77 pointsby dnw9 hours ago9 comments
  • StilesCrisisa minute ago
    > leaving a features behavior undefined

    Missing an apostrophe? A human wrote this! Love to see it.

  • mentalgear4 hours ago
    There is really just one way this goes and its upwards to the peak: which means full formal verification programming languages, OS uni-kernels, small TCB and probably verified HW for the most sensitive cases. Everything else will soon be hackable via 'brute compute' because economy of scale and accessibility of open weight models.
    • comboy34 minutes ago
      These programs are executed in environments. Which are run on a hardware. Big part of which is hidden software.

      And in general you can have 5 boxes verified and be surprised what comes out of them calling each other. Number of boxes is growing and possible interactions is exp. I don't think formal verification solves much.

  • jph2 hours ago
    I'm doing this attack surface tactic with Vix IDE, a terminal text editor that helps novices get comfortable with vi, emacs, git, jj, sql, commands, and more.

    The prompt I used was "Goal: rework to reduce the attack surface. Process: move features into feature-flag Rust crates. Output: build a minimal version. Questions: Ask me anything."

    https://github.com/vixide/vix

    This past weekend, Claude Fable/Opus/Sonnet together successfully refactored the whole Vix IDE codebase into many separate Rust crates and Cargo features.

    This refactor enables a security-oriented user to pick and choose, and also makes it easier for a security auditor to look at one capability at a time.

    If you're curious you can see the commit messages by Claude Sonnet. IMHO they're reasonably good.

    • philipp-gayret22 minutes ago
      Is there not a great irony in over a weekend throwing Fable/Opus/Sonnet at your project, refactoring your whole codebase, and the purpose of that project is to teach people to use vi, git, sql and so on. Why would anyone want to learn that in the current day and age, when as you state it can refactor a project over a weekend fairly autonomously?
  • Marcom0718 minutes ago
    Nice article! Thanks for sharing.
  • messe4 hours ago
    If only Claude didn't constantly drop to less capable models whenever it encountered anything vaguely cybersecurity related (despite being part of the Anthropic Cyber Verification Program and having Mythos access, albeit limited).

    We're strongly pushing for a move to a mix of Codex and open models at my workplace because of Anthropic's ridiculous nanny-ing.

    • oefrhaan hour ago
      Yep, gotta really mind the language, sometimes saying something like “when implementing <foo> feature you gotta pay attention to <bar> to avoid <baz> attack” is enough to trigger it, along with a cache miss of 300k tokens in the downgraded request to rub it in. Frustrating.
    • windexh8er2 hours ago
      These types of flip flop posts are the new security theater. One week Anthropic will post a doom and gloom about how open weight models running a fraction of a token per second on your Grandma's popped Android TV is a national security threat and the next week they'll tell you how awesome their 200+ billion parameter model is at doing something they don't actually allow you to do because they gatekeep all the normies. I really do hope history remembers them correctly, but I'm sure they'll be attributed as being a significant and load bearing linchpin during the new world order of LLMs.
      • nlan hour ago
        > their 200+ billion parameter model

        It's a 10T BTW.

    • LoganDark2 hours ago
      Also in the CVP and kept tripping cyber a couple days ago due to an MCP server that had the ability to connect to remote devices. Maybe it thought I was trying to make a C&C server. But you literally have to start the MCP first, have it generate a key, give the key to the remote device and then it'll generate its key, then give that key back to the MCP server before they can connect.
  • lptome4 hours ago
    I'd really expect a company like Anthropic to proof-read their posts. I found at least 4 typos in this.
    • cianmm3 hours ago
      Maybe they're signalling that the post was written by a human
      • steve19773 hours ago
        That's what Claude wants you to think.
  • Zambytean hour ago
    > Team: Frontier Red Team

    This sounds so arrogant, lol. I know it actually means that they red team the frontier AI models (which is a reasonable claim), but it looks like they are claiming to be the best red team in the world

    • cube00an hour ago
      Considering they have access to infinite free tokens they should be the best.
  • owebmaster5 hours ago
    The irony of a company using Nextjs for a chat app and React for a terminal UI talking about reducing attack surface.
    • esperent4 hours ago
      React is actually pretty good for any kind of reactive interface, and it's small. Something under 3k lines of code, and it's well battle tested at this point.

      You might have a dislike of react and that's fine, but it's not adding any significant attack surface to a project.

      Nextjs on the other hand...

      • bothers13 minutes ago
        > You might have a dislike of react and that's fine

        That's mighty white of you, it's a dirty job but someone's got to tell others what experiences and feelings are fine

      • Maken3 hours ago
        You should add the entire JS runtime you have to ship along React to that attack surface.
        • esperent23 minutes ago
          Wait until you hear about the attack surface you're exposed to when running Linux!
      • brazukadev3 hours ago
        Just the ReactFiberWorkLoop.js has 5k+ lines of code. React is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than you are thinking. And that's not counting Nextjs.
        • esperent24 minutes ago
          No that's including all the comments, types, dev only checks etc. I'm talking about what you get when using the production build.

          I had a quick look around and it's actually ~1000 lines apparently, in React 19.

      • shakna3 hours ago
        We're only 10 months out from React2Shell. That is not nearly enough time to say "battle-tested".
      • skydhashan hour ago
        > React is actually pretty good for any kind of reactive interface,

        It’s a different interface and the axiomatic layers are not the same.

        React expects a tree of nodes that will map to the UI and build on that to add reactivity. And that’s what the major GUI platforms do offer (QT, the web dom, Android, iOS,…).

        The terminal is a grid of characters modfied by the cursor concept. It is also modal (although most TUI uses one mode). What the cursor can do, and how the grid is rendered is terminal dependent (even though most current ones try to follow xterm-256color).

        Using React on top of that is a technical bad idea.

  • vasco6 hours ago
    These guys are now the biggest slowdown to fixing issues with their bullshit cyber detection. They drop a model, let the model find security issues in your code, then when you want to fix them you need to play a game of charades so it doesn't realize it's creating a validation and then a fix for the issue because you might be hacking yourself. Meanwhile attackers are using some ablated deepseek or what have you.
    • 5 hours ago
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    • xnorswap6 hours ago
      It's frustrating. Claude thinks it finds a way to hop from one client to another, but any attempt to get it to demonstrate it isn't relying on something that's already prevented runs into "safety" concerns and gets blocked.

      I'm not that hot on the idea of open models, but having something dangled in front of you but suddenly unable to verify is not a good feeling.

      With the right amount of coaxing you can sometimes get it to reproduce a PoC with a "TDD first" approach to fixing, but often now that gets blocked too.

      • featwanz4 hours ago
        Why wouldn't everyone be hot on open models? Security implications? First time I have heard someone lightly opposing the idea of fully open models.
        • xnorswap3 hours ago
          I'm not opposed to open models at all, I'm just slightly sceptical on how much some people push their use compared to the value we get out of a dirt cheap subscription.

          Propriety models are clearly subsidised by enterprise API contracts, so it makes sense to milk that for all its worth, provided one steers clear of any lock in so the option to switch is always there.

          Jumping to spending time managing and self-hosting open models is a nice ideal but I think it's a distraction to jump on that train without proven benefits given the value that other plans deliver.

          I don't mean I'm against the idea of open models, they were especially instrumental in Anthropic backing down from the "Fable only initially available 2 weeks" plan, which got extended up until Fable was over-taken by Opus in general usefulness.

          It's my view that any company sized appropriately for Teams plan should be milking it for all its worth while it still exists, and it is a waste to lose that opportunity by jumping on open models too early.

          If you're a larger enterprise then it would be a very different story, you'd already be paying more forced onto API pricing and would likely have the capacity to have a team look at open models without impacting delivery.

          • rgbrenner3 hours ago
            there is a middle ground between proprietary models and self-hosting: Fireworks, et al. Popular models like DeepSeek have a couple dozen providers on openrouter.
        • ajb4 hours ago
          There's a lot of lobbying against open models on the grounds of a) China and b) open models mean we won't be able to prevent a hard takeoff.
      • generic920346 hours ago
        On the other hand this sounds like a job guarantee, though. And not only for the moment, as it is not the capability of the model which is insufficient.
      • vasco6 hours ago
        So far I can always get around it by starting fresh sessions on a similar problem and without ever mentioning security issues, but why do I have to play this little theater with a tool we pay to use.
    • esperent6 hours ago
      > Meanwhile attackers are using some ablated deepseek or what have you.

      I think the hackers are just using "not Claude".

    • abc123abc1234 hours ago
      In the kingdom of vibe coderz the engineer is king!