The thing about things like this is that they're shop jigs. You can buy a crosscut sled if you really want to, but most woodworkers just make their own.
It was a different situation 2 years ago, when there was significant cost to building your own harness (but then: you probably weren't doing AI vuln research 2 years ago). Today, I think your best bet is to look at something like this for ideas, and then just ask for your own, to fit your own work style, with your own interface, your own notion of target and effort specification, and your own alerting.
"Shop jigs" is a great way to put it. I think a lot of software has gone from being made for general use to extremely individualised use. Before the Age of AI, it took so much human effort to write something that solved your problem that you might often go the extra mile so that others could re-use it. Now, it takes almost no effort, so the software stays ungeneralised. Some of the incentive has changed, I think. Most of the time I no longer share the things I've been building[0] because, for one thing they simply couldn't possibly have any benefit for others, and if they need something like it, they can build exactly the thing they want instead of having to extend or modify my thing. Like a jig!
> As a rough guideline, expect ~10K uncached input tokens/min and ~2K output tokens/min per agent. You can scale parallelism up to your account's ITPM limit (roughly 10 agents per 100K ITPM).
My guess would be hundreds of dollars with Opus and thousands of dollars with Mythos.
For now, maybe, yes? But the most important targets of this kind of work aren't AI outputs; it's legacy code, particularly (but not exclusively) old memory-unsafe code. In those situations the figure of merit isn't the token cost of recreating the target code; it's the cost of finding the same bugs with humans or preexisting tools.
Given the slop that's made its way to Github we can see that this is a great profit model. Ship slop and then "fix" slop. What an efficient use of our planet!
It's weird because why can't they train the AI to simply output secure code?
The basic security flaws with regards to input validation and overflows should never ever be output by an AI. For "security flaws due to bad design" I'll cut them slack until AGI is achieved.
What's destabilizing the industry right now isn't vulnerabilities AI introduces into new code; it's a flood of sev:hi vulnerabilities in existing code, not introduced by AI but discovered by it.
> It's weird because why can't they train the AI to simply output secure code?
The most interesting security bugs have causes that are spread across large codebases, or networks of dependencies.
Training the AI to "output secure code" won't work if it doesn't also have access to the source code of every dependency that it's using... and even then, given current model speeds and prices most developers won't want to wait for an hour on every edit they make while the LLM reasons through all of the dependencies.
I think these audit tools can look beyond just security and can look for compliance audits as well. The ability to audit real targets in staging environments makes it easy to identify issues.
If you compare to their managed service, that estimate is likely 1/10th expectation, depending on codebase.
But even this larger number, in turn, can be about 1/10th the cost of a formal engagement to discover the type of findings it seems to be going for: things that do not show up from PR reviews or even /security-review without the pre-work steps in the open-source framework guided by an expert. That's not counting the time and delay to figure out how to do that engagement.
Bluntly: if it matters, while this is a month's vibing budget for a single scan, it is also "pennies on the dollar" dirt cheap.
At the same time, its findings still need an expert. Its suggestions may be helpful, they may be actively harmful, depends on the prework quality.
Recommendation to IT department heads: spend a couple grand on this, use the scare page to rustle up the budget to build a relationship with a red team that can find, triage, help remediate if needed, and train your in-house team to be "security minded".
Claude workflows in ultra code mode works in a very similar fashion and it consumes a moderate amount of the session usage limit, depending on the complexity of the task. With the API it would probably get expensive quickly though
I mean, you don't need to run it all the time, right? You do it once over your entire existing codebase to start and then once over the diff in your CI/CD pipeline when you make a new change. I'm sure it's not literally that simple but I doubt these need to churn 24/7/365 either.
In the Mythos blogpost they revealed to run the model like a 1000 times on the same code-base maybe with slightly different prompt or temperature. That suggests it will just be pay to win. If the 'attacker' spends more money/tokens than the 'defender' you will eventually be outclassed.
It's even worse, it's loot box style. Not pay to win, but pay to have the chance to win. The result will always be non-deterministic, so for some cases it can give you what you're looking for from the first time, or it can take 1000 tries.
I have been struggling with false positives and using Claude + MCP as a poor man’s audit tool. As of last few days found better result with nvidia hosted models.
To be sure, security is an amazing AI/LLM use case. A huge swath of the work is pattern matching known security issues against stuff that's very precise to analyze -- programming language text.
Something that stands out is that for the strongest use cases, AI companies will prefer to sell the technique as a service rather than its raw output. For use cases where the output is less valuable, tokens are sold. If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.
The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than taking their knowledge and making money in the stock market directly.
> The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than
Or they want to diversify
> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.
That requires to build and sell a whole product they have little experience with, competing with their own customers. Not a great place for an AI vendor still trying to establish itself. It’s a lot of distraction, when you already have a lot to deal with the existing business. And strategically not too valuable
> They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.
I don't understand this argument. I've ran and sold a semi-successful SaaS. The exhausting and frustrating parts are all the things an LLM cannot help you with. Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.
> Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.
Agree, and I think that's the core of my point.
Not that it's irrational or doesn't make sense to sell tokens for purposes of software dev, but that if tokens were a true game changer for success in software dev, they wouldn't be leading with token sales, the same way they're not leading with token sales for security stuff -- it's more like "Contact Sales".
> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.
If hardware were so magical in creating new value generally, TSMC would be designing the chips instead of selling fabrication as a service.
That is what US chip companies used to do, by the way (back when there was silicon in Silicon Valley, before they got their lunch eaten by Taiwan). If TSMC had to design all of the chips they fabricate now, they would be doing a lot less business. Conversely, if any other company that wanted to design a chip had to build their own cutting-edge fab first, NVIDIA would not exist.
> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.
This doesn't follow at all. Anthropic's revenue is growing 10x year over year selling tokens. Their tokens can be super magical, let them enter established industries and displace incumbents, and get 100% annual growth in those industries, and they would still be better off prioritizing selling tokens, because it's a great business.
What your argument shows is that there are limits. Their tokens are not quite powerful enough to make infinite money instantly in every area of software. Admittedly, that does seem true.
Maybe, but an alternative argument that building an ecosystem is more valuable in the long run.
We started out with many companies forbidding their employees to use remote LLMs on their source code because of security concerns. Now many companies are starting to believe that they must analyze their all their source code with remote LLMs because of security concerns. When trusting Anthropic becomes normalized, that means they can sell more services that require access to the source code.
Surprised we havent gotten an integrated "MetaSploit" AI update where it calls and messages a ton of people in a company and once it starts to find someone possibly vulnerable lets a human red teamer take over or guide it more by hand.
> They can only do that if they're a monopoly, which they're not
Why do you say that? I reckon lots and lots of companies sell software that aren’t monopolies. Having competition, even stiff competition, isn’t anathema to running a business.
They pretty much saying the efficacy of the tool can be tested by anyone to determine if it's worth purchasing the more polished and up-to-date commercial offering.
Looking forward to trying this tomorrow (it's late here). Has anyone run it on a real codebase yet? Curious about setup friction, cost, and signal/noise.
It was a different situation 2 years ago, when there was significant cost to building your own harness (but then: you probably weren't doing AI vuln research 2 years ago). Today, I think your best bet is to look at something like this for ideas, and then just ask for your own, to fit your own work style, with your own interface, your own notion of target and effort specification, and your own alerting.
0: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/17-why-share/ (and related posts, I guess)
https://github.com/anthropics/defending-code-reference-harne... says:
> As a rough guideline, expect ~10K uncached input tokens/min and ~2K output tokens/min per agent. You can scale parallelism up to your account's ITPM limit (roughly 10 agents per 100K ITPM).
My guess would be hundreds of dollars with Opus and thousands of dollars with Mythos.
May even be an order of magnitude more
Ensuring code isn’t bad is the expensive part.
Those costs can be extremely high.
The basic security flaws with regards to input validation and overflows should never ever be output by an AI. For "security flaws due to bad design" I'll cut them slack until AGI is achieved.
The most interesting security bugs have causes that are spread across large codebases, or networks of dependencies.
Training the AI to "output secure code" won't work if it doesn't also have access to the source code of every dependency that it's using... and even then, given current model speeds and prices most developers won't want to wait for an hour on every edit they make while the LLM reasons through all of the dependencies.
But even this larger number, in turn, can be about 1/10th the cost of a formal engagement to discover the type of findings it seems to be going for: things that do not show up from PR reviews or even /security-review without the pre-work steps in the open-source framework guided by an expert. That's not counting the time and delay to figure out how to do that engagement.
Bluntly: if it matters, while this is a month's vibing budget for a single scan, it is also "pennies on the dollar" dirt cheap.
At the same time, its findings still need an expert. Its suggestions may be helpful, they may be actively harmful, depends on the prework quality.
Recommendation to IT department heads: spend a couple grand on this, use the scare page to rustle up the budget to build a relationship with a red team that can find, triage, help remediate if needed, and train your in-house team to be "security minded".
This doesn't make any sense cost-wise. It would be cheaper to just hire a security engineer.
I have working on and using a similar tool for a while now :
https://github.com/bobinson/vulture
I have been struggling with false positives and using Claude + MCP as a poor man’s audit tool. As of last few days found better result with nvidia hosted models.
Something that stands out is that for the strongest use cases, AI companies will prefer to sell the technique as a service rather than its raw output. For use cases where the output is less valuable, tokens are sold. If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.
The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than taking their knowledge and making money in the stock market directly.
Or they want to diversify
> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.
That requires to build and sell a whole product they have little experience with, competing with their own customers. Not a great place for an AI vendor still trying to establish itself. It’s a lot of distraction, when you already have a lot to deal with the existing business. And strategically not too valuable
I don't understand this argument. I've ran and sold a semi-successful SaaS. The exhausting and frustrating parts are all the things an LLM cannot help you with. Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.
Agree, and I think that's the core of my point.
Not that it's irrational or doesn't make sense to sell tokens for purposes of software dev, but that if tokens were a true game changer for success in software dev, they wouldn't be leading with token sales, the same way they're not leading with token sales for security stuff -- it's more like "Contact Sales".
If hardware were so magical in creating new value generally, TSMC would be designing the chips instead of selling fabrication as a service.
That is what US chip companies used to do, by the way (back when there was silicon in Silicon Valley, before they got their lunch eaten by Taiwan). If TSMC had to design all of the chips they fabricate now, they would be doing a lot less business. Conversely, if any other company that wanted to design a chip had to build their own cutting-edge fab first, NVIDIA would not exist.
This doesn't follow at all. Anthropic's revenue is growing 10x year over year selling tokens. Their tokens can be super magical, let them enter established industries and displace incumbents, and get 100% annual growth in those industries, and they would still be better off prioritizing selling tokens, because it's a great business.
What your argument shows is that there are limits. Their tokens are not quite powerful enough to make infinite money instantly in every area of software. Admittedly, that does seem true.
We started out with many companies forbidding their employees to use remote LLMs on their source code because of security concerns. Now many companies are starting to believe that they must analyze their all their source code with remote LLMs because of security concerns. When trusting Anthropic becomes normalized, that means they can sell more services that require access to the source code.
Why do you say that? I reckon lots and lots of companies sell software that aren’t monopolies. Having competition, even stiff competition, isn’t anathema to running a business.
But they can't do that because they aren't monopolies.
Hm :)
Be aware: the .py/s will not pass the antivirus but basically they do the job.
Are they making 8x more features or the same amount just with more code?