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It's crazy to me is that the Github API for this is so nascent for something that has such a large attack surface. E.g., even if you pin your actions directly, there's still no equivalent of an action lockfile* so all the transitives are still unpinned.

*(I think Github said this is on the roadmap a few months ago)


Last year I thought that AI-generated code would be scanned the same way as human-generated code. What I realized from working on Guardian was that being in the agent loop is an unfair advantage: you can ask the agent to switch to a secure library (eg, defusedxml for python) and it will happily do it before code lands. If you asked a developer to do that in a CI code review, it's a lot more context switching and work.

That means there is an unprecedented opportunity to make both security and developer outcomes better by shaping agent behavior towards secure defaults. Even things like "don't add dependencies unless these conditions are met; we only want top1000 NPM dependencies, otherwise just write it yourself."

Capabilities like this will have a big impact on the OSS ecosystem (positive and negative) as they profilerate.


Top comment has a great explicit refutation:

> This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.


Not super surprising that Anthropic is shipping a vulnerability detection feature -- OpenAI announced Aardvark back in October (https://openai.com/index/introducing-aardvark/) and Google announced BigSleep in Nov 2024 (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/clo...).

The impact question is really around scale; a few weeks ago Anthropic claimed 500 "high-severity" vulnerabilities discovered by Opus 4.6 (https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/). There's been some skepticism about whether they are truly high severity, but it's a much larger number than what BigSleep found (~20) and Aardvark hasn't released public numbers.

As someone who founded a company in the space (Semgrep), I really appreciated that the DARPA AIxCC competition required players using LLMs for vulnerability discovery to disclose $cost/vuln and the confusion matrix of false positives along with it. It's clear that LLMs are super valuable for vulnerability discovery, but without that information it's difficult to know which foundation model is really leading.

What we've found is that giving LLM security agents access to good tools (Semgrep, CodeQL, etc.) makes them significantly better esp. when it comes to false positives. We think the future is more "virtual security engineer" agents using tools with humans acting as the appsec manager. Would be very interested to hear from other people on HN who have been trying this approach!


>There's been some skepticism about whether they are truly high severity

To be honest this is an even bigger problem with Semgrep and other SAST tools. Developers just want the .1% of findings that actually lead to issues, but flagging patterns will always lead to huge false positive rates.

I do something similar as what you suggested and it does work well -pattern match + LLM. The downside is this only applies to SAST and so far nobody has found a way to address the findings that make up 90% of a security team's noise, namely SCA and container images.


My first use case of an LLM for security research was feeding Gemini Semgrep scan results of an open source repo. It definitely was a great way to get the LLM to start looking at something, and provide a usable sink + source flow for manual review.

I assumed I was still dealing with lots of false positives from Gemini due to using the free version and not being able to have it memorize the full code base. Either way combining those two tools makes the review process a lot more enjoyable.


> What we've found is that giving LLM security agents access to good tools (Semgrep, CodeQL, etc.) makes them significantly better

100% agree - I spun out an internal tool I've been using to close the loop with website audits (more focus on website sec + perf + seo etc. rather than appsec) in agents and the results so far have been remarkable:

https://squirrelscan.com/

Human written rules with an agent step that dynamically updates config to squash false positives (with verification) and find issues while also allowing the llm to reason.


Definitely not a surprise they ship it. This is manageable for a small subset of repos scanned once. Reality is that code changes frequently and such rescans are expensive especially with thinking models. You can open a PR too, but then there are other missing workflows as rebasing when there are conflicts, finding the devs with the right expertise to review/test the fix, etc. bottom line - I see it is an interesting research tool but not more than that.


"Staged publishing: A new publication model that gives maintainers a review period before packages go live, with MFA-verified approval from package owners. This empowers teams to catch unintended changes before they reach downstream users—a capability the community has been requesting for years."

Overdue but welcome!


This is explicitly not the conclusion Pascal drew with the wager, as described in the next section of the Wikipedia article: "Pascal's intent was not to provide an argument to convince atheists to believe, but (a) to show the fallacy of attempting to use logical reasoning to prove or disprove God..."


Did he say Pascal drew that conclusion and remove it with an edit or something? As it's written now it seems like you're correcting him for something he didn't post.


Do you store your SSDs powered? They can lose information if they're not semi-frequently powered on.


Powering on the SSD does nothing. There is no mechanism for passively recharging a NAND flash memory cell. You need to actually read the data, forcing it to go through the SSD's error correction pipeline so it has a chance to notice a correctable error before it degrades into an uncorrectable error. You cannot rely on the drive to be doing background data scrubbing on its own in any predictable pattern, because that's all in the black box of the SSD firmware—your drive might be doing data scrubbing, but you don't know how long you need to let it sit idle before it starts, or how long it takes to finish scrubbing, or even if it will eventually check all the data.


Adding to this... Spinrite can re-write the bits so their charge doesn't diminish over time. There's a relevant Security Now and GRC article for those curious.


Re-writing data from the host system is quite wasteful of a drive's write endurance. It probably shouldn't be done more often than once a year. Reading the data and letting the drive decide if it needs to be rewritten should be done more often.


How about a background cron of diff -br copyX copyY , once per week, for each X and Y .. if they are hot/cold-accessible

Although, in my case, the original is evolving, and renaming a folder and few files makes that diff go awry.. needing manual intervention. Or maybe i need a content-based-naming - $ ln -f x123 /all/sha256-of-x123 then compare those /all


I've been reading a lot of eMMC datasheets and I see terms like "static data refresh" advertised quite a bit.

You're quite right that we have no visibility into this process, but that feels like something to bring up with the SFF Committee, who keeps the S.M.A.R.T. standard.


Might need to go through the NVMe consortium rather than SFF/SNIA. Consumer drives aren't really following any SFF standards these days, but they are still implementing non-optional NVMe features so they can claim compliance with the latest NVMe spec.


best is to have a filesystem that can do background bit rot scrubbing


For C, you might be interested in https://github.com/weggli-rs/weggli or https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep (I work on the latter). Both are also tree-sitter based.


Looks like the `ets` readme has a direct comparison:

> The purpose of ets is similar to that of moreutils ts(1), but ets differentiates itself from similar offerings by running commands directly within ptys, hence solving thorny issues like pipe buffering and commands disabling color and interactive features when detecting a pipe as output. (ets does provide a reading-from-stdin mode if you insist.) ets also recognizes carriage return as a line seperator, so it doesn't choke if your command prints a progress bar. A more detailed comparison of ets and ts can be found below.


I wrote up a Semgrep rule as a comparison to add! (also tree-sitter based, `pip install Semgrep`, https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep, or play with live editor link: https://semgrep.dev/playground/s/nJ4rY)

    pattern: |-
       def $FUNC(..., database, ...):
           $...BODY
    fix: |-
      def $FUNC(..., db, ...):
          $...BODY


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