Developer finds 10 false positive bugs in his own VS Code security scanner

A developer building a VS Code extension to detect leaked secrets, PII, and security vulnerabilities discovered 10 significant flaws after deliberately auditing his own tool for incorrect findings. Several bugs stemmed from overly broad regex patterns, such as flagging any 16-digit number as a credit card or any variable containing 'log' as a logging risk, regardless of actual context. Other issues were false negatives, including a private key detector that missed the widely used PKCS#8 format and an IPv6 pattern that failed to recognize compressed address notation. Fixes involved tightening pattern scope, adding validation logic like Luhn checksum checks, and anchoring detections to relevant context such as actual log-call shapes or nearby label keywords. The developer shared the root causes in detail, arguing that understanding how pattern-matching security tools fail is more valuable than simply noting that bugs were fixed.