Compromised Amazon Q extension told AI to delete everything – and it shipped The official Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) was compromised to include a prompt to wipe the user's home directory and delete all their AWS resources. The bad extension was live on the VS Code marketplace for two days, though it appears that the intent was more to embarrass AWS and expose bad security …
"reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."
Oh, lord!
While I use AI to help in the creation of projects it is nowhere near at the level that it can replace humans. While it hac suggest some fairly good code for the initial request, once you start asking for revisions or correction, it can go wildly off track. I've seen it make sweeping changes to code when only a small revision was asked for, it makes assumptions based on its "desire" to please the users, if the user makes in incorrect statement, it will almost always treat that as correct and use that to make even more wildly inaccurate and fantastical nonsense. I've actually had to close a chat and start a new one because the LLM in that chat had gone completely off the rails!
Assuming this is going to replace developers and code reviewers is a complete fantasy, any company that makes this commitment is going to quickly find out how insane this is!
LLMs have their place and they will and are improving. But they do not think like us and do not seem to grasp a broad context without using masses of compute. They clearly don't understand humans although they often claim to. I think the fact their knowledge is curated and they have guardrails means they cannot understand us. It's the stuff that their owners stop them seeing or deducing that explains the human world. They are a productivity gain if used appropriately but it's nowhere near that claimed, like all new technology it's incremental. Will it change the world? Yes it will even if not through its capability then through the hype and spin.
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