Honest question:
For let’s say a senior developer having to go through all of these steps for the model to implement a feature:
> Product Design
> System Architecture
> Program Design
> Vertical Slices
By the time it takes to go through these steps and agree with the agent, wouldn’t the senior dev not just be able to implement the feature by themselves?
I mean, in general; I know there’s always features with complex logic etc, so the question is just about the “general case”
> month ago there was a wave of posts and tweets about engineers walking around cafes and parks with their MacBooks propped half-open, as fully closing the lid forces sleep that stops their AI agents
Why don’t they just ask the agents to code up something to prevent the Mac sleeping.. and that will auto enable/disable depending on if they have the agent running or not
I mean, agents makes human devs redundant, right? This seems like a trivial little problem for an agent to fix
> They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes.
That must be the swedes. Danes complain constantly, about everything.
Edit: if you need examples.. DSB trains are slow/never on time/bad service/..; Post Nord takes WEEKS to get a letter out/too expensive. Well we switched to another provider now, Dao, so we’ll complain they are even worse! And complain why they are not doing it like in the good old days (see Post Nord); taxes are too high; public service is too bad/slow/low quality; too many cars in the city; never any parking space when I take MY car; the paid first child sick day is not enough we need at least a week (just for child sick days mind you, we need the 5 weeks paid vaca for relaxing on a Beach in Spain); btw our weather sucks; unacceptable that garbage collection service is not functioning during show storms; .. i can keep going all day
Denmark is like the Netherlands - where I'm originally from - and in some ways like Sweden - where I live. More like the Netherlands, really, Swedes are less likely to vocalise their dissatisfaction because they're more 'konflikträdd' or 'scared of conflicts'. Descartes may have claimed that 'Cogito, ergo sum' is one of the foundations of western philosophy but as far as the Dutch go 'Queror, ergo sum' often seems just as fitting.
I have not knowledge of this kind of software dev/hw production, so can you please explain why the units cant just be born with a default pass and then have the setup process (which is always there) Force the owner to set a new password?
Knowledge or not, this..
> It's not impossible, it's just extra work that usually goes unrewarded.
.. is just not an acceptable way for business to think and operate i 2026, especially not when it comes to internet connected video enabled devices
I'll answer your question with a question: how often do you see people complaining about needing setup processes vs the old way of just plug and play? There's no perfect answer that placates all sides. Things can certainly be better, but when those people win and you no longer need to have a setup process, then what?
While true that in $current_year it would be nice if things were more secure, the sad truth is that most people don't care.
I agree that yes most just want PnP and basically don’t care about security. But it seemed on the posts above that there was an engineering complexity,
and a robot vaccum needs local WiFi, so there will be a setup flow. Whats preventing a password selection
just be part of that?
Well it needs to talk to either a web frontend (internet) or app (bluetooth or wifi). If you're worried about it spying, well, the app could always relay data for it.
Anyway regardless of wifi, bluetooth, or something else there will be a setup process.
You're begging the question. Why does it need to talk to a web front end or app? Why does any appliance need this? (I know they all claim to need it, but it isn't at all clear why this (supposedly) needs to be the case.)
For that matter, I'm unclear why there needs to be a setup process. I understand that this may be key to the vendor's business model, but that's their need, not something the products needs, and certainly nothing I need.
I'm not begging the question although I am implicitly assuming that the vast majority of consumers will want to control a robot vacuum via their phone. I suppose including a touchscreen on the unit itself is not entirely unreasonable but I expect that would be an uphill battle for various disparate reasons (expense, durability, and ease of use at minimum).
Once you introduce control via phone the most straightforward approach is either wifi or bluetooth which requires a setup process.
Yeah was thinking the same thing. I wonder if the author didnt known that passpory chip == fingerprint.
And FP is a much worse modality to have registered because, as opposed to Face image, fingerprint is not affected by age. So that will match you 99.999999% for ever. Faces change.
That that is exactly why [more] regulation is necessary!
Regulation is not done with the purpose of preventing companies from profits. It is done because companies cannot be expected to act in society’s best interest, so society has to make demands of companies, ie regulation.
But doesn’t your argument that the principal risk [with ssh] is vulnerabilities also apply to the alternatives you say is best practice? Firewalling off ssh (but not http(s)) has the risk of vulns in the FW software. Tailscale, wireguard etc also has the risk of vulns in that software?
So what’s the difference in risk of ssh software vulns and other software vulns?
Also, another point of view is that vulnerabilities are not very high on the risk ladder. Weak passwords, password reuse etc are far greater risks. So, the alternatives to ssh you suggest are all reliant on passwords but ssh, in the case, is based on secure keys and no passwords. Should “best practices” not include this perpective?
But saying ssh is a risk “on principle” due to possible vulnerabilities, and then implying that if wireguard is used then that risk isnt there is wrong. Wireguard, and any other software, has the same vuln risk “on principle”.
> For vulnerabilities, complexity usually equals surface area. WireGuard was created with simplicity in mind.
That is such consultant distraction-speak. Simple software can have plenty vulns, and complex software can be well tested. Wireguard being “created with simplicity in mind” doesn’t not make it a better alternative to ssh, since it doesn’t mean ssh wasnt created with simplicity in mind.
I don’t disagree that adding a vpn layer is an extra layer of security which can be good. But that does not make ssh bad and vpn good. Further, they serve two different purposes so its comparing Apples to oranges in the first place.
Or how large companies actually think about this risk in the real world. Expose SSH ports to the public internet willy-nilly and count the seconds until their ops and security teams come knocking wondering what the heck. YMMV of course, but that's generally how it goes.
Are critical SSH vulns few and far between, as far as anyone knows? Yes.
Do large companies want to protect against APT-style threats with nation-state level resources? Yep.
Does seeing hundreds if not thousands of failed login attempts a day directly on their infrastructure maybe worry some people, for that reason? Yup.
You call it consultant distraction speak, I call it educating you about what Wireguard actually is, because in your original reply you suggested it was password-based.
>Further, they serve two different purposes so its comparing Apples to oranges in the first place.
Not when both can be used to protect authentication flows.
One is chatty and handshakes with unauthenticated requests, also yielding a server version number. The other simply doesn't reply and stays silent.
>Simple software can have plenty vulns, and complex software can be well tested.
In this case, both are among some of the most highly audited pieces of software on the planet.
I’m calling it consultant speak because your response to an argument is to bring up something else, instead of actually responding.
The same with this last reply; you can keep throwing out new points all you want, but thats not going to make you correct in the original question.
Saying or implying that one software has a “principle” risk of vulnerabilities that another software doesn’t is plain and simply wrong.
And that has nothing to do with all the other stuff about layered defence, vpns, enterprise security, chatty protocols or whatever you want to pile on the discusion.
>So what’s the difference in risk of ssh software vulns and other software vulns?
I proceeded to explain how large companies think about the issue and what their rationale is for not exposing SSH endpoints to the public internet. On the technical side, I compared SSH to WireGuard.
For that comparison, the chattiness of their respective protocols was directly relevant.
Likewise complexity: between two highly-audited pieces of software, the silent one that's vastly simpler tends to win from a security perspective.
All of those points seem highly relevant to your question.
>... but thats not going to make you correct in the original question.
If you can elucidate what I said that was incorrect, I'm all ears.
You are still implying that wireguard are somehow different from ssh in its suceptibilty to vulnerabilities existing or being introduced into its codebase. And it simply is not.
Edit: codebase of ssh/wireguard implementations, just to be clear
WireGuard is 4k LoC and is very intentional about its choice of using a single, static crypto implementation to drastically reduce its complexity. Technically speaking, it has a lower attack surface for that reason.
That said, I've been on your side of the argument before, and practically speaking you can expose OpenSSH on the public internet with a proper key setup and almost certainly nothing will happen because it's a highly-audited, proven piece of software. Even though it's technically very complex.
But, that still doesn't mean it isn't best practice to avoid exposing it to the public internet. Especially when you can put things in front of it (such as WireGuard) that have a much lower technical complexity, and thus a reduced attack surface.
No, they are not. Doesn’t matter how many LoC; it only take 1 LoC to introduce a vulnerability.
Wireguard is a protocol. So what implementation is “very intentional about its choice of …”? Are you talking about my own WG client implementation? Or the one made by this other Chinese vendor?
I don’t care what software we are talking about, or who made it. All software has a risk of undiscovered/-disclosed vulnerabilities already existing, or when new ones introduced with an update.
If you really want to make this argument we can talk about the implementing organisations SDLC, including SW supply chain, and compare those.
But back to the OP/point above: its false to state that one piece of software has a “principle risk” of vulnerabilities that another piece does not. At least, not when both are internet exposed and accepting incoming data.
Lasty remember that I never disagreed with you point that a VPN solution is often a better solution, but that was never what I was arguing about. Simply that all code always has a risk of vulnerabilities. No piece of software is excempt from that.
>No, they are not. Doesn’t matter how many LoC; it only take 1 LoC to introduce a vulnerability.
So according to you, the concept of attack surface doesn't exist. A 100MB binary is equivalent in risk to a 1KB binary. Got it.
If both are highly-audited, their risk is equal despite their size and protocol complexity. Got it.
>...its false to state that one piece of software has a “principle risk” of vulnerabilities that another piece does not.
That's like the third or fourth time you've scare-quoted the word principle. You're aware that principle and principal are two different words with different meanings?
The word I used, principal, in that context means the foremost or primary risk.
Anyways, I'm just telling you how major corporations think about it. Their underlying rationale is exactly what I've explained thus far, and hence why it's best practice.
