AI Is Forcing Us to Pay Off 40 Years of Technical Debt
A long-dormant out-of-memory bug in PHP, reported back in 2024 and dismissed as a mere crash, turned into a critical vulnerability that threatened NASA, Wikipedia, the White House, and countless WordPress and Drupal sites. Aided by AI tools, researchers at Calif found a way to run arbitrary code on host servers within two weeks. The episode exposes a brutal asymmetry: AI makes finding bugs cheap while fixing them stays expensive, and open-source projects like PHP carry the burden.
One of the things we're witnessing now is that all the legacy software that was written by humans over the last 40 years is being exposed. Now it is time for the technical debt to be paid off.