I found 10 bugs in my own security scanner. Here's what they taught me about false positives.

Short summary

A developer systematically debugged 10 classes of bugs in their VS Code security scanner: patterns matching surface text instead of semantic meaning—substring vs. call-site, digit count vs. checksum, bare pattern vs. contextual label. Each fix required rethinking the actual signal rather than piling on complexity. Key insight: false positives destroy trust in security tools, so ruthless specificity beats sophistication.

• •Found 10 systematic bugs in their security scanner, all from patterns matching text instead of meaning
• •Each fix required rethinking the actual signal (checksum vs. digit count, call-site vs. substring, context vs. bare match)
• •False positives kill security tools faster than false negatives, so specificity and testing matter more than complexity

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