AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
pseudolus · hn · 2026-11-04
An IEEE Spectrum piece argues AI is exposing decades-old software flaws at scale. Legacy patterns like PHP's shell-exec vulnerabilities survived for years because exploitation required manual effort; AI agents can now discover and trigger them automatically, forcing the industry to finally pay down 40 years of accumulated technical debt, with major implications for security auditing and system modernization.
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