When one OAuth token can compromise dev tools, CI pipeline, secrets and deployment simultaneously, something architectural has gone wrong.
Vercel have had React2Shell (CVSS 10), the middleware bypass (CVSS 9.1), and now this, all within 12 months.
At what point do we start asking questions about the concentration of trust in the web ecosystem?
It's funny that at the engineering level we are continuously grilled in interviews about the single responsibility principle, meanwhile the industry's business model is to undermine the entirety of web standards and consolidate the web stack into a CLI.
You have no idea how indifferent security officers can be-even when you point out critical issues. The other day, we flagged that a customer’s database had users with excessive privileges. Their only question: “Can this be exploited from the outside?”
No, but most breaches today come from compromised internal accounts that are then used to break everything.
> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.
> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.
> A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called http://Context.ai that he was using.
> Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.
> We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.
> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.
Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.
> Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.
On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.
But on the other hand... It's Sunday. Unless you're tuned-in to social media over the weekend, your main provider could be undergoing a meltdown while you are completely unaware. Many higher-up folks check company email over the weekend, but if they're traveling or relaxing, social media might be the furthest thing from their mind. It really bites that this is the only way to get critical information.
> On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams
This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.
And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.
Has anyone actually gotten an email from Vercel confirming their secrets were accessed? Right now we're all operating under the hope (?) that since we haven't (yet?) gotten an email, we're not completely hosed.
Hope-based security should not be a thing. Did you rotate your secrets? Did you audit your platform for weird access patterns? Don’t sit waiting for that vercel email.
nope...I feel u, the "Hope-based security" is exactly what Vercel is forcing on its users right now by prioritizing social media over direct notification.
If the attacker is moving with "surprising velocity," every hour of delay on an email blast is another hour the attacker has to use those potentially stolen secrets against downstream infrastructure. Using Twitter/X as a primary disclosure channel for a "sophisticated" breach is amateur hour. If legal is the bottleneck for a mass email during an active compromise, then your incident response plan is fundamentally broken.
I'm going down with the ship over on X.com the Everything App. There's a parcel of very important tech people that are running some playbook where posting to X.com is sufficient enough to be unimpeachable on communication, despite its rather beleaguered state and traffic.
Production network control plane must be completely isolated from the internet with a separate computer for each. The design I like best is admins have dedicated admin workstations that only ever connect to the admin network, corporate workstations, and you only ever connect to the internet from ephemeral VMs connected via RDP or similar protocol.
The actual app name would be good to have. Understandable they don’t want to throw them under the bus but it’s just delaying taking action by not revealing what app/service this was.
I was trying to look it up (basically https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2/java... -- the consent screen shows the app name) but it now says "Error 401: invalid_client; The OAuth client was not found." so it was probably deleted by the oauth client owner.
Yes. The oauth ID is indisputable. It it seems to be context.ai. But suppose it was a fake context.ai that the employee was tricked into using. Or… or…
Better to report 100% known things quickly. People can figure it out with near zero effort, and it reduces one tiny bit of potential liability in the ops shitstorm they’re going through.
Idk exactly how to articulate my thoughts here, perhaps someone can chime in and help.
This feels like a natural consequence of the direction web development has been going for the last decade, where it's normalised to wire up many third party solutions together rather than building from more stable foundations. So many moving parts, so many potential points of failure, and as this incident has shown, you are only as secure as your weakest link. Putting your business in the hands of a third party AI tool (which is surely vibe-coded) carries risks.
Is this the direction we want to continue in? Is it really necessary? How much more complex do things need to be before we course-correct?
This isn't a web development concept. It's the unix philosophy of "write programs that do one thing and do it well" and interconnect them, being taken to the extremes that were never intended.
Just throwing it out there - the Unix way to write software is often revered. But ideas about how to write software that came from the 1970s at Bell Labs might not be the best ideas for writing software for the modern web.
Instead of "programs that do one thing and do it well", "write programs which are designed to be used together" and "write programs to handle text streams", I might go with a foundational philosophy like "write programs that are do not trust the user or the admin" because in applications connected to the internet, both groups often make mistakes or are malicious. Also something like "write programs that are strict on which inputs they accept" because a lot of input is malicious.
The Unix model wasn't simply do one thing and do it well.
It was also a different model on ownership and vetting of those focused tools. It might have been a model of having the single source tree of an old UNIX or BSD, where everything was managed as a coherent whole from grep to cc all the way to X11. Or it might have been the Linux distribution model of having dedicated packagers do the vetting to piecemeal packages into more of a bazaar, even going so far as to rip scripting language bundles into their component pieces as for Python and Perl.
But in both of those models you were put farther away from the third-party authors bringing software into the open-source (and proprietary) supply chains.
This led to a host of issues with getting new software to users and with a fractal explosion of different versions of software dependencies to potentially have to work around, which is one reason we saw the explosion of NPM and Cargo and the like. Especially once Docker made it easy to go straight from stitching an app together with NPM on your local dev seat to getting it deployed to prod.
But the issue isn't with focused tooling as much as it is with hewing more closely to the upstream who could potentially be subverted in a supply chain attack.
After all, it's not as if people never tried to do this with Linux distros (or even the Linux kernel itself -- see for instance https://linux.slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/058249/linux-kerne... ). But the inherent delay and indirection in that model helped make it less of a serious risk.
But even if you only use 1 NPM package instead of 100, if it's a big enough package you can assume it's going to be a large target for attacks.
It's not a hosting model, it's a fundamental failure of software design and systems engineering/architecture.
Imagine if cars were developed like websites, with your brakes depending on a live connection to a 3rd party plugin on a website. Insanity, right? But not for web businesses people depend on for privacy, security, finances, transportation, healthcare, etc.
When the company's brakes go out today, we all just shrug, watch the car crash, then pick up the pieces and continue like it's normal. I have yet to hear a single CEO issue an ultimatum that the OWASP Top 10 (just an example) will be prevented by X date. Because they don't really care. They'll only lose a few customers and everyone else will shrug and keep using them. If we vote with our dollars, we've voted to let it continue.
I’m not joking, but weirdly enough, that’s what most AI arguments boil down to. Show me what the difference is while I pull up the endless CVE list of which ever coreutils package you had in mind. It’s a frustrating argument because you know that authors of coreutils-like packages had intentionality in their work, while an LLM has no such thing. Yet at the end, security vulnerabilities are abundant in both.
The AI maximalists would argue that the only way is through more AI. Vibe code the app, then ask an LLM to security review it, then vibe code the security fixes, then ask the LLM to review the fixes and app again, rinse and repeat in an endless loop. Same with regressions, performance, features, etc. stick the LLM in endless loops for every vertical you care about.
Pointing to failed experiments like the browser or compiler ones somehow don’t seem to deter AI maximalists. They would simply claim they needed better models/skills/harness/tools/etc. the goalpost is always one foot away.
I wouldn't describe myself as an AI maximalist at all. I just don't believe the false dichotomy of you either produce "vulnerable vibe coded AI slop running on a managed service" or "pure handcrafted code running on a self hosted service."
You can write good and bad code with and without AI, on a managed service, self-hosted, or something in between.
And the comment I was replying to said something about not trusting something written in Akron, OH 2 years ago, which makes no sense and is barely an argument, and I was mostly pointing out how silly that comment sounds.
I used to believe that too, yet the dichotomy is what’s being pushed by what I called an “AI maximalist” and it’s what I was pushing against.
There is no “I wrote this code with some AI assistance” when you’re sending 2k line change PR after 8 minutes of me giving you permission on the repo. That’s the type of shit I’m dealing with and management is ecstatic at the pace and progress and the person just looks at you and say “anything in particular that’s wrong or needs changing? I’m just asking for a review and feedback”
It's such a bad faith argument, they basically make false equivalencies with LLMs and other software. Same with the "AI is just a higher level compiler" argument. The "just" is doing a ton of heavy lifting in those arguments.
Regarding the unix philosophy argument, comparing it to AI tools just doesn't make any sense. If you look at what the philosophy is, it's obvious that it doesn't just boil down to "use many small tools" or "use many dependencies", it's so different that it not even wrong [0].
In their Unix paper of 1974, Ritchie and Thompson quote the following design considerations:
- Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.
- Interactive use instead of batch processing.
- Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").
- Self-supporting system: all Unix software is maintained under Unix.
In what way does that correspond to "use dependencies" or "use AI tools"? This was then formalised later to
- Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
- Write programs to work together.
- Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
This has absolutely nothing in common with pulling in thousands of dependences or using hundreds of third party services.
Then there is the argument that "AI is just a higher level compiler". That is akin to me saying that "AI is just a higher level musical instrument" except it's not, because it functions completely differently to musical instruments and people operate them in a completely different way. The argument seems to be that since both of them produce music, in the same way both a compiler and LLM generate "code", they are equivalent. The overarching argument is that only outputs matter, except when they don't because the LLM produces flawed outputs, so really it's just that the outputs are equivalent in the abstract, if you ignore the concrete real-world reality. Using that same argument, Spotify is a musical instrument because it outputs music, and hey look, my guitar also outputs music!
Claude Code defaulting to a certain set of recommended providers[0] and frameworks is making the web more homogenous and that lack of diversity is increasing the blast radius of incidents
Reddit vibecoded LLM posts are kind of fascinating for how homogenous they are. The number of vibe coded half-finished projects posted to common subreddits daily is crazy high.
It’s interesting how they all use LLMs to write their Reddit posts, too. Some of them could have drawn in some people if they took 5 minutes to type an announcement post in their own words, but they all have the same LLM style announcement post, too. I wonder if they’re conversing with the LLM and it told them to post it to Reddit for traction?
I find that often the developers of these apps don't speak English, but want to target an English-speaking audience. For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.
It's insane how most of the dev subreddits are filled with slop like this. I've thought the same thing - why can't they even spend 5 minutes to write their own post about their project?
More like 15. By 2016, Rails was supposedly dead and we were all going to be running the same code on the front end and back end in a full stack, MongoDB euphoria.
The other day, I was forcing myself to use Claude Code for a new CRUD React app[1], and by default it excreted a pile of Node JS and NPM dependencies.
So I told something like, "don't use anything node at all", and it immediately rewrote it as a Python backend, and it volunteered that it was minimizing dependencies in how it did that.
[1] only vibe coding as an exercise for a throwaway artifact; I'm not endorsing vibe coding
You can tell Claude to use something highly structured like Spring Boot / Java. It's a bit more verbose in code, but the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well. And the strict nature of Java is nice in keeping Claude on track and finding bugs early.
I've heard others had similar results with .NET/C#
Even though I'm a hardcore programmer and software engineer, I still need to at least keep aware of the latest vibe coding stuff, so I know what's good and bad about it.
I'm struggling to understand how they bought Bun but their own Ai Models are more fixated in writing python for everything than even the models of their competitor who bought the actual Python ecosystem (OAI with uv)
I once made a golang multi-person pomodoro app by vibe coding with gemini 3.1 pro (when it had first launched first day) and I asked it to basically only have one outside dependency of gorrilla websockets and everything else from standard library and then I deployed it to hugging face spaces for free.
I definitely recommend golang as a language if you wish to vibe code. Some people recommend rust but Golang compiles fast, its cross compilation and portable and is really awesome with its standard library
(Anecdotally I also feel like there is some chances that the models are being diluted cuz like this thing then has become my benchmark test and others have performed somewhat worse or not the same as this to be honest and its only been a few days since I am now using hackernews less frequently and I am/was already seeing suspicions like these about claude and other models on the front page iirc. I don't know enough about claude opus 4.7 but I just read simon's comment on it, so it would be cool if someone can give me a gist of what is happening for the past few days.)
It emits Actix and Axum extremely well with solid support for fully AOT type checked Sqlx.
Switch to vibe coding Rust backends and freeze your supply chain.
Super strong types. Immaculate error handling. Clear and easy to read code. Rock solid performance. Minimal dependencies.
Vibe code Rust for web work. You don't even need to know Rust. You'll osmose it over a few months using it. It's not hard at all. The "Rust is hard" memes are bullshit, and the "difficult to refactor" was (1) never true and (2) not even applicable with tools like Claude Code.
Edit: people hate this (-3), but it's where the alpha is. Don't blindly dismiss this. Serializing business logic to Rust is a smart move. The language is very clean, easy to read, handles errors in a first class fashion, and fast. If the code compiles, then 50% of your error classes are already dealt with.
Python, Typescript, and Go are less satisfactory on one or more of these dimensions. If you generate code, generate Rust.
How are you getting low dependencies for Web backend with Rust? (All my manually-written Rust programs that use crates at all end up pulling in a large pile of transitive dependencies.)
Ok I mean this is a little crazy, "minimal dependencies" and Rust? Brother I need dependencies to write async traits without tearing my hair out.
But you're also correct in that Rust is actually possible to write in a more high level way, especially for web where you have very little shared state and the state that is shared can just be wrapped in Arc<> and put in the web frameworks context. It's actually dead easy to spin up web services in Rust, and they have a great set of ORM's if thats your vibe too. Rust is expressive enough to make schema-as-code work well.
On the dependencies, if you're concerned about the possibility of future supply chain attacks (because Rust doesn't have a history like Node) you can vendor your deps and bypass future problems. `cargo vendor` and you're done, Node has no such ergonomic path to vendoring, which imo is a better solution than anything else besides maybe Go (another great option for web services!). Saying "don't use deps" doesn't work for any other language other than something like Go (and you can run `go vendor` as well).
But yeah, in today's economy where compute and especially memory is becoming more constrained thanks to AI, I really like the peace of mind knowing my unoptimised high level Rust web services run with minimal memory and compute requirements, and further optimisation doesn't require a rewrite to a different language.
Idk mate, I used to be a big Rust hater but once I gave the language a serious try I find it more pleasant to write compared to both Typescript and Go. And it's very amiable to AI if that's your vibe(coding), since the static guarantees of the type system make it easier for AI to generate correct code, and the diagnostics messages allow it to reroute it's course during the session.
It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.
I actually noticed the same. Having it work on Mithril.js instead of React seems (I know it's all just kind of hearsay) to generate a lot cleaner code. Maybe it's just because I know and like Mithril better, but also is likely because of the project ethos and it's being used by people who really want to use Mithril in the wild. I've seen the same for other slightly more exotic stacks like bottle vs flask, and telling it to generate Scala or Erlang.
Shouldn’t Claude just refuse to make decisions, then, if it is problematic for it to do so? We’re talking about a trillion dollar company here, not a new grad with stars in their eyes
I think if you believe that you're either lying or experiencing psychosis. LLMs are the greatest innovation in information retrieval since PageRank but they are not capable of thought anymore than PageRank is.
That's a funny way of saying "race to the bottom."
> The internet does that but it feels different with this
How does "the internet do that?" What force on the internet naturally brings about mediocrity? Or have we confused rapacious and monopolistic corporations with the internet at large?
Is that bad? I would think having everyone on the same handful of platforms should make securing them easier (and means those platforms have more budget to to so), and with fewer but bigger incidents there's a safety-of-the-herd aspect - you're unlikely to be the juiciest target on Vercel during the vulnerability window, whereas if the world is scattered across dozens or hundreds of providers that's less so.
Interstingly, a recent conversation [1] between Hank Green and security researcher Sherri Davidoff argued the opposite. More GenAI generated code targeted at specific audiences should result in a more resilient ecosystem because of greater diversity. That obviously can't work if they end up using the same 3 frameworks in every application.
I love Hank, but he has such a weird EA-shaped blind spot when it comes to AI. idgi
It is true that "more diversity in code" probably means less turnkey spray-and-pray compromises, sure. Probably.
It also means that the models themselves become targets. If your models start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability, how're you gonna patch that?
> start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability
This situation is pretty funny to me. Some of my friends who arent technical tried vibe coding and showed me what they built and asked for feedback
I noticed they were using Supabase by default, pointed out that their database was completely open with no RLS
So I told them not to use Supabase in that way, and they asked the AI (various diff LLMs) to fix it. One example prompt I saw was: please remove Supabase because of the insecure data access and make a proper secure way.
Keep in mind, these ppl dont have a technical background and do not know what supabase or node or python is. They let the llm install docker, install node, etc and just hit approve on "Do you want to continue? bash(brew install ..)"
Whats interesting is that this happened multiple times with different AI models. Instead of fixing the problem the way a developer normally would like moving the database logic to the server or creating proper API endpoints it tried to recreate an emulation of Supabase, specifically PostgREST in a much worse and less secure way.
The result was an API endpoint that looked like: /api/query?q=SELECT * FROM table WHERE x
In one example GLM later bolted on a huge "security" regular expression that blocked , admin, updateadmin, ^delete* lol
It's so trivial to seed. LLMs are basically the idiots that have fallen for all the SEO slop on Google. Did some travel planning earlier and it was telling me all about extra insurances I need and why my normal insurance doesn't cover X or Y (it does of course).
Self fulfilling prophecy: You don't need to secure anything because it doesn't make a difference, as Mythos is not just a delicious Greek beer, but also a super-intelligent system that will penetrate any of your cyber-defenses anyway.
In some ways Mythos (like many AI things) can be used as the ultimate accountability sink.
These libraries/frameworks are not insecure because of bad design and dependency bloat. No! It's because a mythical LLM is so powerful that it's impossible to defend against! There was nothing that could be done.
I've been part of a response team on a security incident and I really feel for them. However, this initial communication is terrible.
Something happened, we won't say what, but it was severe enough to notify law enforcement. What floors me is the only actionable advice is to "review environment variables". What should a customer even do with that advice? Make sure the variable are still there? How would you know if any of them were exposed or leaked?
The advice should be to IMMEDIATELY rotate all passwords, access tokens, and any sensitive information shared with Vercel. And then begin to audit access logs, customer data, etc, for unusual activity.
The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.
I know there is a huge fog of uncertainly in the early stages of an incident, but it spooks me how intentionally vague they seem to be here about what happened and who has been impacted.
> Environment variables marked as "sensitive" in Vercel are stored in a manner that prevents them from being read, and we currently do not have evidence that those values were accessed. However, if any of your environment variables contain secrets (API keys, tokens, database credentials, signing keys) that were not marked as sensitive, those values should be treated as potentially exposed and rotated as a priority.
There are cases where I want env variables to be considered non-secure and fine to be read later, I have one in a current project that defines the email address used as the From address for automated emails for example.
In my opinion the lack of security should be opt-in rather than opt-out though. Meaning it should be considered secure by default with an option to make it readable.
How does the app read the variable if it can't be read after you input it? Or do they mean you can't view it after providing the variable value to the UI?
Seriously. Why am I reading about this here and not via an email? I've been a paying customer for over a year now. My online news aggregator informs me before the actual company itself does?
Please remember that this is the same company that couldn't figure out how to authorize 3rd party middleware and had, with what should be a company ending, critical vulnerability .
Oh and the owner likes to proudly remind people about his work on Google AMP, a product that has done major damage to the open web.
This is who they are: a bunch of incompetent engineers that play with pension funds + gulf money.
I just deleted my account. Their laid-back notice just is not worth it anymore. I will hold them accountable using my cash. You can get out with me. Let their apologies hit your spam filter. They need to be better prepared to react to the storm of insanity that comes with a breach or they lose my info (lose it twice, I guess..)
The Oracle that published an announcement that said "we didn't get hacked" when the hackers had private customer info?
The Oracle that does not allow you to do any security testing on their software unless you use one of their approved vendors?
The Oracle that one of my customers uses where they have to turn off the HR portal for 2 weeks before annual performance evaluations because there is no way to prevent people from seeing things?
The only reason Oracle isn't having nightmarish security problems published every other week is because they threaten to sue anyone that does find an issue.
Oracle is a joke in every conceivable way and I despise them on a personal level.
> The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.
This and because it's so convenient to click some buttons and have your application running. I've stopped being lazy, though. Moved everything from Render to linode. I was paying render $50+/month. Now I'm paying $3-5.
I would never use one of those hosting providers again.
It could be $0 on Render too, but then there's going to be a 3 minute load time for a landing page to become visible, lol. So if you don't want your server to sleep, you're going to have to pay $20/month.
Yeah, given there insane pricing I think the expectations can be higher. Although I know it is impossible to provide 100% secure system, but if something like that happens, then the communication should at least be better. Don’t wait until you have talked to the lawyers... inform your customers first, ideally without this cooperate BS speak, most vercel customers are probably developers, so they understand that incidents like this can happen, just be transparent about it
Completely agreed. At minimum they should be advising secret rotation.
The only possibility for that not being a reasonable starting point is if they think the malicious actors still have access and will just exfiltrate rotated secrets as well. Otherwise this is deflection in an attempt to salvage credibility.
While a different kind of incident (in hindsight), the other week Webflow had a serious operational incident.
Sites across the globe going down (no clue if all or just a part of them). They posted plenty of messages, I think for about 12 hours, but mostly with the same content/message: "working on fixing this with an upstream provider" (paraphrased). No meaningful info about what was the actual problem or impact.
Only the next day did somebody write about what happened. Essentially a database running out of storage space. How that became a single point of failure, to at least plenty of customers: no clue. Sounds like bad architecture to me though. But what personally rubbed me the wrong way most of all, was the insistence on their "dashboard" having indicated anything wrong with their database deployment, as it allegedly had misrepresented the used/allocated storage. I don't who this upstream service provider of Webflow is, but I know plenty about server maintenance.
Either that upstream provider didn't provide a crucial metric (on-disk storage use) on their "dashboard", or Webflow was throwing this provider under the bus for what may have been their own ignorant/incompetent database server management. I guess it all depends to which extend this database was a managed service or something Webflow had more direct control over. Either way, with any clue about the provider or service missing from their post-mortem, customers can only guess as to who was to blame for the outage.
I have a feeling that we probably aren't the only customer they lost over this. Which in our case would probably not have happened, if they had communicated things in a different way. For context: I personally would never need nor recommend something like Webflow, but I do understand why it might be the right fit for people in a different position. That is, as long as it doesn't break down like it did. I still can't quite wrap my head around that apparent single point of failure for a company the size of Webflow though.
> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.
> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.
> Vercel did not specify which of its systems were compromised
I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.
I dunno. If I work on GitHub and I say “obscure subsystem X” has been breached, it’s no more useful than the level of specificity that Vercel has already given (“some customer environments have been compromised”)
Huh, curiously; I'm on Arch Linux, crash happens in Google Chrome (147.0.7727.101) for me too, but not in Firefox (149.0.2) nor even in Chromium (147.0.7727.101).
I find it fun we're all reading a story how Vercel likely is compromised somehow, and managed to reproduce a crash on their webpage, so now we all give it a try. Surely could never backfire :)
if it does so happen that the crash originates from a browser exploit, you should expect to be more at risk due to the absence of a crash on an older version, not less
> Ones NOT marked as sensitive should be rolled out of precaution
if it's not marked as sensitive (because it is not sensitive) there is no reason to roll them. if you must roll a insensitive env var it should've been sensitive in the first place, no?
There's a difference between sensitive, private and public. If public (i.e. NEXT_PUBLIC_) then yeah likely not a reason to roll. Private keys that aren't explicitly sensitive probably are still sensitive. It doesn't seem to be the default to have things "sensitive" and I can't tell if that's a new classification or has always been there.
I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)
He’s a streamer who talks about tech. Previously had a sponsorship relationship with Vercel so is theoretically more well connected than average on the topic. He’s also very divisive because he does a lot of ragebait, grievance reporting, and contrarian takes but famously has blind spots for a few companies and technologies that he’s favored in past videos or been sponsored by. I have friends who watch a lot of his videos but I’ve never been able to get into it.
Incidents like this are a good reminder of how concentrated our single points of failure have become in the modern web ecosystem. I appreciate the transparency in their disclosure so far, but it definitely makes you re-evaluate the risk profile of leaning entirely on fully managed PaaS solutions.
Conjecture, but the wording "limited subset" rarely turns out to be good news. Usually a provider will say "less than 1% of our users" or some specific number when they can to ease concerns. My guess is they don't have the visibility or they don't like the number.
I feel for the team; security incidents suck. I know they are working hard, I hope they start to communicate more openly and transparently.
“Less than 1% of our users” means 10k affected users if you have 1 million users. 10k victims is a lot! Imagine “air travel is safe, only a subset of 1% of travellers die”
The lack of details itself is telling enough. Whatever comes out will be no doubt PR sanitised and some bigger clumps of truth won't make it through the PR process.
This announcement in its current form is quite useless and not actionable. As least people won’t be able to say “why didn’t you say something sooner?” They said _something_
What is the rationale for using vercel ? I'm getting a lot of value out of cloudflare with the $5/month plan lately but my bare metal box with triple digit ram has seen zero downtime since 2015.
They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.
Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).
I really want this to be true. nextjs is a nightmare. I'm eternally disgruntled.
nextjs is also powerful due to AI. But the value is a robust interactive front-end, easily iterated, with maybe SSR backing, nothing specific to nextjs (it's routing semantics + React).
So much complexity has gone into SSR. I hate 5MB client runtime just to read text as much as anyone, but not if the tradeoff is isomorphic env with magic file first-line incantations.
> To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.
I guess they should have put some of that marketing money into hiring someone to manage the security of their systems. It's pretty telling that they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack. If you treat security like something you don't have to worry about until after you've been hacked you're probably going to get hacked.
> they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack
Plenty to criticize them for, but that's totally standard and not something to ding them for. Probably something their cyber insurance has in their contract.
Forensics is its own set of skills, different from appsec and general blue team duties. You really want to make sure no backdoors got left in.
I don’t think they “got lucky”. nextjs is an old project now, and for a long time it was the simplest framework to run a React website.
This is why most open source landing pages used nextjs, and if most FOSS landing pages use it, then most LLM’s have been trained on it, which means LLM’s are more familiar with that framework and choose it
There must be a term for this kind of LLM driven adoption flywheel…
So glad I decided to just stick with django/htmx on my project a few years ago. I invested a little time into nextjs and came to the conclusion that this can't be the way.
Vercel promises to engineer the pain away when it comes to deployment. The thing however is that Vercel introduced that pain in the first place by writing sub-par documentation and splitting many of NextJS functions into small parts with different cost.
Perhaps the rationale is laziness. Maintaining VM probably takes some more effort and competence than deploying to Vercel. Some people are willing to pay to minimize effort and the need to learn anything.
Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.
I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.
Every three months I'm trying to deploy to Cloudflare from Monorepo and I hadn't have success yet. While Vercel works every time from the box. Maybe I could dig deeper and try to understand how it works, but I'm super lazy to do that.
Cloudflare’s developer experience doesn’t come close, it is terrible. Cloudflare are working on it, and hopefully they’ll be a real competitor to Vercel on ease of use someday, but right now, it is painful when compared to Vercel. Cloudflare is infrastructure first, Vercel is developer experience first.
Yes, CloudFlare's full of bugs and sharp edges. Not to mention the atrocious 3MB worker size limit (especially egregious in the age of ML models). They don't mention this up front in the docs and the moment you try to deploy anything non trivial it's oops time to completely re architect your app.
Well it's so far from Vercel that it's not even funny any more.
Good work on workers though, maybe the next generation of sandstorm will be built on CloudFlare in a decade or so after all the bugs have been hammered out.
I haven't used Cloudflare and am the first to shit on Vercel. But I have to say, some aspects of their hosting are nice. In many ways it really is just a terminal command and up it goes with good tooling around it. For example, the PR previews take zero setup and just work. Managing your projects is easy, it's all nicely designed, it integrates well with Next and some other frontend-heavy systems and so on.
Render is really good at this too. I specifically chose "not Vercel" when looking into hosting. Though I haven't tried both to compare: render has been a pleasure, just works, and auto deploys per branch also available.
Knowing how to operate a basic server is perceived as hard and dangerous by many, especially the generation that didn’t have a chance to play with Linux for fun when growing up
Great point on the playing with Linux growing up, it's second nature to me now.
I am always feeling like I'm doing something wrong running bare metal based on modern advice, but it's low latency, simple, and reliable.
Probably because I've been using linux since Slackware in the 90s so it's second nature. And now with the CLI-based coding tools, I have a co-sysadmin to help me keep things tidy and secure. It's great and I highly recommend more people try it.
it's free for newbies and everyone, ofc it's a trap but freemium model gets people. aws can cost easily few thousands with 2-3 mistakes and clicks. vercel makes you start free then if you grow they bill you 10x-100x aws
I dunno I put a lot of traffic through Vercel, maybe 100k visitors per day, and it was under a few hundred a month. I think a couple EC2 instances behind a load balancer would cost similar or more. I was under the impression that its still a VC subsidized service.
They regularly try to get me to join an enterprise plan but no service cutoff threats yet.
You could probably serve 100k visitors from a $5 VPS, depending on the application.
That said, I understand people are paying for basically not having to think about infrastructure, and agree that that's theoretically worth money, if they could do it well.
For a lot of folks, I think its ease of deployment when using Next.js. I switched to astro, also doing a lot of cloudflare at the moment. Before that, I was doing OpenNext with sst.dev on AWS but it started feeling annoying.
There really isn't any if you are running a serious product.
They have a free tier plan for non-commercial usage and a very very good UX for just deploying your website.
Many companies start using Vercel for the convenience and, as they grow, they continue paying for it because migrating to a cheaper provider is inconvenient.
NextJs requires what exactly? Running a nodejs server? I mean yes, it takes a bit more time to set up than one-command deploy to Vercel. But in 2026, even this setup overhead can be cut down to minutes by telling your favorite LLM agent to SSH into your server and set it up for you.
Maybe. CF’s runtime isn’t perfectly identical to Vercel’s. For instance, CF doesn’t support eval(), which is something you shouldn’t be doing often anyway, but it did mean that we can’t use the NPM protobufs package that’s a dependency for some Google SDKs.
I started using it a few years ago when I moved to my current company, and have to say I've learned to like it quite a bit. Moving to Cloudflare is an option, but currently it just works so we can't be bothered. Costs are not nothing, but basically no issues with it until now, and it's not so expensive that it raises eyebrows with the biggest being that we have 3 seats. The setup is quick and again it just works. We are a very small team, and the fact we don't have to deal with it on a daily/weekly basis is valuable. Obviously this current situation is a problem, but I am not sure which platform is free of issues like these. People act like it can't happen to me, until it does.
Assuming that all homes are at equal risk of being burglarized. In practice the neighborhoods I’ve seen are either at much higher risk or much lower risk.
and burglarized homes have higher prob. of being burglarized again, and probabilities don't accumulate but compound, and is the server even in a house?
So, the Vercel post says a number of customers were impacted, but not everyone, and they will contact the people that were impacted.
I wasn't contacted so does that mean I'm safe?
We run on Vercel and I wonder if / how long before we're alerted about a leak. Quick look online suggests environment variables marked as sensitive are ok, but to which extent I wonder.
Vercel acknowledges a security incident, which nobody is claiming doesn't exist. What they don't acknowledge are this person's vague implications about impact elsewhere.
Ah, Theo with his vast insights and connections into everything. That man gets around, and his content is worth it's cost.
Theo's content boils down to the same boring formula.
1. Whatever buzzword headline is trending at the time
2. Immediate sponsored ad that is supposed to make you sympathize with Theo cause he "vets" his sponsors.
3. The man makes you listen to a "that totally happened" story that he somehow always involved himself personally.
4. Man serves you up an ad for his t3.chat and how it's the greatest thing in the world and how he should be paid more for his infinite wisdom.
5. A rag on Claude or OpenAI (whichever is leading at the time)
6. 5-10 minutes of paraphrasing an article without critical thought or analysis on the video topic.
I used to enjoy his content when he was still in his Ping era, but it's clear hes drunken the YT marketer kool-aid. I've moved on, his content gets recommend now and again, but I can't entertain his non-sense anymore.
I just wanted to chime in and say I think he is knowledgeable; he's not a con. I know you didn't say that, but people might have the impression he doesn't know what he's talking about. He does know, and I've learned quite a lot from him in the past.
However, since the LLM Cambria explosion, he has become very clickbaity, and his content has become shallow. I don't watch his videos anymore.
Not that I ever had confidence in his technical knowledge, but it went to zero when he confidently asserted that there was no possible way a single server could handle the massive traffic some NextJS app he had made was serving. He then posted the bill - which was about $5K IIRC - and I was able to determine from the billed runtime and memory that a modestly-spec’d RPi could in fact handle it.
He's about as knowledgeable as the junior you hired last week, except that he speaks from a position of authority and gets retweeted by the entire JS slop sphere. He's LinkedIn slop for Gen Z.
I don't watch his content, but I felt comfortable posting his link as I believe he's generally considered a reputable guy? His tweets sometimes come up in my for you tab and he seems reasonable and knowledgable generally? Maybe I'm wrong and shouldn't have linked to him as a source.
He's kind of like an LLM in that his content has the surface texture of something substantial, and sometimes it's backed by substance, yet it's often half-true or totally off the mark too. You'll notice if you're previously acquainted with what he's talking about, otherwise he seems to be as you described.
I don't think he's a bad guy or that he's trying to be misleading. I suspect he wants his content to actually carry value, but he produces too much for that to be possible. Primarily he's a performer, not a technologist.
> @theo: "I have reason to believe this is credible. If you are using Vercel, it’s a good idea to roll your secrets and env vars."
> @ErdalToprak: "And use your own vps or k3s cluster there’s no reason in 2026 to delegate your infra to a middle man except if you’re at AWS level needs"
> @theo: "This is still a stupid take"
lol, okay. Thanks for the insight, Theo, whoever you are.
You'll have to ask @ErdalToprak on Twitter on that one. I just thought it was funny that this slopfluencer, who's taken money to advertise Vercel, ostensibly believes that using a VPS/k3s is "a stupid take."
It's very typical to have a retainer / insurance to bring in "emergency" incident responders beyond your existing team. Not saying that's the case here but it wouldn't be surprising.
Hey, I’m with you - I think social media needs to die specifically for this reason. I’m reminded of the term “snake oil” - it’s like the dawn of newspapers again.
This is why you pay a real provider for serious business needs, not an AWS reseller. Next.js is a fundamentally insecure framework, as server components are an anti-pattern full of magic leading to stuff like the below. Given their standards for framework security, it's not hard to believe their business' control plane is just as insecure (and probably built using the same insecure framework).
Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.
> Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.
Wasn't unheard of back in the day, that you leaked things via PHP templates, like serializing and adding the whole user object including private details in a Twig template or whatever, it just happened the other way around kind of. This was before "fat frontend, thin backend" was the prevalent architecture, many built their "frontends" from templates with just sprinkles of JavaScript back then.
People say "Next.js is the new PHP" because it's the most popular and prominent tooling out there, and so by sheer number of available targets it's the one that comes up the most when things go wrong like this.
But there are more people trying to secure this framework and the underlying tools than there would be on some obscure framework or something the average company built themselves.
Also "pay a real provider", what does that mean? Are you again implying that the average company should be responsible for _more_ of their own security in their hosting stack, not less?
Most companies have _zero_ security engineers.. Using a vertically-integrated hosting company like Vercel (or other similar companies, perhaps with different tech stacks - this opinion has nothing to do with Next or Node) is very likely their best and most secure option based on what they are able to invest in that area.
PHP was so simple and easy to understand that anyone with a text editor and some cheap shared hosting could pick it up, but also low level enough that almost nothing was magically done for you. The result was many inexperienced developers making really basic mistakes while implementing essential features that we now take for granted.
Frameworks like Next.js take the complete opposite approach, they are insanely complex but hide that complexity behind layers and layers of magic, actively discouraging developers from looking behind the curtain, and the result is that even experienced developers end up shooting themselves in the foot by using the magical incantations wrong.
Totally agree. Nextjs is a vehicle to sell their PaaS, every other feature is a coincidence.
What’s worse is vercel corrupted the react devs and convinced them that RSC was a good idea. It’s not like react was strictly in good hands at Facebook but at least the team there were good shepherds and trying to foster the ecosystem.
Well when the CEO of Vercel poses with Netanyahu, a war criminal, in the middle of a genocide... it's going to imply that Vercel has valuable war crime data that people will want to intercept just to bring down Israel's genocidal program.
Why does anyone running a third party tool have access to all of their clients’ accounts? I can’t imagine something this stupid happening with a real service provider.
I see Vercel is hosted on AWS? Are they hosting every one on a single AWS account with no tenant isolating? Something this dumb could never happen on a real AWS account. Yes I know the internal controls that AWS has (former employee).
Anyone who is hosting a real business on Vercel should have known better.
I have used v0 to build a few admin sites. But I downloaded the artifacts, put in a Docker container and hosted everything in Lambda myself where I controlled the tenant isolation via separate AWS accounts, secrets in Secret Manager and tightly scoped IAM roles, etc.
Is AWS security boundary the AWS account? Are you expecting Vercel to provision and manage an AWS account per user? That doesn’t make any sense man, though makes sense if you’re a former AWS employee.
It doesn’t make sense for a random employee who mistakenly uses a third party app to compromise all of its users it’s a poor security architecture.
It’s about as insecure as having one Apache Server serving multiple customer’s accounts. No one who is concerned about security should ever use Vercel.
Well, I know that you have never heard of someone using a third party SaaS product at any major cloud provider compromising all of their customers accounts.
Are you really defending Vercel as a hosting platform that anyone should take seriously?
I recently got hit by a car on my bike. While I was starting the claim filing process the web portal for ICBC (British Columbia insurance) was acting a little funky / stalling / and then gave me a weird access error. Down at the bottom of the error page was a little grey underlined link that said “vercel”.
I’m not exactly surprised, but it seems like the unserious, ill-informed and lazy are taking over. There is absolutely zero reason why a large, essential public service should be overspending and running on an unnecessary managed service like vercel… yet, here we are.
Much as I want to rip on vercel, its clear that ai is going to lead to mass security breaches. The attack surface is so large, and ai agents are working around the clock. This is a new normal. Open source software is going to change, companies wont be running random repos off github anymore
Most of recent issues, including this incident, happened not due to smart superintelligent "agents" taking over the world - chatbots and other text generators are about as intelligent amd powerful as a dead starfish - but due to the combined stupidity of the said chatbots amd lazy idiots who use them to hide their own incompetence and thus produce such embarassing mistakes. A few years ago, they would be fired for exposing secrets in plain text, but since their manager wanted an AI-Workflow...
LOL. Attackers will run these agents but the thousands of maintainers will be so dumb to sit idly and get hammered with exploits. I wonder what the ratio of attackers to maintainers must be, 1:1000 is a fair assessment i take it.
Also LLMs will be used to attack only, no one will be smart to integrate it into CI flows, because everyone is that dumb. No security tools will pop up.
Let that be the end of Microsoft. Was forced to use their shitty products for years, by corporate inertia and their free Teams and Azure licenses, first-dose-is-free, curse.
this like is saying email marketing is done better if you hand write every email. Thats true, but the hit rate is so low, that you are better off generating 1 million hyper personalized emails and firing them off into the ether
As someone who did the former for a couple years, “better off” is subjective and dependent on your business model, particularly for B2B. It’s a trade off like anything else. You may get more leads, but they may convert at a lower rate. Sending at that scale also increases your risk of email deliverability problems. Trashing your domain has more impacts than you’d think. In smaller, targeted markets it even can damage your business reputation and hurt future sales if done poorly; word gets around.
I disagree. Many humans are phishing in a different language than their native tongue, and LLMs are way better at sounding legit/professional than many of them. The best spear-phishing will still be humans, but AI definitely raises the bar.
At what point do we start asking questions about the concentration of trust in the web ecosystem?
It's funny that at the engineering level we are continuously grilled in interviews about the single responsibility principle, meanwhile the industry's business model is to undermine the entirety of web standards and consolidate the web stack into a CLI.
No, but most breaches today come from compromised internal accounts that are then used to break everything.
> Indicators of compromise (IOCs)
> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.
> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.
> OAuth App: 110671459871-30f1spbu0hptbs60cb4vsmv79i7bbvqj.apps.googleusercontent.com
https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in...
> A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called http://Context.ai that he was using.
> Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.
> We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.
> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.
Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.
On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.
But on the other hand... It's Sunday. Unless you're tuned-in to social media over the weekend, your main provider could be undergoing a meltdown while you are completely unaware. Many higher-up folks check company email over the weekend, but if they're traveling or relaxing, social media might be the furthest thing from their mind. It really bites that this is the only way to get critical information.
This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.
And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.
They can be brought in to do their job on a Sunday for an event of this relevance. They can always take next Friday off or something.
If the attacker is moving with "surprising velocity," every hour of delay on an email blast is another hour the attacker has to use those potentially stolen secrets against downstream infrastructure. Using Twitter/X as a primary disclosure channel for a "sophisticated" breach is amateur hour. If legal is the bottleneck for a mass email during an active compromise, then your incident response plan is fundamentally broken.
https://x.com/rauchg/status/2045995362499076169
https://x.com/rauchg/status/2045995362499076169
Better to report 100% known things quickly. People can figure it out with near zero effort, and it reduces one tiny bit of potential liability in the ops shitstorm they’re going through.
This feels like a natural consequence of the direction web development has been going for the last decade, where it's normalised to wire up many third party solutions together rather than building from more stable foundations. So many moving parts, so many potential points of failure, and as this incident has shown, you are only as secure as your weakest link. Putting your business in the hands of a third party AI tool (which is surely vibe-coded) carries risks.
Is this the direction we want to continue in? Is it really necessary? How much more complex do things need to be before we course-correct?
We need a different hosting model.
Instead of "programs that do one thing and do it well", "write programs which are designed to be used together" and "write programs to handle text streams", I might go with a foundational philosophy like "write programs that are do not trust the user or the admin" because in applications connected to the internet, both groups often make mistakes or are malicious. Also something like "write programs that are strict on which inputs they accept" because a lot of input is malicious.
It was also a different model on ownership and vetting of those focused tools. It might have been a model of having the single source tree of an old UNIX or BSD, where everything was managed as a coherent whole from grep to cc all the way to X11. Or it might have been the Linux distribution model of having dedicated packagers do the vetting to piecemeal packages into more of a bazaar, even going so far as to rip scripting language bundles into their component pieces as for Python and Perl.
But in both of those models you were put farther away from the third-party authors bringing software into the open-source (and proprietary) supply chains.
This led to a host of issues with getting new software to users and with a fractal explosion of different versions of software dependencies to potentially have to work around, which is one reason we saw the explosion of NPM and Cargo and the like. Especially once Docker made it easy to go straight from stitching an app together with NPM on your local dev seat to getting it deployed to prod.
But the issue isn't with focused tooling as much as it is with hewing more closely to the upstream who could potentially be subverted in a supply chain attack.
After all, it's not as if people never tried to do this with Linux distros (or even the Linux kernel itself -- see for instance https://linux.slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/058249/linux-kerne... ). But the inherent delay and indirection in that model helped make it less of a serious risk.
But even if you only use 1 NPM package instead of 100, if it's a big enough package you can assume it's going to be a large target for attacks.
Imagine if cars were developed like websites, with your brakes depending on a live connection to a 3rd party plugin on a website. Insanity, right? But not for web businesses people depend on for privacy, security, finances, transportation, healthcare, etc.
When the company's brakes go out today, we all just shrug, watch the car crash, then pick up the pieces and continue like it's normal. I have yet to hear a single CEO issue an ultimatum that the OWASP Top 10 (just an example) will be prevented by X date. Because they don't really care. They'll only lose a few customers and everyone else will shrug and keep using them. If we vote with our dollars, we've voted to let it continue.
There really isn't an option here, IMO.
1. Somebody does it
2. You do it
Much happier doing it myself tbh.
And my own kernel. Can't trust some shit written by a Finnish dude 30 years ago.
And my own UEFI firmware. Definitely can't trust some shit written by my hardware vendor ever.
The AI maximalists would argue that the only way is through more AI. Vibe code the app, then ask an LLM to security review it, then vibe code the security fixes, then ask the LLM to review the fixes and app again, rinse and repeat in an endless loop. Same with regressions, performance, features, etc. stick the LLM in endless loops for every vertical you care about.
Pointing to failed experiments like the browser or compiler ones somehow don’t seem to deter AI maximalists. They would simply claim they needed better models/skills/harness/tools/etc. the goalpost is always one foot away.
You can write good and bad code with and without AI, on a managed service, self-hosted, or something in between.
And the comment I was replying to said something about not trusting something written in Akron, OH 2 years ago, which makes no sense and is barely an argument, and I was mostly pointing out how silly that comment sounds.
There is no “I wrote this code with some AI assistance” when you’re sending 2k line change PR after 8 minutes of me giving you permission on the repo. That’s the type of shit I’m dealing with and management is ecstatic at the pace and progress and the person just looks at you and say “anything in particular that’s wrong or needs changing? I’m just asking for a review and feedback”
Regarding the unix philosophy argument, comparing it to AI tools just doesn't make any sense. If you look at what the philosophy is, it's obvious that it doesn't just boil down to "use many small tools" or "use many dependencies", it's so different that it not even wrong [0].
In their Unix paper of 1974, Ritchie and Thompson quote the following design considerations:
- Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.
- Interactive use instead of batch processing.
- Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").
- Self-supporting system: all Unix software is maintained under Unix.
In what way does that correspond to "use dependencies" or "use AI tools"? This was then formalised later to
- Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
- Write programs to work together.
- Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
This has absolutely nothing in common with pulling in thousands of dependences or using hundreds of third party services.
Then there is the argument that "AI is just a higher level compiler". That is akin to me saying that "AI is just a higher level musical instrument" except it's not, because it functions completely differently to musical instruments and people operate them in a completely different way. The argument seems to be that since both of them produce music, in the same way both a compiler and LLM generate "code", they are equivalent. The overarching argument is that only outputs matter, except when they don't because the LLM produces flawed outputs, so really it's just that the outputs are equivalent in the abstract, if you ignore the concrete real-world reality. Using that same argument, Spotify is a musical instrument because it outputs music, and hey look, my guitar also outputs music!
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
[0] https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks/report
It’s interesting how they all use LLMs to write their Reddit posts, too. Some of them could have drawn in some people if they took 5 minutes to type an announcement post in their own words, but they all have the same LLM style announcement post, too. I wonder if they’re conversing with the LLM and it told them to post it to Reddit for traction?
see [0]: Rails security Audit Report
[0]: https://ostif.org/ruby-on-rails-audit-complete/
Protection money from Vercel.
"Pay us 10% of revenue or we switch to generating Netlify code."
So I told something like, "don't use anything node at all", and it immediately rewrote it as a Python backend, and it volunteered that it was minimizing dependencies in how it did that.
[1] only vibe coding as an exercise for a throwaway artifact; I'm not endorsing vibe coding
I've heard others had similar results with .NET/C#
You don't have to live like this.
I once made a golang multi-person pomodoro app by vibe coding with gemini 3.1 pro (when it had first launched first day) and I asked it to basically only have one outside dependency of gorrilla websockets and everything else from standard library and then I deployed it to hugging face spaces for free.
I definitely recommend golang as a language if you wish to vibe code. Some people recommend rust but Golang compiles fast, its cross compilation and portable and is really awesome with its standard library
(Anecdotally I also feel like there is some chances that the models are being diluted cuz like this thing then has become my benchmark test and others have performed somewhat worse or not the same as this to be honest and its only been a few days since I am now using hackernews less frequently and I am/was already seeing suspicions like these about claude and other models on the front page iirc. I don't know enough about claude opus 4.7 but I just read simon's comment on it, so it would be cool if someone can give me a gist of what is happening for the past few days.)
Switch to vibe coding Rust backends and freeze your supply chain.
Super strong types. Immaculate error handling. Clear and easy to read code. Rock solid performance. Minimal dependencies.
Vibe code Rust for web work. You don't even need to know Rust. You'll osmose it over a few months using it. It's not hard at all. The "Rust is hard" memes are bullshit, and the "difficult to refactor" was (1) never true and (2) not even applicable with tools like Claude Code.
Edit: people hate this (-3), but it's where the alpha is. Don't blindly dismiss this. Serializing business logic to Rust is a smart move. The language is very clean, easy to read, handles errors in a first class fashion, and fast. If the code compiles, then 50% of your error classes are already dealt with.
Python, Typescript, and Go are less satisfactory on one or more of these dimensions. If you generate code, generate Rust.
But you're also correct in that Rust is actually possible to write in a more high level way, especially for web where you have very little shared state and the state that is shared can just be wrapped in Arc<> and put in the web frameworks context. It's actually dead easy to spin up web services in Rust, and they have a great set of ORM's if thats your vibe too. Rust is expressive enough to make schema-as-code work well.
On the dependencies, if you're concerned about the possibility of future supply chain attacks (because Rust doesn't have a history like Node) you can vendor your deps and bypass future problems. `cargo vendor` and you're done, Node has no such ergonomic path to vendoring, which imo is a better solution than anything else besides maybe Go (another great option for web services!). Saying "don't use deps" doesn't work for any other language other than something like Go (and you can run `go vendor` as well).
But yeah, in today's economy where compute and especially memory is becoming more constrained thanks to AI, I really like the peace of mind knowing my unoptimised high level Rust web services run with minimal memory and compute requirements, and further optimisation doesn't require a rewrite to a different language.
Idk mate, I used to be a big Rust hater but once I gave the language a serious try I find it more pleasant to write compared to both Typescript and Go. And it's very amiable to AI if that's your vibe(coding), since the static guarantees of the type system make it easier for AI to generate correct code, and the diagnostics messages allow it to reroute it's course during the session.
However it is less clear on how to do this, people mostly take the easiest path.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
> b. (Recommended) Do something that works now, you can always make it better later
The internet does that but it feels different with this
That's a funny way of saying "race to the bottom."
> The internet does that but it feels different with this
How does "the internet do that?" What force on the internet naturally brings about mediocrity? Or have we confused rapacious and monopolistic corporations with the internet at large?
Stack exchange. Google.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6pgZKVcKpw
It is true that "more diversity in code" probably means less turnkey spray-and-pray compromises, sure. Probably.
It also means that the models themselves become targets. If your models start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability, how're you gonna patch that?
This situation is pretty funny to me. Some of my friends who arent technical tried vibe coding and showed me what they built and asked for feedback
I noticed they were using Supabase by default, pointed out that their database was completely open with no RLS
So I told them not to use Supabase in that way, and they asked the AI (various diff LLMs) to fix it. One example prompt I saw was: please remove Supabase because of the insecure data access and make a proper secure way.
Keep in mind, these ppl dont have a technical background and do not know what supabase or node or python is. They let the llm install docker, install node, etc and just hit approve on "Do you want to continue? bash(brew install ..)"
Whats interesting is that this happened multiple times with different AI models. Instead of fixing the problem the way a developer normally would like moving the database logic to the server or creating proper API endpoints it tried to recreate an emulation of Supabase, specifically PostgREST in a much worse and less secure way.
The result was an API endpoint that looked like: /api/query?q=SELECT * FROM table WHERE x
In one example GLM later bolted on a huge "security" regular expression that blocked , admin, updateadmin, ^delete* lol
That lack of diversity also makes patches more universal, and the surface area more limited.
These libraries/frameworks are not insecure because of bad design and dependency bloat. No! It's because a mythical LLM is so powerful that it's impossible to defend against! There was nothing that could be done.
I really like it. Recommended.
Something happened, we won't say what, but it was severe enough to notify law enforcement. What floors me is the only actionable advice is to "review environment variables". What should a customer even do with that advice? Make sure the variable are still there? How would you know if any of them were exposed or leaked?
The advice should be to IMMEDIATELY rotate all passwords, access tokens, and any sensitive information shared with Vercel. And then begin to audit access logs, customer data, etc, for unusual activity.
The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.
I know there is a huge fog of uncertainly in the early stages of an incident, but it spooks me how intentionally vague they seem to be here about what happened and who has been impacted.
> Environment variables marked as "sensitive" in Vercel are stored in a manner that prevents them from being read, and we currently do not have evidence that those values were accessed. However, if any of your environment variables contain secrets (API keys, tokens, database credentials, signing keys) that were not marked as sensitive, those values should be treated as potentially exposed and rotated as a priority.
https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in... as of 4:22p ET
https://vercel.com/docs/environment-variables/sensitive-envi...
So they are harder to introspect and review once set.
It’s probably good practice to put non-secret-material in non-sensitive variables.
(Pure speculation, I’ve never used Vercel)
There are cases where I want env variables to be considered non-secure and fine to be read later, I have one in a current project that defines the email address used as the From address for automated emails for example.
In my opinion the lack of security should be opt-in rather than opt-out though. Meaning it should be considered secure by default with an option to make it readable.
Oh and the owner likes to proudly remind people about his work on Google AMP, a product that has done major damage to the open web.
This is who they are: a bunch of incompetent engineers that play with pension funds + gulf money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448723
https://xcancel.com/javasquip/status/1903480443158298994
Google in particular has been staggeringly good, and don't sleep on IBM when they Actually Care.
The Oracle that published an announcement that said "we didn't get hacked" when the hackers had private customer info?
The Oracle that does not allow you to do any security testing on their software unless you use one of their approved vendors?
The Oracle that one of my customers uses where they have to turn off the HR portal for 2 weeks before annual performance evaluations because there is no way to prevent people from seeing things?
The only reason Oracle isn't having nightmarish security problems published every other week is because they threaten to sue anyone that does find an issue.
Oracle is a joke in every conceivable way and I despise them on a personal level.
This and because it's so convenient to click some buttons and have your application running. I've stopped being lazy, though. Moved everything from Render to linode. I was paying render $50+/month. Now I'm paying $3-5.
I would never use one of those hosting providers again.
Does Vercel do the same?
The point is, I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to, even if I had 0 users, lol.
The only possibility for that not being a reasonable starting point is if they think the malicious actors still have access and will just exfiltrate rotated secrets as well. Otherwise this is deflection in an attempt to salvage credibility.
While a different kind of incident (in hindsight), the other week Webflow had a serious operational incident.
Sites across the globe going down (no clue if all or just a part of them). They posted plenty of messages, I think for about 12 hours, but mostly with the same content/message: "working on fixing this with an upstream provider" (paraphrased). No meaningful info about what was the actual problem or impact.
Only the next day did somebody write about what happened. Essentially a database running out of storage space. How that became a single point of failure, to at least plenty of customers: no clue. Sounds like bad architecture to me though. But what personally rubbed me the wrong way most of all, was the insistence on their "dashboard" having indicated anything wrong with their database deployment, as it allegedly had misrepresented the used/allocated storage. I don't who this upstream service provider of Webflow is, but I know plenty about server maintenance.
Either that upstream provider didn't provide a crucial metric (on-disk storage use) on their "dashboard", or Webflow was throwing this provider under the bus for what may have been their own ignorant/incompetent database server management. I guess it all depends to which extend this database was a managed service or something Webflow had more direct control over. Either way, with any clue about the provider or service missing from their post-mortem, customers can only guess as to who was to blame for the outage.
I have a feeling that we probably aren't the only customer they lost over this. Which in our case would probably not have happened, if they had communicated things in a different way. For context: I personally would never need nor recommend something like Webflow, but I do understand why it might be the right fit for people in a different position. That is, as long as it doesn't break down like it did. I still can't quite wrap my head around that apparent single point of failure for a company the size of Webflow though.
/anecdote
> Indicators of compromise (IOCs)
> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.
> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.
> OAuth App: 110671459871-30f1spbu0hptbs60cb4vsmv79i7bbvqj.apps.googleusercontent.com
https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in...
I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.
Clicking the Vercel logo at the top left of the page hard crashes my Chrome app. Like, immediate crash.
What an interesting bug.
I find it fun we're all reading a story how Vercel likely is compromised somehow, and managed to reproduce a crash on their webpage, so now we all give it a try. Surely could never backfire :)
Chrome Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit). Windows 11 Pro.
Video: https://imgur.com/a/pq6P4si
I use uBlock Origin Lite. Maybe it blocks some crash causing script? edit: still no crash when I disabled UBO.
No crash.
Now I don't want to click that "Finish update" button.
Has anyone made the move to self hosting on their own servers again?
https://x.com/theo/status/2045862972342313374
> I have reason to believe this is credible.
https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636
> Env vars marked as sensitive are safe. Ones NOT marked as sensitive should be rolled out of precaution
https://x.com/theo/status/2045871215705747965
> Everything I know about this hack suggests it could happen to any host
https://x.com/DiffeKey/status/2045813085408051670
> Vercel has reportedly been breached by ShinyHunters.
if it's not marked as sensitive (because it is not sensitive) there is no reason to roll them. if you must roll a insensitive env var it should've been sensitive in the first place, no?
I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)
https://t3.gg/
I feel for the team; security incidents suck. I know they are working hard, I hope they start to communicate more openly and transparently.
Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).
nextjs is also powerful due to AI. But the value is a robust interactive front-end, easily iterated, with maybe SSR backing, nothing specific to nextjs (it's routing semantics + React).
So much complexity has gone into SSR. I hate 5MB client runtime just to read text as much as anyone, but not if the tradeoff is isomorphic env with magic file first-line incantations.
Recent Claude models do well with it, especially after adding the official skill.
I have only recently started using it, so would love to hear about anyone else's experience.
I guess they should have put some of that marketing money into hiring someone to manage the security of their systems. It's pretty telling that they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack. If you treat security like something you don't have to worry about until after you've been hacked you're probably going to get hacked.
Plenty to criticize them for, but that's totally standard and not something to ding them for. Probably something their cyber insurance has in their contract.
Forensics is its own set of skills, different from appsec and general blue team duties. You really want to make sure no backdoors got left in.
This is why most open source landing pages used nextjs, and if most FOSS landing pages use it, then most LLM’s have been trained on it, which means LLM’s are more familiar with that framework and choose it
There must be a term for this kind of LLM driven adoption flywheel…
My impression is Next started becoming popular mostly as a reaction against create-react-app.
Everything runs fine locally until you try to deploy it, and bam you need 4g ram machine to run the thing.
So you host it on Vercel for free cause it's easy!
Then you want to check for more than 30 seconds of analytics, and it's pay time.
But the argument is if you’re using Vercel for production, you’re paying 5-10x what you’d pay for a VM, with 4gb.
So then what’s the rationale? You can’t be a hobbyist but also “it’s pay time” for production?
I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.
That's for the free plan.
Limits are documented here:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#w...
Good work on workers though, maybe the next generation of sandstorm will be built on CloudFlare in a decade or so after all the bugs have been hammered out.
Knowing how to operate a basic server is perceived as hard and dangerous by many, especially the generation that didn’t have a chance to play with Linux for fun when growing up
I am always feeling like I'm doing something wrong running bare metal based on modern advice, but it's low latency, simple, and reliable.
Probably because I've been using linux since Slackware in the 90s so it's second nature. And now with the CLI-based coding tools, I have a co-sysadmin to help me keep things tidy and secure. It's great and I highly recommend more people try it.
They regularly try to get me to join an enterprise plan but no service cutoff threats yet.
That said, I understand people are paying for basically not having to think about infrastructure, and agree that that's theoretically worth money, if they could do it well.
They have a free tier plan for non-commercial usage and a very very good UX for just deploying your website.
Many companies start using Vercel for the convenience and, as they grow, they continue paying for it because migrating to a cheaper provider is inconvenient.
Meaning since 2015, you’ve got an 8.2% chance of having someone walk out with that box. Hopefully there’s nothing precious on it.
Thieves probably look for small stuff like jewelry, cash, laptops, not some big old server.
The chance of being burglarized is not the same as the chance that when you are hit, they decide to take your webserver. Think it through.
He also suggests in another post that Linear and GitHub could also be pwned?
Either way, hugops to all the SRE/DevOps out there, seems like it's going to be a busy Sunday for many.
> Here’s what I’ve managed to get from my sources:
>3. The method of compromise was likely used to hit multiple companies other than Vercel.
https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636
To be fair journalists often do this too, eg. "[company] was breached, people within the company claim"
Theo's content boils down to the same boring formula. 1. Whatever buzzword headline is trending at the time 2. Immediate sponsored ad that is supposed to make you sympathize with Theo cause he "vets" his sponsors. 3. The man makes you listen to a "that totally happened" story that he somehow always involved himself personally. 4. Man serves you up an ad for his t3.chat and how it's the greatest thing in the world and how he should be paid more for his infinite wisdom. 5. A rag on Claude or OpenAI (whichever is leading at the time) 6. 5-10 minutes of paraphrasing an article without critical thought or analysis on the video topic.
I used to enjoy his content when he was still in his Ping era, but it's clear hes drunken the YT marketer kool-aid. I've moved on, his content gets recommend now and again, but I can't entertain his non-sense anymore.
However, since the LLM Cambria explosion, he has become very clickbaity, and his content has become shallow. I don't watch his videos anymore.
When you're putting the bar that low, sure.
He's about as knowledgeable as the junior you hired last week, except that he speaks from a position of authority and gets retweeted by the entire JS slop sphere. He's LinkedIn slop for Gen Z.
I don't think he's a bad guy or that he's trying to be misleading. I suspect he wants his content to actually carry value, but he produces too much for that to be possible. Primarily he's a performer, not a technologist.
> @ErdalToprak: "And use your own vps or k3s cluster there’s no reason in 2026 to delegate your infra to a middle man except if you’re at AWS level needs"
> @theo: "This is still a stupid take"
lol, okay. Thanks for the insight, Theo, whoever you are.
So they use third-party for incident management? They are de-risking by spending more, which is a loose-loose for the customers.
Hey, I’m with you - I think social media needs to die specifically for this reason. I’m reminded of the term “snake oil” - it’s like the dawn of newspapers again.
Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.
https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/rss/aws-2...
Wasn't unheard of back in the day, that you leaked things via PHP templates, like serializing and adding the whole user object including private details in a Twig template or whatever, it just happened the other way around kind of. This was before "fat frontend, thin backend" was the prevalent architecture, many built their "frontends" from templates with just sprinkles of JavaScript back then.
But there are more people trying to secure this framework and the underlying tools than there would be on some obscure framework or something the average company built themselves.
Also "pay a real provider", what does that mean? Are you again implying that the average company should be responsible for _more_ of their own security in their hosting stack, not less?
Most companies have _zero_ security engineers.. Using a vertically-integrated hosting company like Vercel (or other similar companies, perhaps with different tech stacks - this opinion has nothing to do with Next or Node) is very likely their best and most secure option based on what they are able to invest in that area.
PHP was so simple and easy to understand that anyone with a text editor and some cheap shared hosting could pick it up, but also low level enough that almost nothing was magically done for you. The result was many inexperienced developers making really basic mistakes while implementing essential features that we now take for granted.
Frameworks like Next.js take the complete opposite approach, they are insanely complex but hide that complexity behind layers and layers of magic, actively discouraging developers from looking behind the curtain, and the result is that even experienced developers end up shooting themselves in the foot by using the magical incantations wrong.
What’s worse is vercel corrupted the react devs and convinced them that RSC was a good idea. It’s not like react was strictly in good hands at Facebook but at least the team there were good shepherds and trying to foster the ecosystem.
I see Vercel is hosted on AWS? Are they hosting every one on a single AWS account with no tenant isolating? Something this dumb could never happen on a real AWS account. Yes I know the internal controls that AWS has (former employee).
Anyone who is hosting a real business on Vercel should have known better.
I have used v0 to build a few admin sites. But I downloaded the artifacts, put in a Docker container and hosted everything in Lambda myself where I controlled the tenant isolation via separate AWS accounts, secrets in Secret Manager and tightly scoped IAM roles, etc.
It doesn’t make sense for a random employee who mistakenly uses a third party app to compromise all of its users it’s a poor security architecture.
It’s about as insecure as having one Apache Server serving multiple customer’s accounts. No one who is concerned about security should ever use Vercel.
You really have no clue what you’re talking about don’t you? Were you a sales guy at AWS or something?
Are you really defending Vercel as a hosting platform that anyone should take seriously?
I’m not exactly surprised, but it seems like the unserious, ill-informed and lazy are taking over. There is absolutely zero reason why a large, essential public service should be overspending and running on an unnecessary managed service like vercel… yet, here we are.
https://x.com/DiffeKey/status/2045813085408051670
What's your agenda here?
Also LLMs will be used to attack only, no one will be smart to integrate it into CI flows, because everyone is that dumb. No security tools will pop up.
Let that be the end of Microsoft. Was forced to use their shitty products for years, by corporate inertia and their free Teams and Azure licenses, first-dose-is-free, curse.
AI agents have the benefit of working at scale, probably "better" used for mass targeting.
But I get your point.