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