Network expert Glenn Fiedler warns game programmers to fix game code vulnerabilities that AI can now find | exclusive - GamesBeat
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Glenn Fiedler. Source: GamesBeat
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Glenn Fiedler, a seasoned network expert and a leader of game companies like Network Next, is warning game coders to fix the security bugs in their code because AI can now find those bugs.
In particular, on the warning from a friend, Fiedler used Anthropic’s latest version of Claude AI programming tool, Claude Code Fable 5, to review his code. In a post on LinkedIn and an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Fiedler said he has been a hardcore AI skeptic.
Until now.
"I passed Claude (Code) Fable 5 over my network libraries starting Monday last week. Starting at 11 p.m., I was up all night until 6 a.m., and have been working non-stop since then to fix everything up," Fiedler posted a few days ago on LinkedIn. "There is something massive coming. First, AI coding is real and it’s going to expose massive security flaws. in game libraries (like my own) that were 10 years old and I thought were completely secure."
Now he has finished working on fixing security bugs found in my open source networking libraries, used by many games and middleware products, with the help of his new AI companion. And he’s warning as many of his colleagues in the industry to do the same.
Fiedler, who is based in New York, has been a big skeptic of generative AI and told game developers to stay away from it. But he now says, "AI coding is real, and it’s going to completely and radically change the game industry forever. Those who don’t agree just haven’t been hit by the shockwave yet. I was a total skeptic of AI two weeks ago and now I am a true believer. It’s real. All of it."
Fiedler is still working on a game, with a focus on putting a thousand players into a single battle.
The good news is that developers can upgrade their code with the help of Claude Code Fable 5. It cost him about $5,000 worth of AI tokens to do so over two weeks, but it would have taken him 10 times longer or more coding time if he had not used the AI helper to get it done. Fiedler has been able to fix his code without having to do the fixes himself.
"I am disclosing this not because my libraries are shit, they were actually the most secure in the industry probably. It’s just that Claude Code Fable 5 is just on another level. All my libraries are secure now with new releases as of today," he said.
He posted some details here (where he is recouping some of the cost with Patreon). Fiedler said Claude Code Fable 5 has found significant bugs in netcode, reliable, serialize and yojimbo open source libraries. These libraries are used in many games. If you are using these libraries in your game or middleware packages, please upgrade to the most recent releases of these libraries immediately, Fiedler wrote.
Do not use old versions of these libraries!
Get the latest versions of these libraries here:
https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/netcode
https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/reliable
https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/serialize
https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/yojimbo
Full list of fixed bugs here: https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/patreon/blob/main/BUGS.md
Fiedler said he got a tip from Brian Bucklew, who is one of the authors of Caves of Qud, about how Fiedler should check out Claude Code and run a best about how Fable 5 could locate any bugs in Fiedler’s own open source libraries. The message came in at 11 p.m. at night, and Fiedler stayed up all night and "continued two weeks of being completely frantic."
In a message to GamesBeat, Bucklew said, "I think it’s clear we’re in the middle of a security arms race and it’s going to have downstream impacts on games and its foundational libraries and engines (Glenn clearly shows that it already is having that impact, it’s not in the future). I’m not sure how that’s going to impact people’s currently extreme views on it, if at all. The current public discussion allows for no nuance and is hyper polarized (perhaps reasonably so, but nonetheless)."
Fiedler himself has been vehemently against AI in gaming.
"I saw this to my for myself. I’m a 100% militant anti-AI skeptic," Fiedler said. "I felt up to that point that AI was just another another thing in a long chain of like NFTs, blockchain, Web 3, game streaming, meta-you know all the bullshit, right? Like all the bullshit that people have been trying to push into the game industry for for a decade plus."
Some of Fiedler’s industry colleagues agree with Fiedler about the urgency to act...