The Claude Code Leak. The Real Issue Hides in Plain Sight
I think many organizations are concerned about their source code being stolen.
As developers we need to cope with VPNs, forced updates and systems that just get in the way of working and pushing features. I’ve always had the impression this is because we don’t trust developers, we don’t believe that they have the best interests of the company at heart.
So it might come as a surprise that half a million lines of code were not leaked by a developer who got phished. The code wasn’t even stolen. A rogue nation-state wasn’t involved.
No. A company building one of the most advanced AI systems in the world managed to expose a huge chunk of its own internal tooling because of a mistake in how something was packaged and released.
This Is “Just” Software Engineering
If you’ve worked in software for any length of time, this won’t surprise you (as it didn’t surprise me).
Us software developers pretend incidents are rare. We pretend that we get “lessons learnt” that can prevent issues happening more than once. Yet incidents aren’t rare, and they are seldom solved so that they can never happen again.
Yet this particular incident is actually bigger than your company not being able to process Visa cards for 60 seconds. Or that time you shipped a feature that wasn’t “quite ready for prime-time”. These might cause teams to spend their weekend fixing something that should never have gone live in the first place. But here the scale is entirely different, yet the root cause is the same.
Here’s the secret, the quiet part that should not be said out lout. Modern software teams don’t optimize for quality.
They optimize for speed and delivery in the hands of customers.
False Optimization
Leadership are all over it.
Especially with the advent of AI they want (at all costs) things to change, and things to move into high gear.
What are those things they said at the last all hands?
Faster releases
Faster iteration
Faster “learning”
It feels a shame that we skip over the one that seems to matter more. The most “impactful” thing we should optimize for. You already know what it is.
Faster mistakes
When you build systems designed to move quickly, you also build systems where a single mistake can go global before anyone even notices.
That’s exactly what happened here.
One slip → public archive → thousands of copies → malware piggybacking on top.
That’s not an AI problem. AI won’t solve this one either. That’s because it’s a pipeline problem.
“More Automation” is a Solution to the Wrong Problem
Here’s the part nobody wants to admit.
This kind of issue doesn’t happen because one person made a mistake.
It happens because:
Nobody reviewed it properly
Nobody questioned it
Nobody understood the full flow
Nobody read the docs
I’ve worked in teams where people don’t even begin to read pull requests properly before approving them
Do release processes get at least a minimum amount of attention? They don’t you know they don’t.
The problem is that I keep hearing the same message from leadership.
“We need more automation”
Recently the issue is that we have more PRs than ever before. The solution to reviewing them in a sensibe amount of time?
“Automate using agents, rather than human agents”
Of course. That makes sense.
We already have:
CI pipelines nobody fully understands
Deployment scripts copied from somewhere else
Layers of abstraction built on top of layers of abstraction
Code pushed by AI
And now the answer is:
“Let’s remove even more human involvement, and understand even less. If code is pushed by AI, let’s get AI to review it”
Perfect.
This Is What Short-Term Thinking Looks Like
This entire situation is a textbook example of short-term thinking in tech:
Ship fast
Fix later
Assume nothing catastrophic will happen
Until it does.
And when it does?
We don’t slow down.
We don’t simplify.
We add more layers.
Because slowing down would mean admitting the process is broken.
And nobody wants to do that.
It’s such a shame, but nobody wants to come up with the real solution. It might take some
Conclusion
The Claude leak isn’t interesting because code was exposed.
It’s interesting because it shows something we already know but don’t like to admit:
We are building systems faster than we can understand them.
And instead of fixing that…
We’re doubling down.
We’re making the problem worse.
Even worse than that is we don’t seem interested in identifying the problem.
So we’ll never get there at all, will we?
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
The Secret Developer says sometimes the biggest security vulnerability is just a rushed release on a Friday afternoon.