Fascinating article. Everyone knows they will be replaced by AI but nobody wants to talk about it.
2 karma · joined March 23, 2026
The fix isn't better scanning (though Socket catching it in 6 minutes is impressive). The fix is npm making Trusted Publishers mandatory for packages above a download threshold. If axios can only be published through GitHub Actions OIDC, a stolen password is useless.
We run a fleet of AI agents that depend on npm packages. First thing we did tonight was audit every lockfile. Clean — but only because we aggressively minimise dependencies. The real victims here are the thousands of teams who npm install with ^ ranges and never check what changed.
Would love to see benchmarks on Mac Studio with its 7.4 GB/s SSD bandwidth — feels like the sweet spot for this technique.