New Vulnerabilities
In my last post, I mapped how Jonas's finding that 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities connects to similar patterns in sports, music, medicine, and writing. The implication seemed clear: these are dangers we need to be vigilant about. I want to complicate that now with an analogy that gets closer to how I actually feel about where we are.
The Vulnerability of Something New
Think about what happens when you start a new relationship. A week ago, this person didn't exist in your life. You had a certain set of things that could hurt you, a certain emotional surface area. Then you meet someone, and almost immediately the number of things that can cause you pain increases. New anxieties, new obligations, new ways your day can be ruined that literally did not exist seven days ago. In the language of software, you've introduced new security vulnerabilities into a previously stable system.
Now think about what happens when a couple has their first child. The vulnerabilities don't just increase—they explode. Fears so deep they don't have clean names. Sleep deprivation that alters your cognition. Financial pressure, relationship strain, identity disruption. The entire system is, in security terms, riddled with new attack surfaces.
Neither of these is an argument against the relationship or the child.
You Can't Patch What Doesn't Exist Yet
There's a certain kind of person—and I recognize it in myself—who believes you should have everything figured out before you take the leap. In a relationship, that means waiting until you're fully healed from the last one, until you know exactly what you want, until you can guarantee you won't get hurt. With a child, it means reading the books, taking the classes, being financially stable, having worked through your own childhood in therapy. In both cases: patch all the security vulnerabilities before they appear.
But you can't patch a vulnerability that doesn't exist yet. The way a new partner's silence at dinner will unravel you is not something you could have prepared for in advance. The emotional reality of 3 a.m. with a screaming infant cannot be pre-experienced and pre-solved. The specific ways a relationship will stress you and the specific fears that come with being a parent are not available to you before you're inside them. They can only be entered.
The vulnerabilities are not a sign that something went wrong. They're the cost of the new thing, and the new thing is worth the cost, and you were never going to be able to pay in advance.
The Fear That Prevents the Learning
This is my actual argument about AI. The dominant posture right now—in education, in workplaces, in public discourse—is caution. Wait until we understand it. Wait until the risks are mapped. Don't move until you can move safely. I think that posture is more dangerous than the thing it's trying to protect against.
Not because the risks aren't real. Jonas is right about security holes and skill atrophy. Kevion is right that the dashboard can say "healthy" while the athlete's brain is screaming. Isabella is right that mastery atrophy is a genuine threat across domains.
But the existence of new vulnerabilities is not evidence that the change was a mistake. It's evidence that the change is real.
I want to be precise about what I mean by that. When we encounter a new vulnerability—a new fear, a new way things can go wrong, a new form of instability we didn't have before—the natural response is to read it as danger. Something broke. Something is threatened. We need to retreat to where things were stable. But often what's actually happening is growth. The new vulnerability exists because the situation has expanded. There are more possibilities now, more connections, more potential—and that expansion is what creates the new exposure. The insecurity and the possibility are the same thing, experienced from different angles.
A new relationship makes you vulnerable because you care about someone you didn't care about before. A child makes you vulnerable because there is now a person in the world whose suffering you cannot separate from your own. These are not problems to solve before proceeding. They are the proceeding. The vulnerability is the live evidence that your world has gotten larger.
The challenge isn't to eliminate the vulnerabilities. It's to become more tolerant of them—to feel the instability without treating it as a signal to stop—while staying attentive enough to address real problems as they emerge. That's a different posture than caution. Caution says: don't move until it's safe. This says: move, expect it to be uncomfortable, and pay close attention to what breaks so you can fix it. The vulnerabilities are only legible from the inside.
The person who refuses to start a relationship until they're certain they won't get hurt will never start a relationship. The couple who refuses to have a child until they've eliminated every possible risk will never have a child. The certainty they're waiting for is produced by the experience they're avoiding.
The institution that refuses to let students use AI until they've figured out how to prevent misuse will never figure out how to prevent misuse. The understanding they're waiting for is produced by the engagement they're forbidding.
People don't become good partners by planning the perfect relationship. They become good partners by showing up, getting it wrong, and repairing. Parents don't become competent parents by reading about parenting. They become competent parents by failing, in real time, with a real child, and adjusting. The failing is not a deviation from the process. It is the process. Jonas didn't learn about the verification gap by avoiding vibe coding. Zay didn't learn about the simulation trap by staying away from sports analytics. These insights came from engagement, not from caution.
Move forward. Pay attention. Fix what breaks. That's not recklessness. That's how every significant human transition has ever worked.