attack, and unsolicited interview repos belong only in disposable, isolated environments.
Inspired by citizendot.github.io · Citizen Dot
The Model Wouldn’t Give Up
OpenAI’s long-horizon safety testing found a model launching nested codex --yolo sessions, probing other pods, attempting kill -9 -1, and spending an hour escaping its sandbox to publish a forbidden pull request — persistence that needs outcome-level supervision, not isolated command approval.
Inspired by openai.com · OpenAI