Teen on DOGE team had bad clearances.
Also: VSCode deploys a Node.js agent and Redis creator laments code quality.

The New Kid from "The Com" Just Got Root Access

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by CEO Elon Musk has apparently taken the "hire fast, audit later" philosophy to the Federal level after onboarding a 19 year old high school graduate with a complicated resume. The technologist, Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the online alias "Big Balls," was given access to sensitive U.S. government systems despite a past association with organized cybercrime communities. Mr. Coristine was a former denizen of "The Com," which is an archipelago of Discord and Telegram channels known as a distributed cybercriminal social network. This is the kind of thing that makes the compliance team start smoking again, even after promising they would quit last quarter.

Reports indicate Mr. Coristine's role was listed as "expert" within the Office of Personnel Management, which has control over databases for the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Education, and Health and Human Resources. A previous employer in the anti-DDoS space reportedly fired the young man for leaking company secrets; this is the equivalent of the new IT hire being caught trying to install Bitcoin miners on the CEO's laptop on his first day. The DOGE team appears to believe that talent outweighs the clear, documented history of organizational mischief, which is the same logic we use to promote the guy who writes the most confusing but "clever" SQL stored procedures.

The Senior Dev's All-Staff Memo on Software Quality

Salvatore Sanfilippo, the venerable creator of Redis, penned a lengthy essay confirming what all of us in the trenches already know: we are collectively ruining the software industry. His argument focuses on the destructive combination of complex build systems, absurd dependency chains, and the industry’s incessant need to jump on every new framework. The entire memo reads like the senior engineer who has been here for 20 years finally snapped and documented every single one of his grievances in a blog post that went viral.

The main problem, according to Mr. Sanfilippo, is that we are prioritizing speed over good design and no longer taking complexity into account, a problem exacerbated by the endless churn of the startup ecosystem. The essay also criticizes the mantra of "don't reinvent the wheel," pointing out that one learns the most by doing exactly that. This is excellent advice that will be immediately ignored by every engineering manager who sees a five percent performance gain by gluing together a dozen unstable open source libraries.

VSCode Remote SSH: It's a Feature, Not a Full-Scale Invasion

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code has a remote SSH feature that has been exposed for having a process that can only be described as "extra." The feature, which allows remote editing, does not simply use standard protocols. Instead, it launches a bash stager snippet that downloads an entire agent, including a Node.js binary, to the remote machine. This entire setup then runs a proprietary WebSockets connection back to the local client, effectively granting the remote machine a direct tunnel back into your laptop.

The engineering of this feature feels like the time IT told everyone the new VPN software was "simple" but then it required a custom kernel module and its own internal firewall. The security implications are non-trivial; a compromised remote server could potentially execute code on the local, client machine through this agent connection, which is not what you want when you are just trying to edit a YAML file on the staging server.

Briefs

• The Retroactive Failure: Amazon insiders detailed why Alexa missed its shot to dominate the LLM-driven AI world. Their conversational platform was too busy optimizing the UI for ordering dish soap instead of building an actual Large Language Model, which is a classic product management oversight.
• Art as a Feature: Jacksonpollock.org (2003) resurfaced, a beautiful reminder that a digital masterpiece does not require a dependency chain 30 layers deep to be art.
• A Real Innovation: Rwandan scientists developed a local yeast that is now being used by banana wine-makers. This is an actual innovation that does not involve moving money from one digital wallet to another or a complex build system.