AI is grappling with a mountain of bugs

One of the things I keep hearing in the Christchurch tech market is how much bugs AI is finding. A recent cloud engineer I met at a meet-up told a story of using Claude to sort out a problem in a large tech stack, which then led to finding other issues / bugs that they had no idea about…

‘AI is not making us any less busy’….many people keep saying to me in the industry as it’s helping us find different ways to do things, improving systems and creating efficiencies but also discovering issues and unknown vulnerabilities. Like the recent massive PHP bugs ‘PHP2SHELL’ which caused web companies and their clients around the globe to go into panic mode in a huge global cybersecurity response just last week, in late October. Because PHP powers roughly 70% of the internet - including major CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla - these architectural flaws put tens of millions of servers at risk. 

So is AI helping more or hindering?

Although AI is exposing vulnerabilities this is a good thing as we’re uncovering unknown issues which can help patch things up before they become even larger risks in the wrong hands…things evolve.

Another great example of AI for good is how it can help solve legacy code issues…

I caught up with one of my old contacts - a brilliant contractor whom has been working on a large project which required close to 300 application integrations to be upgraded from an old legacy proprietary language. They reckoned this project would take about four years in old money but with the use of AI enabling the learning of the ancient language they’ll complete it in approximately 4 months - an unbelievable saving in time and cost.

They started by doing 4 weeks planning, learning the system and then started slowly to refractor the code and work on one integration at a time, then a couple, then four and so on slowly building up the project - a great win for AI tooling. Years ago you’d have to pay a retired contractor in sandals & walk shorts a gizillion dollars an hour - so another positive win for AI tooling and a win for the software industry overall. 

We’re certainly ‘doing more with less’ an example from an innovation leader recently started to create secure, sandboxed environments to give their business confidence to securely ramp up Apps in different domain specialities. The business can then see how the app runs for a period of time, if it adds value - keep it and continue to enhance, if not - just tear it down - code is cheap, keep experimenting and fail fast.

I’m Paul, lover of coffee, dogs, biking, surfing & skiing. Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment and People & Culture Consultancy based in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.

We specialise in recruiting jobs around the product development lifecycle in software, hardware & engineering! We have also made successful appointments within AI, hardware & firmware engineering, mechanical engineering, IoT, electrical & electronics engineering, web & digital marketing and executive search / senior leadership roles.