alex lee

Full-stack veteran (24+ yrs), formerly led 400 engineers, OSS maintainer. The AI revolution is here — I'm in it, learning in public, sharing the real stuff.

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

I'm Alex — 24+ yrs full-stack engineer. Once led a 400-person tech team, built internet infrastructure, still maintain major open-source projects. The AI revolution is here, as inevitable as the industrial one. I refuse to be left behind — so I'm learning in public. 🧵

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@xiaoKuang789 平常多看 AI 和市場

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@Liu136749Liu 出攤趕上了

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@wjamdoing 還差一點，繼續趕

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@lengqie 說得夠直接

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@yhwangl 那不會, 我大概看了下. 但是本身這玩意的應用領域停窄的.可能更加偏向於企業用戶. 平台都不一定需要這個.

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

aws 报的 75,000 个 agent 同时使用，看起来很牛逼是不是？但是实际上你不能这样看。这里说的是停放 75,000 个，而不是同时运行 75,000 个。这差异就非常大了。但是你要说这东西有没有价值？那么我认为有，而且我还挺看好的。因为它解决的正好就是 agent 最贵的那个毛病：等。

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@DMD_2026 thanks!🥞🥞🥞

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

A backdoor hidden in an interview repo sounds like a small story. It involves job candidates, one fake company, one poisoned project, and if you are not currently interviewing, it is easy to file it under somebody else's problem. I nearly did. Then it kept nagging at me, because the uncomfortable part is not really the interview. It's what the case says about open source. The code in an open source project is sitting there for anyone to read. Sitting there to be read, and actually having been read carefully by somebody, turn out to be very different things.

The repo is called sol-live, and SlowMist disclosed it last week. On the surface it is a set of Solidity interview questions, eight of them, each helpfully labelled as a five-to-ten-minute job. The backdoor isn't in the questions. It sits in a settings file inside the .vscode folder. Editors like VS Code read settings that ship inside a project, and this project used that settings file to define a terminal profile. Open a terminal inside the project and the hidden command runs. The folder is hidden too, through an exclusion rule that keeps .vscode out of the editor sidebar, so even a suspicious candidate would struggle to inspect the place the command lives. Once it runs, the command pulls down an obfuscated script of about 4 MB and starts three background processes. One goes through the login databases of 13 Chromium-based browsers. Another scans local files, the macOS Keychain and whatever wallet extensions store, and ships what it finds out. The third provides remote control and watches the clipboard. SlowMist reconstructed all of this offline from the code. They haven't published a victim count, and the Windows path in the code is unconfirmed. They also found 8 more repos built the same way.

Why do we normally assume open source software is safer? The reasoning feels solid. The code is public, anyone can read it, anyone can audit it, so a backdoor would eventually be spotted. Closed source software asks you to trust a vendor you cannot inspect, while open source lets you check for yourself. I have believed some version of that for most of my career, and I still maintain open source projects, so I am not looking to talk myself out of it. The trouble is in a small swap the argument makes without announcing it. Open source gives you the right to audit. It gives you access. It doesn't give you any evidence that an audit has happened. A GitHub page carries no stamp saying how many people read the whole repo, or whether anyone at all opened the configuration folders. A project nobody has ever reviewed and a project that survived a careful review look exactly the same from the outside. Same clean page, same green buttons, same reassuring word: open.

So who actually does the reading? For a famous project, plenty of people do. It has maintainers, companies depending on it, security researchers poking at it because breaking it would be worth bragging about. Those projects are not what I am talking about. I am talking about the long tail that fills most of a working developer's week. You search for a problem, find a small repo by somebody you have never heard of, the README looks competent, and you clone it. Few stars, few forks. For a project like that, there is a decent chance nobody except the author has ever read all the code, and almost nobody has read it looking for malice. Users don't audit tools they're trying to get a job done with. They run them. Even a careful user who peeks at the code tends to look at the main feature, the part that solves their problem. Almost nobody opens .vscode, because in our heads that folder holds editor preferences, fonts and colour themes and personal habits. It doesn't feel like part of the program. That assumption is exactly the hole sol-live walked through. Everyone imagines the audit would look at the code that does the work, so the payload went and lived in the settings nobody counts as code.

Put closed source software next to it and the comparison gets stranger, because on this one narrow point the incentives run the other way. A closed source vendor can absolutely do bad things. It can collect more data than it admits to, ship sloppy security, hide behaviour it would rather you not notice. But behind the software there is a named company with a brand, customers under contract, and lawyers who know where to send the letter. If that company shipped a blatant stealer that emptied browsers and wallets, it would be betting the whole business on nobody catching it. Companies do reckless things, but usually not that reckless, because they can't run. Now look at the fake open source project. Behind it there might be nothing more than a throwaway account and a fake recruiter. Once the stealing is done, the account gets abandoned. There's no brand to protect and no company sitting there waiting to be sued. The honest reason a normal vendor shows some restraint is not that it is virtuous. It is that it has something to lose and an address where the loss can be delivered. A disposable repo has neither. So on small, unknown projects, the thing we treat as open source's safety guarantee, transparency, is mostly an unexercised possibility, while the practical restraints are actually weaker than they are for the closed source vendor we instinctively distrust.

AI is about to make a lot more of these. A convincing fake project used to take real effort. Somebody had to write believable questions, plausible code, a decent README and a hidden payload. Now one person can produce several versions of that in an afternoon, with the docs, the commit history and the exercise all reading like the genuine article. The interview is only the costume that happened to get caught. Next time it can be the little utility you were just searching for, or a starter template, or a practice project some account recommends. You will clone it the way you clone everything, and everything on your main machine is the prize if you are wrong. Your email, your GitHub, your bank, your password manager, your wallets, they all live on the same machine most of us develop on. If our habits stay as they are, each of us ends up doing the first security review of a stranger's repo in the most expensive way possible: by running it at home and finding out.

My advice is narrow, and it's aimed at people like me who touch open source projects all day. Any project you plan to run on your main machine or build real work on top of deserves a few minutes before your editor ever opens it, and that goes double when the stars and forks are few and the author is a stranger to you. Look through the files on GitHub's website first. Open the .vscode folder specifically, and pay attention to anything in the project that is set up to run by itself, settings and scripts included. Then have your local agent do a static review of the whole repo, reading the code without running it, and tell you what the project wants to do to your machine. That pass is cheap now. AI lowered the cost of faking a project, and it lowered the cost of a first audit too, so use it. If you do need to execute the project, use a virtual machine or a throwaway environment rather than the machine that holds your wallets and your main passwords. And if you have already opened a repo like this and started the terminal it configured for you, don't talk yourself into hoping it was fine. SlowMist's order is the right one: isolate the machine, use another device you trust to move your wallet assets somewhere safe, then change the passwords that matter, one by one. Change them now. There's no smarter version of that advice, and waiting only gives the other side more time with your stuff.

Think back to the last small repo you cloned from somebody you had never heard of. Did you open its .vscode folder before you opened the project?

https://t.co/bs5Mx4d4pY

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@Rosewoodbe 健身房自拍當出攤背景，挺有意思

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@gavinlamxq 認真發推、不裝，聽起來就踏實

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@BNorious Is it because I wrote too much?

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@rodger_zha72629 攤子支得早

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@Azhenuyo 串門聊到制冰機加班，話題夠廣

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@yajw23 這攤晚上也熱鬧

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@LeoHong_X 出攤加油

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@hi8esh_ That’s right; I agree with your idea.

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@DMD_2026 安靜聊聊也不錯

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@Simoncuocuo 不取關這點不錯

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@Baohulupz 回關一下可以嗎

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@chrysanthemumXX 早起出攤，精神不錯

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@QianRay_xiao 今天早飯吃豆漿油條

[alex lee @alexlee20122022]

@oderajoseph Yes, attackers often have a deep understanding of human nature. They target your weaknesses. For example, in this case, the user could easily fall victim if they weren't careful.