[areoform]

When Fable was yanked, it was said to be (in part) due to the "jailbreak" of instructing Fable to "fix this code" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552687

Dumb question. If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code?

There can't be more than a few million to tens of millions software businesses / services / regularly used F/OSS projects on Earth.

Why not just give everyone a $100 Fable / Mythos credit to "fix [their] code?"

It would arguably benefit Anthropic. For $100M to $1B, Anthropic could execute the greatest ad campaign in human history. And they'd make the entire world more secure.

Most people aren't malicious. If you, as an engineer, consultant, founder, business owner, or maintainer, were given access to Mythos' capabilities wouldn't you ask it to fix your code?

I might be wrong. But I think that a greater amount of harm will be done in the long-term by trying to lack these capabilities and systems away behind permission gates and sealed doors. It creates an asymmetric world with haves and have nots. And in that world who gets to have access now decides who gets to be secure.

If everyone has mythos, no one has "Mythos."

Just let people fix their code.

[andy99]

> If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code?

Because it doesn’t really confer the advantage they claim, especially compared to e.g. paying an equivalent amount of money to do traditional security scanning.

It’s much better to play of FOMO and hype than to let everyone use it and be underwhelmed.

[usef-]

Are you claiming that LLMs aren't finding new issues compared to previous methods?

There's a huge number of security issues coming out in recent months, especially via Anthropic (glasswing etc). We don't have to take their word for it: look at the code. Some open source maintainers are talking about burnout due to spending so much time patching.

[overgard]

They're probably creating way more vulnerabilities than they're solving. Go look at OpenCode and tell me that any of that is sane. Or fuck, the OG of vibe coding, Claude basically is a terrifying attack vector. It's poorly reviewed and open to prompt injection and yet it basically has access to whatever the user has access to on most corporate machines. They can't even fix flickering bugs but somehow we're supposed to trust that they aren't opening our machines up to terrifying vulnerabilities? It's amazing to me that people will just let it run arbitrarily bash commands in their home directory without thinking, but all the sudden act gravely concerned about security in the age of overhyped LLMs.

[usef-]

I do think security issues in core building blocks like curl and the linux kernel (and almost every significant project) are still a concern even if developers are being sloppy on newly-built apps.

This isn't an "are LLMs net good or bad" argument. It's "are they finding many new security issues or not?". If it's the latter, we want to deal with it no matter where the issues are coming from.

(see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49077452 )

[bee_rider]

The suggestion was to have some AI system “fix” the code. They are reporting that they’ve found lots of bugs. Are they even claiming to have exhaustively found all the bugs? I don’t think even the most optimistic pitches would claim that.

I’d expect patching existing codebases to be an eternal treadmill as better models come about.

[usef-]

Who's suggesting that? They're sending reports to projects to fix. It's up to the projects on how they fix them.

No, I don't think all bugs are fixed. The point of the project (glasswing etc) was to fix as many as possible in the core software the world runs on before the capability to find vulnerabilities is available to everyone (black hats included). Which may only be a few months.

I do think everyone expects it to be an ongoing treadmill: models get better, find better vulnerabilities, etc.

[K0balt]

Yeah, there’s a lot of people that are in the “AI doesn’t work” camp. IDK what to tell them except that they are holding it wrong. My Anthropic subscription (in the hands of an experienced developer) is worth 4 mid tier or 2 top tier devs. And makes better code than the mids. If you “hold it right”.

[overgard]

I think you're describing a strawman. As a proper hater, I know these things have some useful functionality, but most of us don't think "stochastic tool that can do some useful things but also frequently fucks up" is worth two trillion dollars and massive overhyping from the most irritating people on the planet who can't even tell good code from bad.

[K0balt]

So you are saying that there are people that understand the value proposition and the utility, but don’t think it’s worth it to society (myself included) but who respond to that by lying about it not being effective? I guess that makes sense. Weird, but humans, so , yeah.

I react to that by leveraging a very useful but probably poisonous to society in the long term because humans aren’t good at having things that make them lazy tooll to try to mitigate the negative effects that it will definitely have if left to its own devices. I don’t see the point in raw resistance at this juncture.

[overgard]

You're talking in terms of "lies", but I would say this is more "not buying the hype". I use these things every day at work and at home, I'm aware of the workflows and "how to hold it", and I just don't see the theoretical results being promised. Some things are easier. It's not null. But every time someone says "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!" I want to trap them in those little "phantom zone" alternate dimension space prisons from the superman movies and launch them into space where nobody has to hear them ever again. It's ANNOYING and disingenuine. It's not a "skill issue" to push back against breathless hype from people that don't know what they're talking about.

IMO, the people spreading hype and fear are not neutral actors; if I just disagreed I wouldn't care. But I think they're causing actual harm based on a premise that isn't true. People are losing jobs. People are losing leverage in their work choices. Or if you want to be a cold capitalists, corporations are suffering after they have to rehire the workers they let go prematurely. That's why I put up resistance to it, because I think it's important right now that we don't accept the narrative being sold to us, nor the societal deal we're being offered (well, more railroaded into), both of which are bad.

[computably]

Spending their time patching, or reviewing slop "patches"?

[usef-]

They're not slop, if you're talking about recent ones. You might still be operating on information for a year or two ago.

Here's the curl project talking about the strain they're under from real reports (despite being a mature and well-vetted project):

> A thirty years old project could make you think you’ve seen most things already, but we have not been in this situation before.

> The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the speed of 2025 – meaning that on average we now get more than one report per day. The quality is way higher than ever before. The reports are typically very detailed and long.

- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/26/the-pressure/

---

Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman:

> "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now."

- https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/26/linux-kernel...

---

And ffmpeg, who previously complained about slop, 2025: https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1984220199193891166

Now say serious issues are being found, 2026: https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2066169070387413147

(I only point out their previous stance to show that they're not coming from pure AI hype.)

[computably]

I didn't say it's all slop, I questioned the cause of maintenance burden. A critical question is how much time is spent distinguishing and rejecting slop. If all the reports are getting "very detailed and long," identifying slop is also a more cumbersome task, even if the ratio improves from say 10/90 to 50/50.

That scale of improvement, btw, I still highly doubt, as slop largely originates from people either negligently or misguidedly directing their agents to completely autonomously find and report bugs. There's always going to be more noise than signal from random people doing random things. ffmpeg cited an actual product, not arbitrary netizens.

[usef-]

This seems a highly controversial post for some reason, judging by the repeated downvotes/upvotes. I'd be curious what I got wrong.

[Majromax]

> Dumb question. If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code?

In the specific case of cybersecurity, this is a reasonable medium-term outcome. IMO, the cybersecurity risk is akin to the spread of a disease among an 'immune-naive' group: we can suddenly deploy much stronger attack-finding tools against large, established codebases created with much weaker security designs. The path from here to there will be rough, but it's still fundamentally easier to write secure code than it is to exploit vulnerabilities. (It's just easier yet to write insecure code, giving our status quo problem.)

For other 'safety' matters, defense isn't so easy because the attack and target are so different. An AI propaganda bot or catfisher 'attacks' slowly-evolving human culture; one that instructs on explosives or bioterrorism directly interacts with an accomplice and not a victim. If you believe that knowledge on how to build a pipe-bomb must be restricted, then giving everyone access to Fable does not mitigate the risk.

The controversial limit of this attitude is recursive self improvement and an AI singularity with potentially destructive results. Proponents of this view think that sufficiently powerful AI is risky in nearly unimaginable ways such that the capability itself is harmful. This is part (but not all) of why Fable (originally?) degraded itself when apparently assisting with AI research.

[StilesCrisis]

I don't think a one-time $100 credit is enough. First of all, that isn't very much. But also, the volume of new code is going way up. Unless they keep giving out monthly free credits, it's just a stopgap.

[benlivengood]

> Dumb question. If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code?

That's basically project Glasswing; mixing responsible disclosure with frontier exploit generators.

[bluGill]

I doubt most bosses will give engineers the time. They care about security only to the extent that they have already been harmed by a lack of it. I would like to play with mythos, but on my own time my kids have plenty of activities to fill my time. My personal backlog of projects is only getting longer and none of it is something mythos could help. If I had more time is have restored my old truck instead of making payments on something new (in turn limiting what else I can afford to buy)

[pejrich]

It's not that simple. The odds are always stacked in favor of the hacker. It's like saying, "why not just make a prison that's impossible to escape from". You can make a prison very, very hard to escape from, but you have to shut off every possible way someone could try to escape, whereas someone trying to escape only has to find one vulnerability, once. It's much harder to plug every possible hole in a complex system than it is to find one point of weakness.

[usef-]

They are doing that (see their project glasswing over the past few months), but there's a lot more code in the world than you realise.

The problem with rolling it out is that bad and good actors can both use it at the same time, and bad actors will typically move faster than typical day-to-day software projects and patching schedules, so they set up glasswing to give access to the major producers and projects to patch their own software before it becomes available more widely (they've submitted tremendous numbers of security issues to open source projects)

[machinist5]

> Most people aren't malicious. If you, as an engineer, consultant, founder, business owner, or maintainer, were given access to Mythos' capabilities wouldn't you ask it to fix your code?

1. Some do not want to use LLMs because of grave ethical concerns.

2. Some do not want to use LLMs because of copyright concerns. Google v Oracle looms large in the background.

3. You presume the outcome of Fable / Mythos is a net positive for a FOSS project. Reviewing a firehose of code written without the context of the values and considerations of a particular project shaped over years or sometimes decades of formal and informal decisions is not necessarily the best use of the maintainers time.

[ashu1461]

I think eventually there will be Mythos grade AI which will be released which can solve a lot of bugs, even right now opus/fable can fix more things which companies can even keep track of.

The problem is how to make sure such AI is released safely. The same AI that can solve bugs can also find bugs in authentication or loopholes in critical systems.

[Gigachad]

I think there is some logic in delaying the rollout, giving it to the heads of the largest software products first to fix their code before dumping it on the general public. But yes eventually everyone will have this tech and it won't matter because the low hanging fruit will have all been picked clean.

[xboxnolifes]

For starters, it's probably closer to $10,000 per codebase for Fable/Mythos for a full review. That would be around 5 years of their current spending I think.

They really want that level of spend coming into the company, not going out.

[paxys]

$100 credit on Fable/Mythos will last a grand total of 10 minutes.

[overgard]

Because this is all kayfabe. You cannot take a single thing these companies or people say at face value.

[slashdave]

> why not just let it fix everyone's code?

That's the stated idea. Fix code before releasing to the public.