Is AI shrinking the patch window faster than our dependency management practices can adapt?

The author has been experimenting with AI-assisted vulnerability research and believes it may be changing the risk calculation for unmaintained dependencies. They note that AI can potentially reduce the expertise and time required to perform patch diffing at scale, creating a mismatch where organizations with 7-14 day patching SLAs could be exposed during most of the exploitation window as attackers use automated tooling to analyze patches immediately after publication. The author has written a technical article on the topic and is developing an open-source Python tool to identify potentially stale, abandoned, or high-risk dependencies, and asks whether AI meaningfully changes the patch-gap problem and if dependency risk should be assessed beyond known CVEs.