It is almost like the people developing all this shit have not even been around for the last 40 years of software development. The Dunning Kruger effect is spinning out of control in Silicon Valley.
Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius
Avoiding the "lethal trifecta" – access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and an external communication path – is difficult enough when working with AI agents. But the use of connectors – integrations with third-party services like Gmail or Slack – expands the scope of concern in a way that makes it exceedingly …
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Sunday 19th July 2026 19:17 GMT jake
For "people", read "kids".
They haven't been around for 40 years. In fact, most of them do not remember a world without iPhones.
To them, computers are black boxes that they are incapable of understanding the inner workings of, either by personal choice, or by corporate decree.
It's all nothing more than magic to the poor, uncomprehending saps. They both don't know, and don't WANT to know, because that might be dangerous. And hard.
I fear we are losing something very important that is going to prove to be almost impossible to get back. The hackishness that drove the early industry is being eradicated.
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Monday 20th July 2026 13:54 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: For "people", read "kids".
Don't overlook the fact that there are people who were trainees before it* existed so couldn't know it.
* I gather it's some sort of science fiction film. I can't be bothered with science fiction - so have survived an entire working life and a lot of retirement without knowing it. A Jake said, it has nothing to do with reality.
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Monday 20th July 2026 17:05 GMT Philo T Farnsworth
Re: For "people", read "kids".
Even though I've long since outgrown the stuff1 I don't discount it.
Far too many AI and crypto bros seem to think it's some sort of blueprint for the future, especially if you extend the reach of the genre into sword and sorcery fantasy.
Witness all the ventures named after Lord of the Rings characters and talismans. I suspect Tolkein would be simultaneously amused and horrified that his little experiment in philology wrapped in an Aurthurian-adjacent2 fairy tale has spawned such unremitting awfulness (I'm talkin' to you, Peter Thiel).
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1 As someone said, the golden age of science fiction is between 12 and 15.
2 Where do you think Gandalf came from?
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Monday 20th July 2026 23:17 GMT jake
Re: For "people", read "kids".
Naming boxen after Tolkien characters officially became old after I ran across the fifth server named "Bilbo" in a single day (two at Berkeley, one each at Stanford, San Jose State and Mission College). That was in roughly 1980.
Gandalf made PABXs, line-drivers, terminal host selectors & the like starting in the very early '70s ... I assumed they got their name from the books, but dunno for sure.
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Sunday 19th July 2026 19:25 GMT itscomplicated
To be fair, for most of that time software has been deterministic. If you want to limit an API's blast radius you either ensure the calling code doesn't do bad things (from the caller side) or establish permissions on the credential (from the service side)
Neither of those are really viable when you want a (effectively) non-deterministic software system to take action on your behalf automatically. You can't control exactly what it will do and if you lock down the credential too much it won't be able to do what you want. So what do you do? Human-authorize each call? Write some heuristic to monitor the calls? Allow the bad things but have rollback functionality?
It's still being worked on.
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Monday 20th July 2026 00:24 GMT jake
I'm fairly certain a small village of Gauls was doing something similar around the time of Ceasar ... but they used fresh fish, not cured fish, as the preserved stuff was coin of the realm at the time. Still is, come to think of it ... Have you SEEN the price of kippers (or baklava or smoked salmon or katsuobushi) recently?
With that said, I wasn't intending to kink-shame. Apologies if I did. Beers all around.
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