Learning to code has become sort of become pointless as AI increasingly dominates programming tasks, said Replit founder and chief executive Amjad Masad. "I no longer think you should learn to code," Masad wrote on X.

The statement comes as major tech executives report significant AI inroads into software development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25% of new code at the tech giant is AI-generated, though still reviewed by engineers. Furthermore, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could generate up to 90% of all code within six months.

Masad called this shift a "bittersweet realization" after spending years popularizing coding through open-source work, Codecademy, and Replit -- a platform that now uses AI to help users build apps and websites. Instead of syntax-focused programming skills, Masad recommends learning "how to think, how to break down problems... how to communicate clearly, with humans and with machines."

What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"?

That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.")

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Copilot: "You'll get lots of code and caveats from Copilot, but nothing that you can execute as is. (Compare that to the functioning 10 lines of code TouchDevelop program). It's a good reminder that just because GenAI can generate code, it doesn't necessarily mean it will generate the least amount of code, the most understandable or appropriate code for the requestor, or code that runs unchanged and produces the desired results.
theodp also reminds us that TouchDevelop "was (like BASIC) abandoned by Microsoft..." Interestingly, a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality. This shows how lacking iPhone and Android still are today as far as easy programmability-for-the-masses goes. (When asked, Copilot replied that Apple's Shortcuts app wasn't up to the task).

As Rust approaches its 10th anniversary, "there is an important piece of documentation missing that many other languages provide," notes the Rust Foundation.

While there's documentation and tutorials — there's no official language specification: In December 2022, an RFC was submitted to encourage the Rust Project to begin working on a specification. After much discussion, the RFC was approved in July 2023, and work began.

Initially, the Rust Project specification team (t-spec) were interested in creating the document from scratch using the Rust Reference as a guiding marker. However, the team knew there was already an external Rust specification that was being used successfully for compiler qualification purposes — the FLS.
Thank Berlin-based Ferrous Systems, a Rust-based consultancy who assembled that description "some years ago," according to a post on the Rust blog: They've since been faithfully maintaining and updating this document for new versions of Rust, and they've successfully used it to qualify toolchains based on Rust for use in safety-critical industries. [The Rust Foundation notes it part of the consultancy's "Ferrocene" Rust compiler/toolchain.] Seeing this success, others have also begun to rely on the FLS for their own qualification efforts when building with Rust.
The Rust Foundation explains: The FLS provides a structured and detailed reference for Rust's syntax, semantics, and behavior, serving as a foundation for verification, compliance, and standardization efforts. Since Rust did not have an official language specification back then, nor a plan to write one, the FLS represented a major step toward describing Rust in a way that aligns with industry requirements, particularly in high-assurance domains.
And the Rust Project is "passionate about shipping high quality tools that enable people to build reliable software at scale," adds the Rust blog. So... It's in that light that we're pleased to announce that we'll be adopting the FLS into the Rust Project as part of our ongoing specification efforts. This adoption is being made possible by the gracious donation of the FLS by Ferrous Systems. We're grateful to them for the work they've done in assembling the FLS, in making it fit for qualification purposes, in promoting its use and the use of Rust generally in safety-critical industries, and now, for working with us to take the next step and to bring the FLS into the Project.

With this adoption, we look forward to better integrating the FLS with the processes of the Project and to providing ongoing and increased assurances to all those who use Rust in safety-critical industries and, in particular, to those who use the FLS as part of their qualification efforts.
More from the Rust Foundation: The t-spec team wanted to avoid potential confusion from having two highly visible Rust specifications in the industry and so decided it would be worthwhile to try to integrate the FLS with the Rust Reference to create the official Rust Project specification. They approached Ferrous Systems, which agreed to contribute its FLS to the Rust Project and allow the Rust Project to take over its development and management... This generous donation will provide a clearer path to delivering an official Rust specification. It will also empower the Rust Project to oversee its ongoing evolution, providing confidence to companies and individuals already relying on the FLS, and marking a major milestone for the Rust ecosystem.

"I really appreciate Ferrous taking this step to provide their specification to the Rust Project," said Joel Marcey, Director of Technology at the Rust Foundation and member of the t-spec team. "They have already done a massive amount of legwork...." This effort will provide others who require a Rust specification with an official, authoritative reference for their work with the Rust programming language... This is an exciting outcome. A heartfelt thank you to the Ferrous Systems team for their invaluable contribution!
Marcey said the move allows the team "to supercharge our progress in the delivery of an official Rust specification."

And the co-founder of Ferrous Systems, Felix Gilcher, also sounded excited. "We originally created the Ferrocene Language Specification to provide a structured and reliable description of Rust for the certification of the Ferrocene compiler. As an open source-first company, contributing the FLS to the Rust Project is a logical step toward fostering the development of a unified, community-driven specification that benefits all Rust users."

Cloud providers like the security of running things in virtual machines "at scale" — even though VMs "are not known for having fast cold starts or a small footprint..." noted Microsoft's Open Source blog last November. So Microsoft's Azure Core Upstream team built an open source Rust library called Hyperlight "to execute functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a VM."

But that was just the beginning... Then, we showed how to run Rust functions really, really fast, followed by using C to [securely] run Javascript. In February 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted to onboard Hyperlight into their Sandbox program [for early-stage projects].

[This week] we're announcing the release of Hyperlight Wasm: a Hyperlight virtual machine "micro-guest" that can run wasm component workloads written in many programming languages...

Traditional virtual machines do a lot of work to be able to run programs. Not only do they have to load an entire operating system, they also boot up the virtual devices that the operating system depends on. Hyperlight is fast because it doesn't do that work; all it exposes to its VM guests is a linear slice of memory and a CPU. No virtual devices. No operating system. But this speed comes at the cost of compatibility. Chances are that your current production application expects a Linux operating system running on the x86-64 architecture (hardware), not a bare linear slice of memory...

[B]uilding Hyperlight with a WebAssembly runtime — wasmtime — enables any programming language to execute in a protected Hyperlight micro-VM without any prior knowledge of Hyperlight at all. As far as program authors are concerned, they're just compiling for the wasm32-wasip2 target... Executing workloads in the Hyperlight Wasm guest isn't just possible for compiled languages like C, Go, and Rust, but also for interpreted languages like Python, JavaScript, and C#. The trick here, much like with containers, is to also include a language runtime as part of the image... Programming languages, runtimes, application platforms, and cloud providers are all starting to offer rich experiences for WebAssembly out of the box. If we do things right, you will never need to think about whether your application is running inside of a Hyperlight Micro-VM in Azure. You may never know your workload is executing in a Hyperlight Micro VM. And that's a good thing.
While a traditional virtual-device-based VM takes about 125 milliseconds to load, "When the Hyperlight VMM creates a new VM, all it needs do to is create a new slice of memory and load the VM guest, which in turn loads the wasm workload. This takes about 1-2 milliseconds today, and work is happening to bring that number to be less than 1 millisecond in the future."

And there's also double security due to Wasmtime's software-defined runtime sandbox within Hyperlight's larger VM...

Longtime Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 writes: According to an article in Wired, Elon Musk has appointed a team of technologists from DOGE to "rewrite the code that runs the SSA in months." This codebase has over 60 million lines of COBOL and handles record keeping for all American workers and payments for all Social Security recipients. Given that the code has to track the byzantine regulations dealing with Social Security, it's no wonder that the codebase is this large. What is in question though is whether a small team can rewrite this code "in months." After all, what could possibly go wrong? "The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis ... and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL ... and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months," notes Wired.

"Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits."

In 2017, SSA announced a plan to modernize its core systems with a timeline of around five years. However, the work was "pivoted away" because of the pandemic.

A breach of legacy Cerner servers at Oracle Health exposed patient data from multiple U.S. hospitals and healthcare organizations, with threat actors using compromised customer credentials to steal the data before it had been migrated to Oracle Cloud. Despite confirming the breach privately, Oracle Health has yet to publicly acknowledge the incident. BleepingComputer reports: Oracle Health, formerly known as Cerner, is a healthcare software-as-a-service (SaaS) company offering Electronic Health Records (EHR) and business operations systems to hospitals and healthcare organizations. After being acquired by Oracle in 2022, Cerner was merged into Oracle Health, with its systems migrated to Oracle Cloud. In a notice sent to impacted customers and seen by BleepingComputer, Oracle Health said it became aware of a breach of legacy Cerner data migration servers on February 20, 2025.

"We are writing to inform you that, on or around February 20, 2025, we became aware of a cybersecurity event involving unauthorized access to some amount of your Cerner data that was on an old legacy server not yet migrated to the Oracle Cloud," reads a notification sent to impacted Oracle Health customers. Oracle says that the threat actor used compromised customer credentials to breach the servers sometime after January 22, 2025, and copied data to a remote server. This stolen data "may" have included patient information from electronic health records. However, multiple sources told BleepingComputer that it was confirmed that patient data was stolen during the attack.

Oracle Health is also telling hospitals that they will not notify patients directly and that it is their responsibility to determine if the stolen data violates HIPAA laws and whether they are required to send notifications. However, the company says they will help identify impacted individuals and provide templates to help with notifications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Despite Oracle denying a breach of its Oracle Cloud federated SSO login servers and the theft of account data for 6 million people, BleepingComputer has confirmed with multiple companies that associated data samples shared by the threat actor are valid. Last week, a person named 'rose87168' claimed to have breached Oracle Cloud servers and began selling the alleged authentication data and encrypted passwords of 6 million users. The threat actor also said that stolen SSO and LDAP passwords could be decrypted using the info in the stolen files and offered to share some of the data with anyone who could help recover them.

The threat actor released multiple text files consisting of a database, LDAP data, and a list of 140,621 domains for companies and government agencies that were allegedly impacted by the breach. It should be noted that some of the company domains look like tests, and there are multiple domains per company. In addition to the data, rose87168 shared an Archive.org URL with BleepingComputer for a text file hosted on the "login.us2.oraclecloud.com" server that contained their email address. This file indicates that the threat actor could create files on Oracle's server, indicating an actual breach. However, Oracle has denied that it suffered a breach of Oracle Cloud and has refused to respond to any further questions about the incident.

"There has been no breach of Oracle Cloud. The published credentials are not for the Oracle Cloud. No Oracle Cloud customers experienced a breach or lost any data," the company told BleepingComputer last Friday. This denial, however, contradicts findings from BleepingComputer, which received additional samples of the leaked data from the threat actor and contacted the associated companies. Representatives from these companies, all who agreed to confirm the data under the promise of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the information. The companies stated that the associated LDAP display names, email addresses, given names, and other identifying information were all correct and belonged to them. The threat actor also shared emails with BleepingComputer, claiming to be part of an exchange between them and Oracle.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes companies will eventually need fewer software engineers as AI continues to transform programming. "Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers," Altman told Stratechery.

AI now handles over 50% of code authorship in many companies, Altman estimated, a significant shift that's happened rapidly as large language models have improved. The real paradigm shift is still coming, he said. "The big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet," Altman said, suggesting that the next breakthrough will be AI systems that can independently tackle larger programming tasks with minimal human guidance.

While OpenAI continues hiring engineers for now, Altman recommended that high school graduates entering the workforce "get really good at using AI tools," calling it the modern equivalent of learning to code. "When I was graduating as a senior from high school, the obvious tactical thing was get really good at coding. And this is the new version of that," he said.

FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said.

"While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

Slashdot reader spatwei shared this report from the cybersecurity site SC World: : AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday.

Rules files are used by AI coding agents to guide their behavior when generating or editing code. For example, a rules file may include instructions for the assistant to follow certain coding best practices, utilize specific formatting, or output responses in a specific language.

The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call 'Rules File Backdoor,' weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent.

Hidden Unicode characters like bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners can be used to obfuscate malicious instructions in the user interface and in GitHub pull requests, the researchers noted.

Rules configurations are often shared among developer communities and distributed through open-source repositories or included in project templates; therefore, an attacker could distribute a malicious rules file by sharing it on a forum, publishing it on an open-source platform like GitHub or injecting it via a pull request to a popular repository.

Once the poisoned rules file is imported to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, the AI agent will read and follow the attacker's instructions while assisting the victim's future coding projects.

Computer programming jobs in the US have declined by more than a quarter over the past two years, placing the profession among the 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially signaling the first concrete evidence of artificial intelligence replacing workers.

The timing coincides with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Anthropic researchers found people use AI to perform programming tasks more than those of any other job, though 57 percent of users employ AI to augment rather than automate work. "Without getting hysterical, the unemployment jump for programming really does look at least partly like an early, visible labor market effect of AI," said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution.

While software developer positions have remained stable with only a 0.3 percent decline, programmers who perform more routine coding from specifications provided by others have seen their ranks diminish to levels not seen since 1980. Economists caution that high interest rates and post-pandemic tech industry contraction have also contributed to the decline in programming jobs, which typically pay $99,700 compared to $132,270 for developers.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said startups are reaching $1-10 million annual revenue with fewer than 10 employees due to "vibe coding," a term coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February.

"You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan told CNBC (video). "You don't have to hire someone to do it, you just talk directly to the large language model that wrote it and it'll fix it for you." What would've once taken "50 or 100" engineers to build, he believes can now be accomplished by a team of 10, "when they are fully vibe coders." He adds: "When they are actually really, really good at using the cutting edge tools for code gen today, like Cursor or Windsurf, they will literally do the work of 10 or 100 engineers in the course of a single day."

According to Tan, 81% of Y Combinator's current startup batch consists of AI companies, with 25% having 95% of their code written by large language models. Despite limitations in debugging capabilities, Tan said the technology enables small teams to perform work previously requiring dozens of engineers and makes previously overlooked niche markets viable for software businesses.

Most mobile apps fail to reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years, according to a new report from RevenueCat examining data from over 75,000 mobile apps. Across all categories, only about 20% of apps achieve the $1,000 threshold, while just 5% reach $10,000 monthly.

In 2025, the top 5% of apps generate 500 times more revenue than the remaining 95% -- up from 200 times in 2024. After one year, elite performers in gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social categories exceed $5,000 monthly, while those in the 25th percentile earn a meager $5-20 per month. The report also highlights North American developers' heavy iOS dependence, with 76.1% making over 80% of their revenue from Apple's platform. Subscription retention presents another challenge, with barely 10% of monthly subscribers staying beyond the first year.

Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon: In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable as it interprets scripts. Codon fixes types and compiles Python into compact, executable binaries that execute much faster.

Several things have changed with their latest release: I have successful compiles, the committers have added a compiled version of NumPy (high performance math algorithms), and changed their open source license to Apache 2.
"The other big news is that Exaloop, the company that is behind Codon, has changed their license to Apache 2..." according to the article, so "commercial use and derivations of Codon are now permitted without licensing."

Tuesday Microsoft "surprised everyone," writes Neowin, "by announcing a new change that will radically improve TypeScript performance" — porting TypeScript to Go.

InfoWorld writes that "The initiative promises dramatic improvements in editor startup speed, build times, and memory usage, making it easier to scale TypeScript to large code bases, Microsoft said." Microsoft's TypeScript team expects to be able to preview command-line type-checking in Go-based tsc by mid-2025, and to deliver a feature-complete Go implementation of TypeScript by the end of the year. [You can build and run the Go code now from Microsoft's new working repository.] Developers who use Go-based TypeScript in the Visual Studio Code editor will feel the increased speed in the editor, Microsoft said. The company promises an 8x improvement in project load times, instant comprehensive error listings across entire projects, and greater responsiveness for all language service operations including completion lists, quick information, go to definition, and find all references. The new TypeScript will also support more advanced refactoring and deeper insights that were previously too expensive to compute, the company said.
Microsoft believes native Go implementations reduce build times by up to 10x, notes Neowin. But "Developers can expect TypeScript 6.0 to have some deprecations and breaking changes to support the upcoming Go-based version." Later this year, Microsoft will be releasing this new native Go implementation as TypeScript 7.0. The current JS-based TypeScript codebase will continue development into the 6.x series until TypeScript 7+ reaches sufficient maturity and adoption, since some projects may depend on certain API features, legacy configurations, or other things that are not supported by TypeScript 7+.
TypeScript's original creator Anders Hejlsberg recorded an announcement video — and also shared his thoughts in a GitHub discussion titled simply... "Why Go?" The TypeScript compiler's move to Go was influenced by specific technical requirements, such as the need for structural compatibility with the existing JavaScript-based codebase, ease of memory management, and the ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently. After evaluating numerous languages and making multiple prototypes — including in C# — Go emerged as the optimal choice...

Let's be real. Microsoft using Go to write a compiler for TypeScript wouldn't have been possible or conceivable in years past. However, over the last few decades, we've seen Microsoft's strong and ongoing commitment to open-source software, prioritizing developer productivity and community collaboration above all. Our goal is to empower developers with the best tools available, unencumbered by internal politics or narrow constraints. This freedom to choose the right tool for each specific job ultimately benefits the entire developer community, driving innovation, efficiency, and improved outcomes. And you can't argue with a 10x outcome!
Hejlsberg also addressed their choice of Go in an online interview with the Michigan TypeScript meetup.

Tens of thousands of JPMorgan Chase software engineers increased their productivity 10% to 20% by using a coding assistant tool developed by the bank, its global chief information officer Lori Beer said. From a report: The gains present "a great opportunity" for the lender to assign its engineers to other projects, Beer told Reuters ahead of DevUp, an internal conference hosted by JPMorgan, bringing together its top engineers in India this year. The largest lender in the U.S. had a technology budget of $17 billion for 2024. Its tech workforce of 63,000 employees, with a third of them based in India, represents about 21% of its global headcount. The efficiency gains from the coding assistant will also allow JPMorgan's engineers to devote more time to high-value projects focusing on artificial intelligence and data, Beer said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice. According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

The AI didn't stop at merely refusing -- it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities." [...] The developer who encountered this refusal, posting under the username "janswist," expressed frustration at hitting this limitation after "just 1h of vibe coding" with the Pro Trial version. "Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn't matter as much as a fact that I can't go through 800 locs," the developer wrote. "Anyone had similar issue? It's really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding." One forum member replied, "never saw something like that, i have 3 files with 1500+ loc in my codebase (still waiting for a refactoring) and never experienced such thing."

Cursor AI's abrupt refusal represents an ironic twist in the rise of "vibe coding" -- a term coined by Andrej Karpathy that describes when developers use AI tools to generate code based on natural language descriptions without fully understanding how it works. While vibe coding prioritizes speed and experimentation by having users simply describe what they want and accept AI suggestions, Cursor's philosophical pushback seems to directly challenge the effortless "vibes-based" workflow its users have come to expect from modern AI coding assistants.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has publicly disagreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction that AI will write 90% of code within 3-6 months, estimating instead that only "20-30% of code could get written by AI."

"Are there some really simple use cases? Yes, but there's an equally complicated number of ones where it's going to be zero," Krishna said during an onstage interview at SXSW. He argued AI will boost programmer productivity rather than eliminate jobs. "If you can do 30% more code with the same number of people, are you going to get more code written or less?" he asked. "History has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can produce more products."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled a new "Responses API" designed to help software developers create AI agents that can perform tasks independently using the company's AI models. The Responses API will eventually replace the current Assistants API, which OpenAI plans to retire in the first half of 2026. With the new offering, users can develop custom AI agents that scan company files with a file search utility that rapidly checks company databases (with OpenAI promising not to train its models on these files) and navigate websites -- similar to functions available through OpenAI's Operator agent, whose underlying Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model developers can also access to enable automation of tasks like data entry and other operations.

However, OpenAI acknowledges that its CUA model is not yet reliable for automating tasks on operating systems and can make unintended mistakes. The company describes the new API as an early iteration that it will continue to improve over time. Developers using the Responses API can access the same models that power ChatGPT Search: GPT-4o search and GPT-4o mini search. These models can browse the web to answer questions and cite sources in their responses. That's notable because OpenAI says the added web search ability dramatically improves the factual accuracy of its AI models. On OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark, which aims to measure confabulation rate, GPT-4o search scored 90 percent, while GPT-4o mini search achieved 88 percent -- both substantially outperforming the larger GPT-4.5 model without search, which scored 63 percent.

Despite these improvements, the technology still has significant limitations. Aside from issues with CUA properly navigating websites, the improved search capability doesn't completely solve the problem of AI confabulations, with GPT-4o search still making factual mistakes 10 percent of the time. Alongside the Responses API, OpenAI released the open source Agents SDK, providing developers free tools to integrate models with internal systems, implement safeguards, and monitor agent activities. This toolkit follows OpenAI's earlier release of Swarm, a framework for orchestrating multiple agents.

A 55-year-old software developer faces up to 10 years in prison after being convicted for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employer's network, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

Davis Lu was convicted by a jury for causing intentional damage to protected computers owned by power management company Eaton Corp., the US Department of Justice announced Friday. Lu, who worked at Eaton for 11 years, became disgruntled after a 2018 corporate "realignment" reduced his responsibilities.

He created malicious code that deleted coworker profile files, prevented logins, and caused system crashes. His most destructive creation was a "kill switch" named "IsDLEnabledinAD" that automatically activated upon his termination in 2019, disrupting Eaton's global operations. Lu admitted to creating some malicious code but plans to appeal the verdict.