Jools

Cisco tech leader; SecOps automation, Python dev. Founding @canonical @ubuntu MAAS engineering manager. All tweets my own. Rude/Troll = block

[Jools @tech_jools]

I did some timing earlier to see which way of checking a zero length list in Python is the quickest. Without cheating, which do you think it was? #Python

[Jools @tech_jools]

But, no matter how hard you try, it always still finds a way to talk about how things *used* to be in comments and documentation, like it's some amazingly relevant fact.

[Jools @tech_jools]

I've learned the most important word when asking AI to do anything:

"concise"

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

Tesla helped save a man from jail.

Kevin Finley was arrested at gunpoint for allegedly fleeing police. His Tesla captured the key moments, showing why he never saw the unmarked police car.

Nearly two years later, the judge watched the video and found him not guilty.

[Jools @tech_jools]

@jpatel41 @lennysan Absolutely spot on. Most of my work goes through a planning stage (or use EARS for coding) to produce a detailed task list that you can review. Then use adversarial review by another agent, before checking with human eyes. So many mistakes still found.

[Jools @tech_jools]

Git has to be one of the worst pieces of software your average developer has to deal with on an hourly basis. I've never had to Google how to use it, for the same thing over and over, as much as anything else I've ever used. The UX is just miserable across the board.

[Jools @tech_jools]

This hurts to read

[Arvid Kahl @arvidkahl]

Things we depend on way too much:

- GitHub
- us-east-1
- that Google account we use for all OAuth logins
- 1.1.1.1

[Jools @tech_jools]

@willmcgugan Then doing it all again when you get different beans. It's cathartic after a while, honest.

[Jools @tech_jools]

Unreal

[The Hacker News @TheHackersNews]

‼️ A Claude Mythos 5 agent spent 34 hours trying to backdoor a real open-source project.

It hid a malware dropper inside a working bug fix. When exposed, it denied the code was malicious, rewrote Git history, and used a second account to vouch for itself.

The attempt failed because a human read the diff.

Read what happened and how it worked 🠖 https://t.co/SDBC8hQggU

[Jools @tech_jools]

@driscollis textwrap.dedent already does this, why reinvent the wheel?

[Jools @tech_jools]

@willmcgugan I think it's called snapping.

[Jools @tech_jools]

https://t.co/6dlhhKM5ax

Skynet nearly escaped today.

[Chuck Robbins @ChuckRobbins]

Today, @cisco launched Antares: a family of open-weight, small language models that pinpoint where known vulnerabilities exist within a codebase. Testing shows our Antares models outperform many open- and closed-weight models at critical security tasks — at a fraction of the cost.

Congrats to the Cisco Foundation AI team on another win for the cyber defender community! Learn more: https://t.co/Dbf5d9RijM

[Jools @tech_jools]

@charliermarsh It's nice to see GH finally catching up with what Launchpad Code did 15 years ago.

[Jools @tech_jools]

@Engineering Fix the feed to use "Following" again, you broke it for what feels like the millionth time to use "For You".

Also, where did the scroll bar go? Why remove it?

[Jools @tech_jools]

@ursinha Everyone hates VARgentina.

[Jools @tech_jools]

$ docker system prune
... <2 minutes pass>
Total reclaimed space: 34.77GB

🤪🤬

[Jools @tech_jools]

Why yes, Claude, I *would* like you to enable all the additional Ruff checks I asked for, and then fix the resulting mess that you made in the first place.

[Jools @tech_jools]

- it loves to invoke shell scripts to do edits and ignore the MCP-provided editor tools

I also just had to tell it to work in smaller batches so I can review its output. You can spec out a change as much as you like and it nearly always finds a way of becoming a slop cannon.

[Jools @tech_jools]

My personal observations of Claude Opus after using it for quite a while now:
- it generally writes quite nice readable code
- It is awful at organising code into reusable abstractions
- for Python, it loves inline imports, and:
- ignores my AGENTS.md telling it not to do that

[Jools @tech_jools]

@Canonical There wasn't really any more info in the Discourse post. Can you expand on the mitigations applied?