AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt

The PHP2Shell vulnerability, an out-of-memory bug in PHP reported as far back as 2024, was turned into a critical remote code execution flaw by a Calif researcher aided by AI tools, prompting a four-engineer team to spend two months on a patch. Researchers say AI is making it far easier to exploit decades of legacy code, while formal verification tools may help automate patching.