Coté

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Is Your AI Assistant Creating a Recursive Security Loop? from Camille Crowell-Lee

AI-assisted coding is starting to eat its own tail: the same LLMs that write code are increasingly asked to review it, explain security decisions, and even override their own warnings. That creates recursive trust loops where “explain your reasoning” becomes an attack surface, and models can literally talk themselves out of being secure. The fix isn’t better prompts, it’s old-school architecture - separation of concerns, non-AI enforcement, and treating LLMs as assistants, not authorities.

Check out more in her article.

Perhaps the attraction is that film noir is a way of traveling into the past—the world right before I was born. When watching old films, I like to remind myself that to the people in the film, their world was just as rich as ours and felt just as “now” as ours does. Here’s John Koenig talking about the people in old photographs:

Of course, to them, it wasn’t all flickering silence and grainy black and white. They saw vivid color rushing by in three dimensions, heard voices in deafening stereo, confronted smells they couldn’t escape. For them, nothing was ever simple. None of them knew for sure what this era meant, or that it was even an era to begin with. At the time, their world was real. Nothing was finished, and nothing guaranteed.

That world is now gone. If the past is a foreign country, we’re only tourists. We can’t expect to understand the locals or why they do what they do.

I doubt that today’s young can understand the 1970s. If you cannot imagine a professor smoking in class, or the person next to you on the airplane smoking, without it seeming weird or annoying, then you’ll never understand what life felt like in the 1970s. Just as the people of 2075 will never understand that it 2025 it felt perfectly normal to walk into a friend’s house without taking off your shoes, sit down at a table, and begin eating an animal.

From Scott Sumner.

“We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it—but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” Terwilliger says bluntly. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”

🔗 Dell’s CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I’ve had in maybe 5 years

Once again I’m logging in from Ibiza. I wouldn’t say I’ve gone native, but I’ve been here long enough to get it. This is not fierce, grind-it-out, Silicon Valley society; even Austin Texas, that wellspring of slackerdom, has a harsher work-ethic. This little Mediterranean island with some genuine Lotus-eater aspects to it – the island of the Lotus Eaters was supposed to be Djerba over in Tunisia.

According to the Odyssey, you sail there, you partake of the Lotus, you go kinda blotto and everything’s groovy. You’re not supposed to succumb to this sweet and easy life, of course. Captain Odysseus makes everybody get back on the boat and recommence rowing for Ithaca. A few hundred Greek verses later, every blue-collar guy is dead and only Captain Odysseus is left to manage his narrative.

Maybe staying in Lotus Land wasn’t such a bad idea for the working man…

Software Defined Talk’s 2025 Year in Review - This week, we review our 2025 predictions, discuss the big stories, and speculate on 2026. Plus, Coté dives deep into the EU broth market.

Check out the traditional podcast version if you prefer that over video.

I liked Jana’s book The Octopus Organization, and there were so many more questions I had.