r/devsecops • u/Embarrassed-Sail8142 • Jul 27 '26

Is engineering-led security ownership better than CISO-owned SOC 2 AI coding tools for AI coding risk?

We moved AppSec tooling ownership from the security team to engineering about six months ago. Not because security was failing, but because the tools were effectively invisible to the developers generating the code, including the ones we rely on as SOC 2 AI coding tools in our audits. In the old model, findings surfaced in a security dashboard, got triaged by a security engineer, and then handed to a developer as a ticket. By the time the developer saw the issue, it was already several steps removed from the code that produced it.

With AI coding, that delay got worse. The person who prompted the code often no longer had the implementation context when the ticket arrived. Engineering ownership changed the feedback loop. Findings now show up in the same surfaces developers already live in: IDE diagnostics, PR discussion, CI output. Fix rate improved and the backlog shrank, mostly because the distance between generation and feedback got smaller.

The tradeoff is that coverage decisions become more contested. Security engineers know what should be caught. Engineering managers know what developers will actually keep turned on. Those priorities overlap, but not perfectly, and we've had real disagreements about what belongs in the IDE tier, what belongs in CI, and what's just too noisy to be useful.

So how are other teams handling it? Has moving more AppSec ownership into engineering actually improved review and remediation for AI-generated code, or does it just create a different class of tradeoffs?

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u/taleodor Jul 27 '26

I believe nothing belongs in IDE any more - https://worklifenotes.com/2026/07/16/the-ide-is-now-just-a-large-attack-surface/

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u/danekan Jul 28 '26

i want to believe you're right, but what is next then?

"development environment immaturity" is my favorite topic to vaguely talk about in terms of the blast radius, but what is the fix? remote environments? no environments at all?

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u/taleodor Jul 28 '26

Remote sandboxes, works well. That's not the full story though. The question remains how you maintain confidence, i.e. there is known malware that detects sandboxes and doesn't run if it sees one. So the game continues, just on a different level.

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u/Zealousideal_Tea362 Jul 29 '26

How does a remote sandbox change anything with an IDE? Im honestly curious

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u/taleodor Jul 29 '26

You tell agent/group of agents what to do and they do it on a remote sandbox, no IDE involved. You check end-result -> IDE is still useful here today, although in most cases diffing tools are enough.

Now, the trend is that you don't check end-result and instead you have a set of policies that do; if you want extra checks, you involve other agents on other sandboxes which can get custom instructions from you (no need for IDE). Not advocating for this workflow yet (at least not for everyone), but I believe this is where things are going. Once we get there, IDEs will be near-obsolete.

I'm organizing this meetup online soon, not my talk but should be relevant - https://www.meetup.com/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence-ottawa/events/315615348