curl is installed on roughly 30 billion devices. It's arguably the most scrutinised, most-fuzzed networking library on the planet. And right now, its creator is burning out.
Not because curl is suddenly full of holes. Because AI-powered security research has reached a quality and volume that human maintainers weren't built to absorb.
Daniel Stenberg, curl's founder and lead developer, published a raw, honest post this week:
The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the speed of 2025 — meaning that on average we now get more than one report per day. The quality is way higher than ever before. The reports are typically very detailed and long.
This isn't the slop era anymore. In 2024, Stenberg was writing about stupid LLM hallucinations flooding bug trackers. In early 2025, it was "death by a thousand slops." Now in 2026, the tooling has matured — and so has the pressure.
