Friday Hacks #305: From Hand-Written Code to AI Coding & Keeping Secrets from Your AI Agent: How to Protect Your Credentials
Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, we have:
Talk 1: From Hand-Written Code to AI Coding: What Changes, What Doesn't
Writing code is now nearly free. Knowing it is right is not. In 2015, dozens of volunteers spent years translating You-Dont-Need-jQuery into fifteen languages; this year, an AI agent synced thirteen of them in one day and surfaced sixteen bugs that thousands of people had copied. This talk covers what has really changed in how software gets built, the practices that hold up, and what still depends on you.
Speaker Profile:
Shaoyin Song is an Engineering Manager at TikTok in Singapore, ex-Alibaba. In 2015, he created You-Dont-Need-jQuery, which has grown to over 20,000 GitHub stars with more than 100 contributors across 16 languages.
Talk 2: Keeping Secrets from Your AI Agent: How to Protect Your Credentials
AI agents make coding much faster, but they can also read the API keys and tokens in your .env files, environment variables and config files, and send them to model providers along with your code. This talk covers where your credentials live, how they leak, and how their protection has evolved, then shares simple habits so your agent can do its job without ever holding your real credentials.
Speaker Profile:
He Li (moonD4rk) is a security researcher in Singapore, working on cloud infrastructure and DevSecOps by day. Creator of HackBrowserData, an open-source browser forensics tool with 14k+ GitHub stars. Research focus: how browsers, crypto wallets and now AI agents handle secrets. Spoke at DEF CON Singapore 2026 and will present at Black Hat Europe 2026 Arsenal.
📍 COM3 SR12
🍕🧋will be served!