Code fixers have fired up the AI warp drive. Strange new worlds await

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times – especially if your job is keeping systems patched and up to date.

Microsoft has gone from 60-90 Windows security fixes per month last year to a record of 600+ this July.

Oracle and Linux are following the same path, and they are very much not alone.

The good news is that a lot of bad things are getting fixed very quickly.

The bad news is that patches can bring side effects of their own.

There are two mechanisms at work, both driven by the source of and solution to all our woes, AI.

The first is that the appropriate LLMs and their humans have got very good at bug hunting.

Like demon archaeologists, they've started thrashing their way down through the stratified layers of long-established code bases, bringing a huge backlog of previously buried bugs to the surface.

Complicating matters, LLMs are also writing an awful lot of code, some of which is not very good.

It is making its way into production for all the old reasons – marketing-led deadline pressure, shape-shifting specs, and Brownian goalposts – until the implacable hostilities of reality spit it back out.

The result is a very interesting dynamic of conflicting pressures that is changing the nature of patches.

It's easy to assume that the current explosion of bug fixes will die down as the code bases are repeatedly refined and purified, and that this time next year we'll be seeing rather fewer patches than in the pre-AI days, let alone today.

It's a nice thought.

Similarly, with the old code in a new state of grace, attention can turn to properly generating and testing the AI-powered stuff, so that it too calms down.