We’re living in a new world now — one where it’s an AI-powered penetration tester that “now tops an eminent US security industry leaderboard that ranks red teamers based on reputation.” CSO Online reports:
On HackerOne, which connects organizations with ethical hackers to participate in their bug bounty programs, “Xbow” scored notably higher than 99 other hackers in identifying and reporting enterprise software vulnerabilities. It’s a first in bug bounty history, according to the company that operates the eponymous bot…
Xbow is a fully autonomous AI-driven penetration tester (pentester) that requires no human input, but, its creators said, “operates much like a human pentester” that can scale rapidly and complete comprehensive penetration tests in just a few hours. According to its website, it passes 75% of web security benchmarks, accurately finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. — Read More
Daily Archives: July 14, 2025
hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars
Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble.
The talent mania could fizzle out as the winners and losers of the AI war emerge, but it represents a new normal for the foreseeable future. If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact.
This inequality certainly manifests at the founder level (Founders Fund exists for a reason), but applies to employees too. Key people have driven billions of dollars in value – look at Jony Ive’s contribution to the iPhone, or Jeff Dean’s implementation of distributed systems at Google, or Andy Jassy’s incubation of AWS. — Read More
No Code Is Dead
Once again, the software development landscape is experiencing another big shift. After years of drag-and-drop, no-code platforms democratizing app creation, generative AI (GenAI) is eliminating the need for no-code platforms in many cases.
Mind you, I said “no code” not “low code” — there are key differences. (More on this later.)
GenAI has introduced the ability for nontechnical users to use natural language to build apps just by telling the system what they want done. Call it “vibe coding” — the ability to describe what you want and watch AI generate working applications, or whatever. But will this new paradigm enhance existing no-code tools or render them obsolete?
I sought out insights from industry veterans to explore this pivotal question, revealing a broad spectrum of perspectives on where the intersection of AI and visual development is heading. — Read More
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