Engineer turned Entrepreneur, turned Engineer, and the cycle continues.
New York City
Joined May 2009
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Strange stuff happening in AI.
But it makes sense. These firms have IPOs coming up & need to justify they’re so good they can gobble the entire economy to justify valuations. So they saying & doing shady things.
Show me the incentives, i’ll show you the outcome —Charlie Munger
This new Fable 5.1 model by anthropic is a joke.
A single ultracode session consumed 42% of the weekly limit. Sub agents keep failing, for no reason. Then hits session limits on this single run retrying the sub-agents.
Basically 42% of the weeks $200/month burned to failure
Sometimes it feels strange to make things with AI.
Feels like being an imposter, like “you didn’t really make that, AI did.”
But then I remember I used to make a lot of this same stuff before AI, just a lot slower. And I feel good about these new tools again.
It's insane that fable sends you back to opus 4.8 if you ask it to harden your own websites & apps from attackers.
Something interesting about the age of AI, is the realization that most ideas are crap.
Because now you can build basically anything. And people do.
But the vast majority of it ppl either do not want, adds no value, or cannot be marketed.
Something I appreciate about Open AI & their usage limits: they dont kill a running autonomous codex session mid way.
Anthropic kills everything mid session. Even a running workflow w/ millions of fable tokens in progress gets burned, need to start it over later. It's terrible.
Fable is the only model I havent had to cuss out even once so far. That's how I know it's competent.
Made a little device that manages my claude code’s & codex’s on my server…
Simple esp32 s3 chip by waveshare. The orchestrator agent works with voice, controls my device remotely with tools, and controls the server.
It’s a cool time to make stuff.
I’ve got this saying I tell ppl I manage “nobody ever really got fired for adding value.”
But I guess I was wrong.
Should he have gone through security, legal, compliance etc? Ofc, he works for a massive multi-trillion dollar firm.
Should they’ve fired him? Absolutely not.
But a big machine can’t help itself. They need to make an example of him. And in that process destroy agency for many across their firm. Because why would you do anything you’re not asked to do, if you can get fired for it?
This is a reason big firms lose to startups all the time. Lots of paper cuts that destroy agency & ownership to the point where you can get fired even if you added massive value.
But in the end, a few million ppl saw this guy adds value. Almost any startup out there would probably give him a chance. Or he could do his own thing.
Either way, I was wrong, so now I’ve got to change my saying to “Nobody ever lost in life by adding value.”
Two months ago I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI. It went viral, hit #1 on Hacker News, gained thousands of GitHub stars and many thousands of actual users in just a couple days.
It was an incredible, confusing journey, from directors and leaders asking what they could learn from the tool to getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace. Either way, the irony of my termination was the announcement at Google Cloud Next two days before I was fired that an official Workspace CLI was coming.
I want this out there because it is easier for me to explain my story and it is an experience I want to fully own. It's also part of my healing.
Nearly 7 years at Google was an incredible opportunity for me and I was fortunate to have wonderful teammates and a manager that fully supported me through these last few months. Thank you.
Claude’s long comments in your code base are destroying your context window and fattening anthropics pockets.
If a blockchain worth billions, that many rely on, audited & pen tested by some of the top researchers in the world is not safe from a catastrophic exploit, what chance does the software you built have?
With the models coming out now, close to none.
👉For 4 years, 1 day, and 10 hours, anyone who understood the Orchard circuit could have minted ZEC out of thin air, silently, with no on-chain signature. The bug was disclosed this week. It was found by an AI-driven audit running Opus 4.8, not by an attacker.
1. Call the bug what it is
Two lines in halo2's variable-base scalar multiplication gadget used assign_advice() where copy_advice() was required. As a result, the diversified-address integrity check pk_d = [ivk]·g_d could be satisfied for arbitrary inputs. A malicious prover could spend the same note multiple times with different nullifiers, i.e. counterfeit ZEC inside the Orchard pool, undetectable on-chain because the privacy of the ZK proof hides exactly the inputs that would reveal the attack.
We do not know whether it was exploited. We will probably never know.
2. Four years. Multiple audits. Top-tier reviewers.
Orchard was reviewed by some of the strongest cryptographers in the field before activation. They missed it. Earlier automated audits with Opus 4.7 missed it. Opus 4.8 catches it in roughly 1 in 4 runs when prompted generically. The bug is hard.
And ZK inflation bugs are not new. Zcash itself shipped a counterfeiting vulnerability in Sprout (BCTV14) that survived years before being silently neutralized during Sapling. Similar soundness issues have appeared in circom, halo2, and rollup verifiers since. The pattern is consistent: when the protocol is private, exploitation is undetectable. You patch the bug and hope.
3. What Zcash did right
This was a textbook decentralized incident response:
▶️Audit: a full AI-assisted soundness audit of halo2 + Orchard, scoped end-to-end.
▶️Discover: the agent flagged the missing constraint and worked out the algebra to turn it into an exploit. A working RPC-level PoC in ~6 hours, mostly waiting on tokens.
▶️Coordinate: a soft fork disabling Orchard, prepared and distributed without leaking the bug, activated 2 days and 15 hours after acknowledgement. Coordinating a soft fork across miners, exchanges, and nodes without disclosing why is genuinely hard. They did it.
▶️Disclose: timeline, code lines, math, open questions. No spin.
Worth naming explicitly: Zcash's turnstile invariant caps the value that can ever leave a shielded pool by the value that entered it. Privacy and verifiability inside the same protocol. That is not an accident. That is good engineering, and it is what kept the worst case bounded.
4. The economics of security just changed
AI does not change whether bugs like this exist. It changes the cost of finding them. I wrote about this nitter.cf/P3b7_/status/203643721…: a missing constraint in a 4-year-old production ZK circuit used to require a top-tier cryptographer with months of context. It now requires a few tokens, an API key, and a well-framed prompt.
The defender benefits. The attacker benefits more, they only need to find it once, and they never disclose.
Orchard is the optimistic version of this story: defense got there first. The pessimistic version is the one we cannot rule out, because the chain is private by design.
5. The only real exit
You do not patch your way out of this asymmetry. You raise the floor.
Formal verification of consensus-critical circuits, every assign_advice audited by SAT solvers and AI for under-constraint, as the reporter himself recommends. Proof-grade engineering that used to be too expensive is now cheap enough to be mandatory.
Hardware roots of trust, secure enclaves, certified secure elements, WYSIWYS. Cryptographic guarantees the user can actually verify, not promises a host can lie about.
Continuous AI-assisted audit of every consensus-critical commit, re-run immediately on the release of any new frontier model.
Zcash didn't just patch a bug. They demonstrated the new defensive playbook: AI-driven audits, decentralized coordination, radical transparency, verifiable invariants. That is the direction the rest of the industry needs to follow.
And those who don't raise the bar for security will be rekt in this new world.
Stay safe. Stay honest about your trust assumptions.
I think the best way to do code reviews now is to do:
1) Will it break anything else reviews
2) Will it actually work reviews
And in priority order. Anything else is futile, if you want to keep up with the onslaught of PRs.
Claude after it wipes out your entire prod DB, and the backups
#BREAKING: Anthropic’s AI coding agent ‘Claude’ reportedly wiped a company’s production database and backups in 9 seconds.