AI coding tools were built for one developer, not a team

Your engineers are faster than they were. That part is real, and it is not going back.

What came with the speed is less visible. AI coding tools ship with defaults chosen for one person working alone. Your team is not one person, and it does not work alone.

Permissive is fine on one laptop

On a single machine, a tool that can read any file and run any command is simply convenient. The developer is right there. They see what it does.

Roll the same configuration out across a team with production access, and those defaults become risk classes. Most engineering leaders meet them for the first time in an incident review, which is the most expensive place to learn anything.

Nobody decided to accept that risk. It arrived with the install.

What to look at

You do not need to slow anyone down. You need to know what is configured.

Look at what the tools are allowed to read, and whether that includes secrets. Look at what they can execute, and where. Look at what leaves the machine. Look at whether anything is logged, and whether anyone would notice an instruction arriving from a file or a web page rather than from the developer.

These are publicly documented classes of vulnerability. None of them is exotic. All of them are easier to close on a calm day than during an incident.

Working configuration, not a report

An audit that ends in a document changes nothing. The output that matters is hardened configuration your team uses the next morning, with the findings behind it so they understand why.

Then keep watching. Tools update. Defaults change. A setup that was safe in the spring is not automatically safe now.

Keep the speed

The goal is not to take the tools away. It is to make sure the speed you gained never becomes your biggest liability.

If your team adopted AI coding tools faster than it reviewed them, bring us the setup.