Your AI coding agent has access to your secrets, pulls in content from the outside world, and can run shell commands. According to Joe Holdcroft, that combination makes you one prompt injection away from a very bad time. The tools haven't changed the fundamentals of security â they've just made every existing risk move faster, and introduced a few genuinely new ones. What we cover:
Why the "lethal trifecta" of agent capabilities creates a novel threat surface
How text and markdown files have become a new class of vulnerability
Slop squatting: the attack vector created by agents hallucinating package names
The context supply chain â and why it mirrors the early days of npm security
What a "CBOM" (context bill of materials) might look like and why we may need one
How to think about agent trust using the contractor mental model
Chapters:
00:00 IntroductionÂ
01:40 The Lethal Trifecta: why agents are inherently riskyÂ
03:23 Same hygiene, higher stakesÂ
04:08 Text as a vulnerability: markdown as a security riskÂ
06:08 Do AI tools make you more or less secure?Â
08:09 Snyk + Tessl: scanning skills in the registryÂ
10:10 The context supply chain problemÂ
14:28 The CBOM: do we need a context bill of materials?Â
17:35 Secrets, credentials, and principle of least privilegeÂ
22:25 Balancing security with developer velocityÂ
36:54 One piece of advice for CTOs going all-in on AIÂ
Links:
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