Why Writing Software Has Become Dangerous Today
SC World, Friday, June 5th, 2026
AI-assisted development generates more code, dependencies and connections than developers can review, making software hard to understand.
This SC Media Perspectives piece argues that the volume of software flowing through modern development environments has grown far faster than our ability to evaluate it. Using AI agents like Cursor to build a feature can generate code, auto-pull dependencies, change configuration files and create new system connections in minutes-more than any developer can realistically review.
The author reframes development: rather than primarily writing code, developers increasingly supervise an ecosystem of software that creates, modifies and moves other software, where individual components are understandable but their collective behavior is not.
The piece highlights the developer machine as a critical, under-defended asset holding repositories, cloud credentials, API keys, tokens and direct production connections, even as defenses historically concentrated on production.