this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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For about a year as a hobby I've been writing an app that scratches several itches that I've had with the fediverse (multiple accounts at once, supporting both microblog- and threaded-style content, synthetic/hybrid feeds, etc.) and for the past month or so have been using it exclusively on the desktop and about 50% of the time on mobile (Voyager is my main mobile client and source of inspiration here). I'd like to open source the whole thing. But the code is mine, therefore buggy and bad. Normally I'd not worry too much about that, but in the age of LLM attacks I don't want to contribute more security vulnerabilities to the world. Should I use an LLM security tool to analyze my code and point out security issues so I can patch them before releasing the code? If so that would more or less be the only AI contribution. I'm a practical-minded person and use AI tools at work so it doesn't bother me, but I know lots of people here have strong (and often helpful) opinions on the matter.

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[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago

no matter the way you go, I'd start by marking it as "alpha" or similar, and be upfront about lack of professional quality security testing.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'd say "sure, why not?"

Depends on how expensive the tool is, mind you. I use local models so I've never had to poke around much at how much the paid ones go for, I don't know what you're using.

[–] artifex@piefed.zip 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The company I work for uses CodeRabbit Security and allows our team to use it for personal FOSS projects. I don't know if it's the best tool, but it's the one I know (and certainly one of the more popular ones), so it'll still do a much better job than I would manually.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 points 3 hours ago

Oh by all means then. Free is free. :)

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 31 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Honestly not everyone will agree, but personally I can't see any flaw in using AI to read through your code and point out security flaws. It's going to happen regardless of whether you initiate it. It's not like us sys admins are going "well I'm not going to patch the dirtyfrag vulnerability because it was discovered with AI". I'd say knowing if AI can find a vulnerability in your code, is just a requirement right now.

[–] ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 hours ago

I'd actually go one step further an set up a harness or job which regularly reviews it against CVE and known vulnerabilities, as frankly they come so fast these days it's worth making a regular automated review with at least some intelligence, vs us human who might remember to take the trash out on trash day. We are better at some elements of this, but adding intelligence to security reviews against the intelligent intruders seems like a necessity.

[–] artifex@piefed.zip 7 points 6 hours ago

This is how I'm leaning as well. I'm no strict idealogue :)

[–] Hoimo@ani.social 1 points 3 hours ago

If you're the only one using it, you could just publish the source and let us review it. Worst case we find some terrible flaw and you have to stop using it for a bit while you fix it.

But I can't imagine any big vulnerabilities in a local frontend anyway? I'd be more worried about accidentally sending/resending requests and generating unnecessary load for the server. For authentication it's hard to mess up as long as you're not sending passwords to servers other than the one you're trying to log in.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 5 points 5 hours ago

Don't overthink and just publish it.

[–] emb@lemmy.world 15 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

For my 2c, I think it's a good idea. If you don't, and it gets any use, attackers or contributors will.

It's a little bit of a lose/lose. The target audience is very anti-LLM, so some people will hate it. It's that or leave low-hanging-fruit bugs in there.

Either way, make sure to include an AI disclosure and explanation front-and-center. If I see a new project posted any more, I immediately write it off as low effort, vibe-coded slop until I have a reason to think otherwise. But using LLMs is not necessarily equivalent to slop imo.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 5 points 5 hours ago

I don't think anyone would be opposed to using AI to audit code. It's when it's to write code that people object.

[–] sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 hours ago

LLMs for security review is a great use of the tool. Let it give you bugs and security issues ranked by severity and suggestions on how to fix them, then it’s up to you to implement if you want to have a layer of isolation.

[–] notabot@piefed.social 9 points 6 hours ago

You'll get blowback either way, the only difference is that in one case it'll be because your app was compromised and in the other case it'll be because someone doesn't see a difference between slopcoding the entire app and using it as a second pair of eyes in a limited, and human validated, context.

I think that LLMs for coding is both terrible practice and environmentally costly, but I can see this sort of usecase being beneficial. Trying to find a model that's only been trained on open source code, and that runs without a huge environmental cost is tricky though. You really don't want the risk that some proprietary code has got into the training set and it gets regurgitated for you. There's been way too many court cases over a few lines of code being copied.

[–] keisatsu@infosec.pub 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

An AI security tool can't substitute for a real security audit. Especially if you don't have the necessary know-how to verify the outcome. If you don't have extensive experience performing manual security code audits, don't even bother. You might just as well release it with a disclaimer that it hasnt been vetted and leave it up to whoever want to test it to review it.

If you do opt for a scan, please disclose it properly. Many will never consider code that has been touched by an LLM in any shape or form, but it's better to be honest about it.

Finally, if you pay the frontier labs for their models you are supporting their business practices including training models on stolen data, the destruction of the environment and further inflation of the AI bubble. A local model is not much better, all things considered, but at least Scam Altman and Wario Amodei won't benefit.

[–] artifex@piefed.zip 4 points 6 hours ago

Yep. honestly it doesn't bother me if nobody else uses it (for ideological reasons or otherwise), I just figured if it's useful to me it might be useful to others as well.