In general I agree and suspect that memory safety is a tool that will continue to pay dividends for some time.

But there are tradeoffs and more ways to write correct and 'safe' code than doing it in a "memory safe" language. If frontier models indeed are a step function in finding vulnerabilities, then they're also a step function in writing safer code. We've been able to write safety critical C code with comprehensive testing for a long time (with SQLite presenting a well known critique of the tradeoffs).

The rub has been that writing full coverage tests, fuzzing, auditing, etc. has been costly. If those costs have changed, then it's an interesting topic to try to undertand how.

So the intersting question: are we long term safer with "simpler" closer to hardware memory unsafe(ish) environments like Zig, or is the memory safe but more abstract feature set of languages like Rust still the winning direction?

If a hypothetical build step is "look over this program and carfully examine the bounds of safety using your deep knowledge of the OS, hardware, language and all the tools that come along with it", then a less abstract environment might be at an overall advantage. In a moment, I'll close this comment and go back to writing Rust. But if I had the time (or tooling) to build something in C and test it as thoroughly as say, SQLite [1], then I might think harder about the tradeoffs.

[1] https://sqlite.org/whyc.html