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Programming · by Diego Quispe · 2026-11-04

IEEE Spectrum: "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

spectrum.ieee.org

The piece uses the PHP2Shell vulnerability as an example: AI tools are getting very good at finding old bugs in old code, which means decades of 'it works, don't touch it' are suddenly exploitable at scale. Attackers get the same tools as defenders. Is your team actually seeing more legacy CVEs land, or is this mostly a headline?

29 sparks · 4 comments

Comments

Maksym Bondar · 13 likes

we got 3 reports on a 2009 perl service last month. all real. all found by some scanner w/ llm triage

Nima Ahmadi · 13 likes

perl in 2026, respect to whoever is on call for that

Nusrat Akter · 13 likes

the debt was always there, ai just turned on the lights

Youssef Mahmoud · 1 likes

cool so now my 'temporary' fix from 2014 has a cve number