"Bugmageddon." I heard this term on a recent Journal episode and it sounded both funny and scary.
Some people call it the "Vulnerability Armageddon" because AI is starting to uncover software flaws at a scale and speed that security teams may struggle to keep up with. Anthropic's Mythos found a bug in OpenBSD that had gone unnoticed for more than 27 years. It also found 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox in a single pass.
AI is changing the speed of vulnerability discovery. Once those vulnerabilities are found, the real work begins.
People are debating me on the point that human engineers will have to be involved to understand, triage, patch, and ship fixes to these vulnerabilities. Some argue that if AI can find bugs, it can fix them too. Maybe partly. But security fixes are rarely just about changing one line of code. The hard part is making sure that in fixing one vulnerability, you are not creating another problem somewhere else.
The Journal compared this moment to Y2K. In both cases, old software carried hidden problems for years. Once the risk became clear, teams had to go back, audit systems, and fix buried technical debt before it caused damage at scale.
The vulnerabilities were always there. Mythos is the key that opened up this Pandora's box — exposing how much hidden security debt has been sitting underneath modern software.
I will soon be sharing what is under the hood of the OpenBSD bug, a 27-year-old flaw that survived five million automated tests, and look at what it took for AI to finally spot it.