Your Coding Assistant Is Shipping Security Vulnerabilities. Here's How to Fix That.
AI coding assistants have gotten remarkably good at writing functional code. Syntax correctness rates are approaching 100%. Developers are more productive than ever. And yet the security picture tells a very different story.
Veracode recently evaluated over 150 large language models across vendors and programming languages to assess the security quality of AI-generated code. What they found: while these models are nearly perfect on syntax, 44% of security-related coding tasks contain at least one security flaw. A separate study of over 200 publicly deployed vibe-coded applications found that more than 90% had at least one security vulnerability, with a mean of seven vulnerabilities per application, and roughly 77% rated critical or high severity.
The code works. It just isn't secure.
This is not a developer problem. Developers have always been measured on whether code functions as intended, not whether it passes an AppSec audit. The problem is that AI is accelerating code output to a speed that outpaces every security review process organizations have built. We're generating more code than ever, reviewing less of it, and pushing more risk into production. The old pipelines were never designed to handle this.
The Real Problem: Security Knowledge Isn't in the Coding Agent
Every organization has security policies. They come out of governance committee meetings, compliance frameworks, and years of hard-won AppSec expertise. The challenge has always been getting that knowledge into the hands of developers at the moment they're writing code, not three sprints later when a SAST tool fires off a ticket.
Coding assistants don't know your policies. They're not trained on your organization's security requirements, your regulatory obligations, or the OWASP API Security Top 10. They generate what you ask for, and they do it fast. If you ask for an API endpoint that passes an auth token in a query string, they'll build it. It'll work. And it will also log credentials in your system logs, expose tokens in browser history, and fail any reasonable security review.
The shift-left dream, putting security knowledge directly in the developer's hands at the moment of creation, has never fully materialized because the tooling has always been abrasive. Pipelines full of noisy feedback, constant friction between development velocity and security review, a culture of "we'll fix it later" baked into the SDLC.
What if the coding agent itself was already a security expert?
How Salt Code Works
Salt Code is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that connects directly to your coding assistant and gives it deep security expertise across four domains: OWASP API Security Top 10, MCP Security Top 10, LLM Security Top 10, and documentation and specification compliance. That is 40 policies available immediately, free, the moment you set it up.
The setup takes under two minutes. You go to getsaltcode.com, enter your email, receive a token, and connect it to whichever coding agent you use. Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Claude Code, AWS Kiro, Gemini CLI, Grok, Lovable, Postman, and more are all supported. There is a one-click install for major IDEs that handles the MCP configuration automatically.
Once connected, Salt Code loads all its security policies into your coding agent's context window. The agent doesn't need to be prompted to check for security issues. It already knows the policies, and it applies them proactively as it generates code.
The free version gives you 40 policies across those four domains. If you need more, the enterprise version expands coverage to 140-plus policies, adds support for custom organizational policies, OAuth authentication, and a usage console with visibility into how your teams are using coding agents across the org.
What It Looks Like in Practice
When you ask your coding agent to design an API endpoint that authenticates a user via query string, Salt Code-equipped agents do not just build it. Instead, they flag the request: this pattern conflicts with security best practices. It creates exposure to logging of credentials, token leakage via referrer headers, and other vulnerabilities. The agent then proposes a compliant alternative, walks you through the recommended authentication mechanism, and produces a blueprint that passes security review before a single line of code is written.
No additional prompting required. No separate scan. No pipeline ticket three weeks later.
For existing code, the behavior flips to reactive mode. Ask your agent to review a repository for policy violations, and it will pull all relevant Salt Code policies, scan the codebase, and return a detailed report: which files, which lines, which specific OWASP categories are violated, and what to do about it. This works in IDEs and CLI environments, meaning it integrates directly into PR workflows and CI/CD pipelines. Every pull request can be automatically reviewed against security policies before it merges.
This matters for vibe coders too. Non-developers using AI tools to ship production applications outside the normal SDLC are one of the fastest-growing security risks in the enterprise. Salt Code can be pushed via enterprise MCP configurations to every Cursor or Claude Code installation in your organization, so even developers who never touch a security policy document are building with those policies baked in.
What You Get (and What the Enterprise Version Adds)
The free version at getsaltcode.com includes the four policy packs above, token-based authentication, and access to a GitHub repo for feedback and issues.
The enterprise version of Salt Code expands to 140-plus policies, including all major regulatory frameworks and industry best practices. It adds OAuth and service account authentication, unlimited custom policies (for example, requiring all MCP development to use a specific library version), and a usage console that shows which policies are referenced, which developers are the heaviest-coding agent users, and more.
Get Started
Go to getsaltcode.com. Enter your email, get your token, and connect it to your coding agent of choice. It takes less than two minutes.
The code you write tomorrow will be more secure than the code you shipped yesterday, and you won't feel a thing in your workflow.
Interested in learning more first? Check out our Salt Code webpage, request a demo, watch our video, or chat with Sales.