Preamble

For the last ten years, I’ve watched software rot.
Not gracefully, like oak weathering into something strong.
But like milk left out in August — sour, sticky, and crawling with bugs.

And while the industry congratulates itself with Agile stand-ups, motivational stickers, and new frameworks that promise salvation, one constant remains: the code keeps getting worse.

And for that, dear developers, I must say… thank you.
Your shortcuts, your negligence, your TODOs — they’ve made me rich.
I raise this glass not in anger, but in gratitude.

1. Your Zero-Days, My Paydays

You call them “critical vulnerabilities.”
I call them “direct deposits.”

Take CVE-2025-53767, a 10/10 Azure OpenAI flaw patched in Microsoft’s August 2025 Patch Tuesday.
You were still “waiting on sprint planning” when PoCs were circulating in Telegram channels.
While you debated “risk prioritization,” I was prioritizing which bounty to cash first.

You call it technical debt.
I call it passive income.

2. The Faith of Framework Worshippers

You treat frameworks like religion.
Never audited. Never questioned. Blind faith.

Then came the XZ Utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) — slipped in by a “maintainer” you never heard of, capable of undermining SSH on millions of Linux boxes.
Your prayers to “secure defaults” went unanswered.

You call it abstraction.
I call it remote execution.

3. QA Is Dead; Long Live the Linter

You fired QA and replaced them with prettier ESLint configs.
And that’s why Trend Micro Apex One (CVE-2025-54948) was one lazy os.system() away from total compromise.

Real testers are gone.
You left the fox guarding the henhouse and called it “DevSecOps.”
The hens thank you. So do I.

4. Thanks for the “Secure Defaults” Myth

SAP thought their middleware would save them.
Then CVE-2025-31324 let attackers upload malicious binaries and execute arbitrary code, straight into the enterprise.

You believed in magic defaults.
I believed in input validation.
Guess who won.

5. The Copy-Paste Circus

Half your stack is Stack Overflow answers duct-taped together.
The other half is tutorial code that hasn’t been updated since Obama’s first term.

That’s why a 2025 GitHub study found over 1,700 open-source projects riddled with the same path-traversal vulnerabilities, copy-pasted like scripture.

You didn’t just reinvent the wheel.
You reinvented the flat tire.

6. Supply-Chain Roulette

Every dependency you trust is a bullet in the chamber.
Pull the trigger, deploy to prod, hope it doesn’t go off.

Sometimes it’s npm left-pad.
Sometimes it’s XZ Utils.
Sometimes it’s your CI/CD pipeline delivering my payload to prod.

But you keep playing. And I keep winning.

7. Thank You for the Bounties

You build cardboard castles.
I storm them.
And your employer mails me a check for proving their moat was a puddle.

Your “move fast, patch later” mantra is my business plan.
Your insecurities — both personal and technical — pay my mortgage.

A Veteran’s Final Toast

So here’s to you —
The optimists who think SQL injection is solved.
The architects who confuse linting rules with defense in depth.
The seniors who leave TODO: fix later comments like Easter eggs for attackers.
The startups that “move fast” and break not just things, but everything.

I raise my glass. 🍷
May your features always ship.
May your patches always be late.
And may your CVEs always keep me in business.

Signed,
0xTruth
The Sarcastic Veteran
Breaker of Builds, Collector of Bounties, Poet of Bad Code

🥂 Signed, 0xTruth: A Veteran’s Toast to Bad Code