Troy Hunt

Things Troy Says on Podcasts

Security researcher and consultant based on Australia's Gold Coast. Created and runs Have I Been Pwned, a data breach search service, and has testified before US Congress on the impact of data breaches. Holds the title of Microsoft Regional Director and has authored security courses for Pluralsight. Hosts a weekly update podcast and writes a security blog covering breaches, vulnerabilities and password security, and appears as a guest on other security and technology podcasts including Darknet Diaries and Smashing Security.

Where to Find Them

Troy Hunt hosts and writes Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast , hosts and writes Troy Hunt's Blog and writes Troy Hunt . They have also been a guest on Smashing Security (2 times) , CyberWire Daily , Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson , Darknet Diaries , Intelligent Machines (Audio) , The Bootstrapped Founder , Rich On Tech and Down the Security Rabbithole Podcast (DtSR) .

Recently: “Weekly Update 528: Reading AI-generated Code & the Economics of Solar (1)” on Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast (November 2026); “Weekly Update 528: Reading AI-generated Code & the Economics of Solar” on Troy Hunt's Blog (November 2026); “Weekly Update 527_ Cybergeddon News v. Reality” on Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast (October 2026); “Weekly Update 527: Cybergeddon News v. Reality” on Troy Hunt's Blog (October 2026); “Weekly Update 526: Building HIBP AI/SI First” on Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast (October 2026); “Weekly Update 526: Building HIBP AI/SI First” on Troy Hunt's Blog (October 2026).

What They Said

“I'm finding the AI tends to do a really comprehensive job of all of the sorts of error handling which we probably wouldn't normally do as a dev. If you're doing an MVP, you'd go, well, just get the customer, because the payment can't exist if the customer doesn't exist, and you may not do any error handling around a non-existent customer.” — Troy Hunt, Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast

Troy was reading through a payments feature that a coding agent wrote for Have I Been Pwned, which he kicked off by voice from his phone on a morning walk. It's one concrete way he finds AI-written code differs from what a rushed human developer would write.

Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast · 2026-11-01 Permalink → Listen →
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast Around 00:00 into the episode
Troy Hunt

Good morning. Rushing into place as usual. Wouldn't be a weekly view unless I wasn't rushing in some way or another. Yeah, that's sort of been the theme of the week. My office is still in disarray. My office is still built into the disarray. My office is still built in. So everything came out of the wardrobe in order for the wardrobe to get upgraded along with everything else in this room. And everything is still covered in dust. I feel like I could pick a single thing up on my desk and dust absolutely everywhere. Anyway, that's fine. How about Binance? I shouldn't laugh. That's serious. I'd seen little bits and pieces of this in the press over the week. And then this morning I was doing some press on it. Some media, one of the local radio stations, wanted to talk about, is your money safe in the bank in the era of AI? Hmm. Yes. Yes, it probably is. It's kind of interesting, every one of these discussions, because like, you know, the banks have AI as well, right? Like, you know, the bad guys obviously have AI, but the banks have AI too. And the good guys can do stuff with AI in the same way that the bad guys can do stuff…

Speaker 2

It's thinking.

Troy Hunt

Look at the pen. Okay, the proposal had 40.85 kilowatts of solar generation and 99.44 kilowatt hours of battery storage. 40.85 kilowatts is the peak power output, not the daily energy that changes with the sun and weather. Okay, there we go. Call it solar price pressure, 41 kilowatts of solar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Most people out there are just seeing the prompt and they'll be like, yeah, I just give everything access to everything. We as technology professionals are a lot more aware of this than the normies: we're going to get some good stuff out of this, we are going to create a risk. Are we satisfied with that risk, and what are your mitigating controls?” — Troy Hunt, Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast

Troy had just described connecting ChatGPT to his Outlook inbox, first read-only and then toward sending email, and admitted the risk if his account were taken over. He frames AI adoption as a risk trade-off most users aren't making consciously.

Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast · 2026-11-01 Permalink → Listen →
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast Around 00:00 into the episode
Troy Hunt

Good morning. Rushing into place as usual. Wouldn't be a weekly view unless I wasn't rushing in some way or another. Yeah, that's sort of been the theme of the week. My office is still in disarray. My office is still built into the disarray. My office is still built in. So everything came out of the wardrobe in order for the wardrobe to get upgraded along with everything else in this room. And everything is still covered in dust. I feel like I could pick a single thing up on my desk and dust absolutely everywhere. Anyway, that's fine. How about Binance? I shouldn't laugh. That's serious. I'd seen little bits and pieces of this in the press over the week. And then this morning I was doing some press on it. Some media, one of the local radio stations, wanted to talk about, is your money safe in the bank in the era of AI? Hmm. Yes. Yes, it probably is. It's kind of interesting, every one of these discussions, because like, you know, the banks have AI as well, right? Like, you know, the bad guys obviously have AI, but the banks have AI too. And the good guys can do stuff with AI in the same way that the bad guys can do stuff with AI.…

Speaker 2

It's thinking.

Troy Hunt

Look at the pen. Okay, the proposal had 40.85 kilowatts of solar generation and 99.44 kilowatt hours of battery storage. 40.85 kilowatts is the peak power output, not the daily energy that changes with the sun and weather. Okay, there we go. Call it solar price pressure, 41 kilowatts of solar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“How much time should you spend reviewing the code? If we put this in the context of treating the AI as a team member, when I had people reporting to me, how much time would I spend looking at their stuff? The answer is it depends. It depends on the experience of the individual, on their proven track record, and on the potential impact of screwing up the code.” — Troy Hunt, Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast

Troy was answering a cybersecurity professor who was alarmed that he prompts an agent and barely looks at the code it writes. He argues review depth should scale with trust and with how bad a mistake would be, just as with a human team member.

Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast · 2026-11-01 Permalink → Listen →
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast Around 00:00 into the episode
Troy Hunt

Good morning. Rushing into place as usual. Wouldn't be a weekly view unless I wasn't rushing in some way or another. Yeah, that's sort of been the theme of the week. My office is still in disarray. My office is still built into the disarray. My office is still built in. So everything came out of the wardrobe in order for the wardrobe to get upgraded along with everything else in this room. And everything is still covered in dust. I feel like I could pick a single thing up on my desk and dust absolutely everywhere. Anyway, that's fine. How about Binance? I shouldn't laugh. That's serious. I'd seen little bits and pieces of this in the press over the week. And then this morning I was doing some press on it. Some media, one of the local radio stations, wanted to talk about, is your money safe in the bank in the era of AI? Hmm. Yes. Yes, it probably is. It's kind of interesting, every one of these discussions, because like, you know, the banks have AI as well, right? Like, you know, the bad guys obviously have AI, but the banks have AI too. And the good guys can do stuff with AI in the same way that the bad guys can do stuff with AI. And that's…

Speaker 2

It's thinking.

Troy Hunt

Look at the pen. Okay, the proposal had 40.85 kilowatts of solar generation and 99.44 kilowatt hours of battery storage. 40.85 kilowatts is the peak power output, not the daily energy that changes with the sun and weather. Okay, there we go. Call it solar price pressure, 41 kilowatts of solar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If the cost of the AI, if the cost of the tokens went up five times, we'd still be way ahead. I honestly think it'd be more like 10 times before we had to start going, objectively, is this now a problem? If I look at what we spend on Stefan, our one employee, versus what we spend on tokens, it is an order of magnitude more efficient.” — Troy Hunt, Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast

A viewer asked how far AI prices could rise before Troy would re-evaluate, given token prices are widely believed to be below cost. He treats it as an ROI question, comparing token spend with the cost of his one employee, whom he says he still wants.

Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast · 2026-11-01 Permalink → Listen →
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast Around 00:00 into the episode
Troy Hunt

Good morning. Rushing into place as usual. Wouldn't be a weekly view unless I wasn't rushing in some way or another. Yeah, that's sort of been the theme of the week. My office is still in disarray. My office is still built into the disarray. My office is still built in. So everything came out of the wardrobe in order for the wardrobe to get upgraded along with everything else in this room. And everything is still covered in dust. I feel like I could pick a single thing up on my desk and dust absolutely everywhere. Anyway, that's fine. How about Binance? I shouldn't laugh. That's serious. I'd seen little bits and pieces of this in the press over the week. And then this morning I was doing some press on it. Some media, one of the local radio stations, wanted to talk about, is your money safe in the bank in the era of AI? Hmm. Yes. Yes, it probably is. It's kind of interesting, every one of these discussions, because like, you know, the banks have AI as well, right? Like, you know, the bad guys obviously have AI, but the banks have AI too. And the good guys can do stuff with AI in the same way that the bad guys can do…

Speaker 2

It's thinking.

Troy Hunt

Look at the pen. Okay, the proposal had 40.85 kilowatts of solar generation and 99.44 kilowatt hours of battery storage. 40.85 kilowatts is the peak power output, not the daily energy that changes with the sun and weather. Okay, there we go. Call it solar price pressure, 41 kilowatts of solar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If I had a junior dev that could write code like that, way better than me, that's not a junior dev. I think what you mean is treat it as someone whose output you should validate. So we need to separate the quality of the code that is written from the level of trust and confidence. Trust and confidence is something that is earned over time, and the AI has been earning my trust and confidence by doing a really, really good job.” — Troy Hunt, Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast

A listener's email repeated the common advice to treat AI like a junior developer and review every pull request. Troy says he gave that advice earlier in the year but no longer thinks it fits, and separates code quality from earned trust.

Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast · 2026-11-01 Permalink → Listen →
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update Podcast Around 00:00 into the episode
Troy Hunt

Good morning. Rushing into place as usual. Wouldn't be a weekly view unless I wasn't rushing in some way or another. Yeah, that's sort of been the theme of the week. My office is still in disarray. My office is still built into the disarray. My office is still built in. So everything came out of the wardrobe in order for the wardrobe to get upgraded along with everything else in this room. And everything is still covered in dust. I feel like I could pick a single thing up on my desk and dust absolutely everywhere. Anyway, that's fine. How about Binance? I shouldn't laugh. That's serious. I'd seen little bits and pieces of this in the press over the week. And then this morning I was doing some press on it. Some media, one of the local radio stations, wanted to talk about, is your money safe in the bank in the era of AI? Hmm. Yes. Yes, it probably is. It's kind of interesting, every one of these discussions, because like, you know, the banks have AI as well, right? Like, you know, the bad guys obviously have AI, but the banks have AI too. And the good guys can do stuff with AI in the same way that the bad guys can do stuff with AI. And that's going to be a nice segue into what I want to talk about today. In…

Speaker 2

It's thinking.

Troy Hunt

Look at the pen. Okay, the proposal had 40.85 kilowatts of solar generation and 99.44 kilowatt hours of battery storage. 40.85 kilowatts is the peak power output, not the daily energy that changes with the sun and weather. Okay, there we go. Call it solar price pressure, 41 kilowatts of solar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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