Ken Thompson's 1984 ACM Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust," published in Communications of the ACM volume 27, issue 8, pages 761–763, demonstrated that a malicious compiler can inse…
A new paper (arxiv 2607.24888) demonstrates that Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack can be executed using GNU strip, a build utility that neither reads nor generates source code, by tampering with f…
GitHub user rajnandan1 released ken, a plugin that instills Ken Thompson's systems discipline into AI agents, with benchmarks showing it rewrote 6 of 6 planted-rot functions versus 0 of 6 without it. …
Google has published an argument on its Developers Blog explaining why Go is becoming the dominant language for AI-assisted software engineering. The post highlights Go's design philosophy prioritizin…
Google's Go programming language, created by Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer, and Ken Thompson, is positioned as ideal for AI-assisted software engineering because it prioritizes code review, verification,…
Andrew, a software developer, compares using the Unix tool sed versus Anthropic's Claude AI assistant for a refactoring task, finding sed took about six minutes to get right while Claude completed the…
A developer built a system that replaces generic AI review with a board of expert personas based on real people like Ken Thompson, Don Norman, and Linus Torvalds, each with documented, citeable princi…
Deploying AI models, even open-weight ones, introduces significant black box risk because current reverse engineering capabilities cannot predict model behavior or reliably detect backdoors. Research …
A developer proposes a method called 'Named-Persona Adversarial Review' to overcome the blind spots of single-modal LLMs in code review. By asking the AI to review code as specific named individuals w…
A developer built a methodology for turning personal tools into open source contributions and subjected it to a novel AI-assisted review process that role-plays as 24 famous engineers, including Linus…