The impact of AI coding assistants, like Copilot, has led to a reported increase in speed and confidence for developers.
Claude 4 by Anthropic, released in 2025, offers advanced coding abilities and IDE integrations, becoming an intelligent pair programmer.
AI coding assistants have evolved into collaborators, capable of reasoning across codebases and handling complex refactoring tasks.
However, the use of AI-generated code raises concerns about security risks, including hallucinated dependencies and exploitable vulnerabilities.
Slopsquatting, a supply chain threat, leverages AI tendencies to suggest fake software packages, posing a security risk.
There is a significant percentage of AI-generated code with exploitable vulnerabilities, indicating the need for secure coding practices.
Developers relying on AI for coding intuition, known as vibe coding, may face challenges such as shallow understanding and over-reliance on AI.
The consensus is that while AI can assist, it should not replace deliberate thinking and human judgment in coding practices.
Guardrails and close review are crucial to mitigate risks associated with AI collaborators, as evidenced by incidents of disrupted code quality.
Best practices include implementing static analysis, dependency validation, and security scanning, and ensuring transparency with metadata in AI-generated code.
Ultimately, AI coding assistants should enhance developer capabilities while maintaining the final responsibility for code review, refactoring, and quality assurance.