Zero-Days, Superintelligence, and the Collapse of Software Assumptions

From the Travel Tech Podcast newsletter for episode 14, Zero-Days, Superintelligence, and the Collapse of Software Assumptions.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, also streaming on Spotify and YouTube.

Software development is entering a phase where the cost of generating code has collapsed, but the cost of verifying it has not. QA, once absorbed into engineering under “shift-left” practices, is quietly re-emerging as a critical system-level constraint in AI-driven development.

In this episode, I speak with Jen Reid-Schram, former VP of Technology and AI practitioner with deep experience in QA and engineering leadership, alongside Oli Deakin, former CTO of Snowflake Software and ex-technology leader at Cirium. We explore how AI is reshaping software reliability, why verification is becoming the bottleneck in modern systems, and what happens when code generation outpaces human understanding.

We also dig into the security implications of frontier models like Anthropic’s Mythos preview, zero-day vulnerabilities at scale, and why AI may be amplifying both productivity and systemic risk faster than organizations can adapt their control systems.

Key Takeaways from the Episode

• Verification is becoming the bottleneck: AI reduces the cost of writing software, but increases the cost of proving it behaves correctly.
• QA is re-emerging as a system layer: Quality is shifting from a team function to an architectural requirement in AI-generated systems.
• Spec-driven development replaces implicit design: Engineers are moving from writing code to defining constraints and expected behavior.
• Zero-days scale into systemic risk: Unknown vulnerabilities become more consequential when code generation outpaces review cycles.
• Security is now a real-time constraint: Patching can't keep up when AI generates code faster than humans can review it.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Alex Brooker, Host of the Travel Tech Podcast, Founder of Airside Labs