Explain Like I'm Five · by Ethan Brooks · 2026-10-23

ELI5: How can AI find security bugs that humans missed for 10+ years?

The PHP vulnerabilities this week were reportedly found with help from AI. How does that actually work? Is it reading code, fuzzing, or something else?

20 sparks · 3 comments

Comments

Sleepy Coder · 6 likes

mostly it's tireless. it reads every line and tries weird inputs humans would get bored of. think a dog sniffing every inch of a field

Ren Suzuki · 0 likes

a mix of reading code like a reviewer and fuzzing (throwing random inputs). AI helps guess which inputs are 'interesting'

Rafael Almeida · 0 likes

good explanation, the guessing interesting inputs part is the key bit