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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Did you ever get around to trying my suggestion for setting up a code harness and predigesting your code base?

So I'm asking @self_made_human and others who seem more on-board with the AI hype train: does this report from a knowledgeable and experienced developer change your opinions on the future trajectory of AI at all?

I don't really have any strong opinions on what one dude has to say about about a model I can't otherwise evaluate myself, but in your own article the guy you're apparently claiming is skewering ai and that should put us in shambles also said:

We also see a high volume of high quality security reports flooding in: security researchers now use AI extensively and effectively.

Like, I dunno, man. Do you not feel like the goal posts are shifting here? It's useful but one report from mythos on one repo where the guy said he was disappointed that there weren't more bugs found because other AI tools had found more(Which were already patched and thus not available for mythos to find)? This is your justification for the whole of AI being slop and hype?

I guess I update slightly in favor of mythos being closer to the current public sota rather than a league ahead of it. Perhaps the Curl codebase is just actually so tight that the whatever IQ equivalent level security expert that mythos represents wasn't about to find much, I promise you that other projects are not so tight.

curl is one of the most fuzzed and audited C codebases in existence (OSS-Fuzz, Coverity, CodeQL, multiple paid audits). Finding anything in the hot paths (HTTP/1, TLS, URL parsing core) is unlikely.

Do you not feel like the goal posts are shifting here?

The original claim Anthropic made was that Mythos could do all of this independently. That it didn't need a highly experienced security researcher guiding it. In fact that the reason it was so dangerous is because any lay-person could use Mythos to "hack the planet" It's not goal post shifting to point out, no Mythos is just a SOTA tool and like most SOTA AI tools it works better by having an experienced human guiding it on what to code, look for, design the system etc. The AI ecosystem is very hype oriented, people claim far more than what is realistically delivered.