Thomas Ptacek
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
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Where they publish
The Fly BlogBlog Their employer's blog, where their long technical posts appear.
A company blog with several writers; their own posts are bylined and are where the longer arguments land. No feed is attached here, because one feed carries every author's posts and this page must not attribute anyone else's words to them.
Link verified 1 Sept 2026.
On record
What they believeKorents 7 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by korents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Coding agents make every plugin interface you ever blew off trivially usable, which is a large productivity win.
I can't say enough how excellent a coding agent is at customizing Chrome with extensions. A huge productivity win. Every plugin interface you've ever blown off is now trivially usable.
@tqbf on X Said 19 Aug 2026
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
@tqbf on X Said 10 Aug 2026
The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform.
Progressive slopulism really fucked us with this "Private equity is buying up all the houses" argument. It's a fractally stupid concern AND an excuse for deferring zoning reform.
@tqbf on X Said 6 Aug 2026
Show 4 more
An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
@tqbf on X Said 22 Jul 2026
Even if all progress on LLMs stopped today, LLMs would remain the second most important development in a software career spanning the mid-1990s to now.
All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts Said 2 Jun 2025
LLMs can write a large fraction of the tedious code a developer will ever need to write, and most code on most projects is tedious.
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts Said 2 Jun 2025
The part of a coding agent that actually acts on code is not AI at all — it is simple systems code wired to ground truth, the way a Makefile is.
The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts Said 2 Jun 2025
Beliefs others hold too
The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform. 2 hold this
Progressive slopulism really fucked us with this "Private equity is buying up all the houses" argument. It's a fractally stupid concern AND an excuse for deferring zoning reform.
@tqbf on X Said 6 Aug 2026
Latest
Everything, newest firstFeed Posts, videos, repos and beliefs from every card above, in one stream.
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- Coding agents make every plugin interface you ever blew off trivially usable, which is a large productivity win. 19 Aug
- Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least. 10 Aug
- The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform. 6 Aug
- An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model. 22 Jul
- The part of a coding agent that actually acts on code is not AI at all — it is simple systems code wired to ground truth, the way a Makefile is. 2 Jun 2025
- LLMs can write a large fraction of the tedious code a developer will ever need to write, and most code on most projects is tedious. 2 Jun 2025