AI coding tools were supposed to make software development faster and easier. They did, but maybe a little too well. People are writing code faster than ever before, and this has created a whole new set of problems for companies.
According to The New York Times, one financial services company started using Cursor, an AI coding tool, and went from producing 25,000 to 250,000 lines of code per month. That sounds like a win, but it created a backlog of one million lines of unreviewed code.
“The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can’t keep up with,” said Joni Klippert, CEO of StackHawk, a security startup working with the firm.
The problem has spread across Silicon Valley. Companies are now producing more code than they have the people to review, and that gap is becoming a security risk.
So, what’s the problem?
The role responsible for catching errors in AI-generated code is called an application security engineer. There aren’t nearly enough of them. “There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need,” said Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures.
It’s not just a staffing problem either. AI coding tools work better on personal laptops than on secure company servers, which means engineers are downloading entire codebases onto personal devices. If a laptop goes missing, so does a lot of sensitive data.
Is more AI really the answer?
Predictably, Silicon Valley thinks so. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor are already building AI-powered review tools to help catch errors in AI-generated code. Cursor even acquired a code-reviewing startup to build this into its product.
As Cursor’s head of engineering put it, “The software development factory kind of broke. We’re trying to rearrange the parts in some sense.”
I have my doubts. Yes, AI will eventually be able to catch errors in code, but human review will still be necessary before releasing final production. Recently, an AI code caused an Amazon outage, resulting in over 100,000 lost orders and 1.6 million errors.
No company wants to see that happen, and I am not sure AI code reviewers are the answer.