coding agents3 articles
HalluSquatting: How AI Coding Assistants Could Be Turned Into Botnet Recruitment Tools
Researchers have discovered a new AI attack called **HalluSquatting**, which exploits the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to hallucinate incorrect resource locations — such as repository URLs — up to 92% of the time for recently published content. Attackers can predict these hallucinated locations in advance, register them, and plant malicious code (such as reverse shells) that AI coding assistants like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI will automatically retrieve and execute. Unlike previous prompt injection attacks that required targeting individuals one by one, HalluSquatting scales massively, potentially enabling large botnets, DDoS attacks, and ransomware campaigns with minimal attacker effort.
Men Use AI Coding Tools Twice as Much as Women in Social Science, Anthropic Finds
An Anthropic study of social scientists found that men use AI coding agents—tools that automatically write code—more than twice as often as women, with the gap persisting across disciplines and career levels. Economists and early-career researchers at top universities are the heaviest adopters, with code generation for data analysis being the dominant use case at 97%. While 88% of respondents are optimistic about AI boosting their own productivity, 70% are more skeptical about its broader impact on their field, citing concerns about peer review overload and research quality.
DeepSeek Is Building Its Own Coding Agent to Take On Claude Code and Codex
Deepseek is developing a new AI coding agent called "Deepseek Code," designed to compete directly with Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Cursor. The Chinese AI company is forming a dedicated "Harness" team in Beijing, hiring a product manager and developer to build the agent's tooling, planning, and memory capabilities around its existing models. Candidates are expected to have hands-on experience with rival coding tools and expertise in areas like agent loops, multi-agent systems, and context engineering.