[rafaelmn]

This should be the real benchmark of AI coding skills - how fast do we get safe/modern infrastructure/tooling that everyone agrees we need but nobody can fund the development.

If Anthropic wants marketing for Mythos without publishing it - show us servo contrib log or something like that. It aligns nicely with their fundamental infrastructure safety goals.

I'd trust that way more than x% increase on y bench.

Hire a core contributor on Servo or Rust, give him unlimited model access and let's see how far we get with each release.

[mort96]

We do not need vibe-coded critical infrastructure.

[falcor84]

As I see it, the focus should not be about the coding, but about the testing, and particularly the security evaluation. Particularly for critical infrastructure, I would want us to have a testing approach that is so reliable that it wouldn't matter who/what wrote the code.

[jbvlkt]

I have been thinking about that lately and isn't testing and security evaluation way harder problem than designing and carefully implementing new features? I think that vibecoding automates easiest step in SW development while making more challenging/expensive steps harder. How are we suppose to debug complex problems in critical infrastructure if no one understands code? It is possible that in future agents will be able to do that but it feels to me that we are not there yet.

[bawolff]

I dont think that will ever be possible.

At some point security becomes - the program does the thing the human wanted it to do but didn't realize they didn't actually want.

No amount of testing can fix logic bugs due to bad specification.

[skrtskrt]

AI as advanced fuzz-testing is ridiculously helpful though - hardly any bug you can in this sort of advanced system is a specification logic bug. It's low-level security-based stuff, finding ways to DDOS a local process, or work around OS-level security restrictions, etc.

[bawolff]

I'm kind of doubtful that AI is all that great at fuzz testing. Putting that aside though, we are talking about web browsers here. Security issues from bad specification or misunderstanding the specification is relatively common.

[thephyber]

Re-read the thread you are replying to.

Each of the last 4 comments in your thread (including yours) are conflating what they mean by AI.

[skrtskrt]

You must be lost.

[falcor84]

Well, yes, agreed - that is the essential domain complexity.

But my argument is that we can work to minimize the time we spend on verifying the code-level accidental complexity.

[bawolff]

Sure, but that is what we've been doing since the early 2000s (e.g. aslr, read only stacks, static analysis, etc).

And we've had some succeses, but i wouldn't expect any game changing breakthroughs any time soon.

[mort96]

I disagree. Thorough testing provides some level of confidence that the code is correct, but there's immense value in having infrastructure which some people understand because they wrote it. No amount of process around your vibe slop can provide that.

[px43]

That's just status quo, which isn't really holding up in the modern era IMO.

I'm sure we'll have vibed infrastructure and slow infrastructure, and one of them will burn down more frequently. Only time will tell who survives the onslaught and who gets dropped, but I personally won't be making any bets on slow infrastructure.

[falcor84]

I somewhat agree, but even then would argue that the proper level at which this understanding should reside is at the architecture and data flow invariants levels, rather than the code itself. And these can actually be enforced quite well as tests against human-authored diagrammatical specs.

[t43562]

If you don't fully understand the code how do you know it implements your architecture exactly and without doing it in a way that has implications you hadn't thought of?

As a trivial example I just found a piece of irrelevant crap in some code I generated a couple of weeks ago. It worked in the simple cases which is why I never spotted it but would have had some weird effects in more complicated ones. It was my prompting that didn't explain well enough perhaps but how was I to know I failed without reading the code?

[jbvlkt]

Exactly. We do not have another artifact than code which can be deterministically converted to program. That is reason we have to still read the code. Prompt is not final product in development process.

[mort96]

I disagree. The code itself matters too.

[irishcoffee]

Who is writing the tests? An LLM? If so, they have little value.

[teaearlgraycold]

Well if the big players want to tell me their models are nearly AGI they need to put up or shut up. I don't want a stochastically downloaded C compiler. I want tech that improves something.

[rl3]

>> ...give him unlimited model access

>We do not need vibe-coded critical infrastructure.

I think when you have virtually unlimited compute, it affords the ability to really lock down test writing and code review to a degree that isn't possible with normal vibe code setups and budgets.

That said for truly critical things, I could see a final human review step for a given piece of generated code, followed by a hard lock. That workflow is going to be popular if it already isn't.

[mort96]

The availability or lack thereof of compute has absolutely nothing to do with my opinion. More vibe coded tests doesn't fix the problem.

[rl3]

It might when an individual function has 50 different models reviewing it, potentially multiple times each.

Perhaps part of a complex review chain for said function that's a few hundred LLM invocations total.

So long as there's a human reviewing it at the end and it gets locked, I'd argue it ultimately doesn't matter how the code was initially created.

There's a lot of reasons it would matter before it gets to that point, just more to do with system design concerns. Of course, you could also argue safety is an ongoing process that partially derives from system design and you wouldn't be wrong.

It occurred to me there's some recent prior art here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721953

It's probably fair to say the Linux kernel is critical infra, or at least a component piece in a lot of it.

[mort96]

I do not care how strong your vibes are and how many claudes you have producing slop and reviewing each others' slop. I do not think vibe coding is appropriate for critical infrastructure. I don't understand why you think telling me you'd have more slop would make me appreciate it more.

[rl3]

Fair enough. I respect the commitment to purity.

In the not so distant future you'll probably be one of the few who haven't had their actual coding skills atrophy, and that's a good thing.

[rafaelmn]

If you're trusting core contributors without AI I don't see why you wouldn't trust them with it.

Hiring a few core devs to work on it should be a rounding error to Anthropic and a huge flex if they are actually able to deliver.

[mort96]

I trust people to understand the code they write. I don't trust them to understand code they didn't write.

[weregiraffe]

So you don't trust projects with more than one author? By definition, they'd have to understand each other's code.

[mort96]

Different people can understand different parts of the code.

[t43562]

It's extremely tempting to write stuff and not bother to understand it similar to the way most of us don't decompile our binaries and look at the assembler when we write C/C++.

So, should I trust an LLM as much as a C compiler?

[jddj]

What if it impairs judgement?

[scrame]

Unfortunately we're going to get it whether or not we need it.

[andai]

They're getting really good at proofs and theorems, right?

[IshKebab]

Proofs/theorems and memory safety vulnerabilities are a special case because there's an easy way to verify whether the model is bullshitting or not.

That's not true for coding in general. The best you can do is having unreasonably good test coverage, but the vast majority of code doesn't have that.

[nicoburns]

> show us servo contrib log or something like that

Servo may not be the best project for this experiment, as it has a strict no-AI contributions allowed policy.

[beepbooptheory]

Oh good, I was worried for a sec that people wouldn't be talking about AI in this thread.

[Night_Thastus]

The problem with such infrastructure is not the initial development overhead.

It's the maintenance. The long term, slow burn, uninteresting work that must be done continually. Someone needs to be behind it for the long haul or it will never get adopted and used widely.

Right now, at least, LLMs are not great at that. They're great for quickly creating smaller projects. They get less good the older and larger those projects get.

[rafaelmn]

I mean the claim is that next generation models are better and better at executing on larger context. I find that GPT 5.4 xhigh is surprisingly good at analysis even on larger codebases.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2029348087538565612

Stuff like this where these models are root causing nontrivial large scale bugs is already there in SOTA.

I would not be surprised if next generation models can both resolve those more reliability and implement them better. At that point would be sufficiently good maintainers.

They are suggesting that new models can chain multiple newly discovered vulnerabilities into RCE and privilege escalations etc. You can't do this without larger scope planning/understanding, not reliabily.

[andai]

Replicating Chromium as a benchmark? ;)

Replicating Rust would also be a good one. There are many Rust-adjacent languages that ought to exist and would greatly benefit mankind if they were created.

[dabinat]

The true solution to this is to fund things that are important, especially when billion-dollar companies are making a fortune from them.

[manx]

Agreed. Which other software does society need badly?

[raincole]

Perhaps, you know, not every thing, especially not every thread on HN, has to be about AI?

I read the link twice and no AI or LLM mentioned. I don't know why people are so eager to chime in and try to steer the conversation towards AI.

[rafaelmn]

Someone in the thread said they vibe coded something trivial so I just made the connection. I'd like to see Servo get to full browser status. I don't think they have the resources to do it. Anthropic is virtue signaling about their commitment to security in foundational software. Seems like a perfect match - even if Servo won't take it upstream - other companies spent hundreds of millions on Firefox/Chromium skins - Anthropic could ship their OSS browser based on Servo and showcase how effective their models are at coding. Hiring a few core contributors and giving them model access should be cheap in comparison to ARC acquisition and such. Will echo way louder than toy C compilers and benchmaxxing.