If you were at RSA this year, you saw the spectacle: puppies, monster trucks, baby goats, and other gimmicks so over-the-top they border on surreal. These stunts are attention-grabbing for sure, but they highlight a deeper issue in modern cybersecurity: we’re prioritizing flash over function, and ignoring what matters most: developer-first security that actually solves problems.
Every single booth at that event claimed to “use AI.” Everyone’s promising to “shift left.” But when you have real, no-nonsense conversations with the people on the ground, most teams are still swamped with unaddressed vulnerabilities, siloed tools, and developers who have tuned out of the security conversation altogether.
At Symbiotic, we’re having those no-nonsense conversations; we talk to security teams, platform engineers, and DevOps leaders every day. They’re not asking for goats, they’re asking for help with a real problem:
How do we all stop wasting time on security that doesn’t solve the problem? How do we, finally, make security part of how we build, not a problem we fix afterward?
Let’s break that down.
Modern environments are enormous, complex, and sometimes fragmented. Developers are writing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to define and deploy resources in cloud-native ecosystems. That means vulnerabilities aren’t just introduced in application code - they’re being written into the infrastructure itself.
The problem? Most teams are discovering these issues after the fact. By the time a misconfiguration is caught, there are already a number of instances of it, increasing the chances of exploitation. In a best case scenario, it slows down the development cycle and, at worst, it’s a potential incident. This delay forces security teams and developers into a reactive loop. A ticket is created. A fix is requested. Everyone’s time is wasted. Trust erodes.
What’s needed is a way to catch and fix these issues before they become a problem - or even before they become a waste of time. Right at the moment they’re introduced. Without slowing anyone down.
“AI-powered” is quickly becoming one of the most overused phrases in cybersecurity (don’t look at our AI Code Security page). The messaging was everywhere at RSA, sometimes bordering on parody. But behind the buzzwords, a more nuanced picture emerges.
It’s not that most solutions aren’t using AI meaningfully. Many are genuinely trying to apply it to security use cases. The challenge is how they’re doing it. Too often, AI is retrofitted into legacy platforms - bolted on rather than built in. This results in awkward workflows, disjointed experiences, and AI that feels more like an add-on than an enabler.
When AI isn’t embedded into the core of a product, it struggles to deliver on its potential. You might get vague alerts, generic suggestions, or incremental improvements—but rarely the kind of transformative impact AI promises.
For AI code security to truly add value, it needs to do more than just check a marketing box. It should be designed around the developer experience and embedded seamlessly into the way teams already work. That means:
When AI is built into the foundation—not tacked on—it can shift security from a bottleneck to a force multiplier.
Security teams know the playbook: conduct reviews, detect problems (you can’t solve what you can’t see) prioritize vulnerabilities, triage risks, apply patches. But that’s no longer enough.
Attackers are automating reconnaissance and exploiting infrastructure faster than most companies can respond. They’re using the same tools we are - LLMs, automation pipelines, code scanning - to find and exploit misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in seconds and minutes, not hours and days.
That means the time between vulnerability introduction and exploitation is pretty much gone. But most security tools still operate on a “find-and-fix” model. It’s whack-a-mole - and if you’re doing that, it’s already too late.
What’s needed is prevention. That starts with integrating security at the point of creation: yes, in-IDE, but during the act of writing code or configuring infrastructure, not once the writing is done.
The right approach cuts through the arms race by shifting detection and remediation to the root in a way that doesn’t halt production - not in theory, but in practice. It allows developers to avoid creating a vulnerability in the first place instead of responding to alerts after the fact.
There’s no denying the cybersecurity skills shortage. But the real issue isn’t just that we’re short on talent - it’s that we’re not enabling the people we already have to succeed. This is exactly where a developer-first security approach makes the difference.
Security engineers are stretched thin, and developers are left to make critical security decisions without the right tools, training, or support. Most tools are built for security teams, not for developers or their workflows, and training platforms are one-size-fits-none—hours-long videos and LMS modules that no one remembers by the time it matters.
This creates a frustrating cycle. Developers introduce the same issues. Security catches them. Nobody learns. The backlog grows.
The solution is to break the cycle: when a developer introduces a vulnerability, they have the tool to solve it, right then and there, without having to become a security expert - while giving them information relevant to what they’re actually working on. Searching, switching tools, and doubling back is a waste of time. Developers can do their job, learn what they need, when they need it, and apply all of it instantly.
This saves time. But more importantly, it changes behavior.
Security isn’t supposed to be this inefficient. You shouldn’t be reworking on the same code you just committed. You shouldn’t have to mediate conflicts between developers and security operators who are fundamentally on the same team.
You need tools that help your developers get it right the first time. You need intelligence that improves with use. You need training that works within the workflow, not around it.
We believe security should be a catalyst, not a constraint. A trusted coach embedded in your development flow. A system that saves time instead of costing it. A partnership that scales as your team grows.
If you’re ready to stop wasting time and start making real progress on security, we’re ready to help.
