A Security Audit Found One Bug in AI-Drafted Code. Here's What It Was.

The Setup

On a fintech client project, we brought in an independent security firm to audit a module that AI had helped scaffold — an internal admin tool for managing refund requests. We wanted an honest, outside answer to a question we ask ourselves on every project: did our review process actually catch what it needed to?

What They Found

One issue: an internal API endpoint accepted a user ID parameter without verifying the requester had permission to view that specific user's refund history. It wasn't a catastrophic hole — the endpoint required authentication — but it was a real authorization gap, the kind of thing that's easy to miss when a first draft is generated quickly and the reviewer is scanning for the obvious problems.

Why It Slipped Through Our First Pass

The endpoint looked correct at a glance: it checked that a user was logged in. It just didn't check that they were logged in as the right user. That's exactly the class of bug our review checklist is designed to catch, and in this case, the reviewer missed it on a busy week. We fixed it within a day of the audit report and added the specific check ("does this endpoint scope data to the authenticated user") as an explicit line item in our review checklist going forward.

The Point of Telling You This

We're not claiming a flawless process — nobody should. What we can tell you is that we test our own process against outside scrutiny, fix what it misses, and get more specific each time. That's a more honest promise than "we guarantee airtight security."