You wrote a hundred lines today.
You shipped a million.
The rest came in through a single command,
a name in a file,
a version you never read.
That is the deal nobody says out loud.
Every dependency is a stranger
you gave a key to your house
because they saved you an afternoon.
Most are kind.
They do the small job and leave.
But you did not vet the stranger.
You vetted the download count.
Popularity is not the same as safety.
A package with a million stars
can still hide one line
in an update you approved without looking.
The attacker knows this.
He does not knock on your front door.
He becomes the tool you already trust.
A typo in a name.
A maintainer who walked away.
A new version at 2 a.m. that no one reviewed.
That is the door now.
So ask the questions you skip.
What does this pull in?
Who keeps it alive?
What happens the day they stop?
Pin the versions.
Read the diff on the upgrade.
Know what runs before your first line runs.
The smallest attack surface
is the one you chose to keep small.
You do not need every convenience.
Each one you add
is a promise you cannot personally keep.
Trust less by default.
Not because people are bad,
but because your name ships with theirs,
and the blast does not check the byline.
The code you did not write
still runs under your account.
It still reads your secrets.
It still speaks to your network.
It still fails with your logo on the screen.
So own it like you wrote it.
Read enough to sleep.
Because on the day it breaks,
"it was the library" is not a defense.
It is just the shape
of the thing you never looked at.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
