The Dissolved Boundary

The data/instruction separation was humanity's greatest engineering achievement in computing. LLMs dissolved it by returning to natural language. That's not a bug. It's the cost of the interface. In 1998, a programmer named Jeff Forristal published an advisory describing a new class of vulnerability. By embedding SQL commands inside user input fields, an attacker could make a database execute arbitrary instructions. The attack worked because the database couldn’t tell the difference between data it was supposed to store and commands it was supposed to execute. The fix took the industry twenty-seven years of effort, but it worked. Parameterized queries. Input validation. Prepared statements. The common principle: draw a hard line between data and instructions, and enforce that line at the parser level. Not with human judgment. Not with guidelines. With syntax. This fix was possible because formal languages — SQL, Python, JavaScript, every programming language ever written — were designe