According to recent research, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by many businesses for security purposes, but it is being hesitantly adopted for coding.
Only about a third (32%) of respondents said their companies use AI/ML for coding, even though nine out of ten reported using AI/ML-powered tools in security scanning and remediation efforts, according to a JFrog survey.
This discrepancy emphasises how cautiously artificial intelligence is being used in the development process, probably because many people are worried about possible vulnerabilities that AI-generated code might introduce into enterprise software.
“DevSecOps teams worldwide are navigating a volatile field of software security, where innovation frequently meets demand in an age of rapid AI adoption,” JFrog CTO Yoav Landman commented, Techradar reported.
The study also showed disagreements about the best times to perform security scans, even though security is still a top priority. Of those surveyed, approximately 42% think that scanning should occur while the code is being written, and 41% support pre-deployment scans on newly installed software packages that come from open-source software repositories.
According to almost two out of every five respondents, obtaining permission to utilise a new package or library can take up to a week, indicating that security appears to be impeding productivity.
Furthermore, up to 74% of high or critical CVSS scores were found to be inappropriate in common scenarios, despite 60% of security and development teams devoting roughly 25% of their time to addressing vulnerabilities. These findings add to the report’s concerns regarding the misinterpretation of Critical Vulnerability Severity Scores (CVSS).
“Knowing where to put those tools, use their team’s time, and streamline processes is critical to keeping their SDLC secure,” Shachar Menashe, Senior Director of JFrog Security Research, summarises.
Making educated decisions and allocating resources strategically are more crucial than ever in a time when cyber threats are becoming more prevalent. Fortunately, the report also shows a bright future: although threats are growing, the degree of severity may not (at least not to the same extent).
Study Coincides With The Launch Of Devin AI
The JFrog survey comes at a time when the latest sensation in the world of coding has been Cognition, an AI start-up that has come up with a new fully autonomous AI software engineer named ‘Devin’.
While many other AI chatbots can easily write code, Devin specialises in it. The product’s developer, Cognition, is backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu.
Devin has the potential to disrupt the IT sector, due to its ability to handle development projects end-to-end (from writing the code and fixing associated bugs to final execution) on its own.
“This marks a significant shift in the AI-assisted development space, offering engineers a full-fledged AI worker for their projects, rather than a co-pilot that could merely write barebones code or suggest snippets,” reported Business Today on the product.
As per Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition, Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor, and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions.
“The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin’s chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem,” Wu remarked further.
After getting the natural language prompt from the human user, Devin begins the project using its developer tools, writes its own code, fixes issues, tests and reports on the project’s progress in real-time.
“If something doesn’t look right to the human observer, the user can also jump into the chat interface and give the AI a command to fix it,” Business Today stated further.
Cognition has backed its artificial intelligence software engineer as a helping hand for human engineering teams, as the latter can “delegate some of their projects to the AI and focus on more creative tasks that require human intelligence.”
“In this way, Devin offers a new paradigm that may be a glimpse of the way all software development — and computer work generally — may be done in the near-future: by AI workers overseen by human supervisors/users,” the venture stated.
As of March 2024, access to Devin has only been given to a select few customers.