The Moth in the Machine
The most famous computer bug was a real moth.
Context
Code Stories is a picture-led history/essay Short (2:50) on @AI.JoinDev. No diagrams, phone or terminal: documentary art (no likenesses of real people), archive plates, clippings, numbers with sources. This episode follows the word "bug" from a moth in a 1947 relay to bugs written by AI in 2025. Facts: specs/first-bug-moth.facts.md (F-numbers below); review: specs/first-bug-moth.review.md.
Trade-offs
- Checking costs time and money (Y2K's bill; staged rollouts slow fixes too).
- The AI numbers are from benchmarks/tests, not all AI-written code in production.
Numbers worth knowing
- 6 known massive overdoses, Therac-25, June 1985–Jan 1987 (Leveson & Turner 1993) — F6
- ~40 s: Ariane 501 broke up after lift-off, 4 June 1996 (Inquiry Board) — F9
- 64 KB of memory per heartbeat request; ~17% of secure web servers vulnerable (heartbleed.com, Netcraft) — F13–F14
- 8.5 million Windows devices, < 1% of all (Microsoft, July 2024) — F16
- 45% insecure choices, 80 tasks, 100+ LLMs (Veracode, July 2025) — F18
- 205,474 unique hallucinated package names in 576,000 samples (USENIX Security 2025) — F19
