When Snyk announced they were embedding Claude into their platform this week, my first reaction wasn't competitive anxiety, it was clarity.
Clarity about what CodeSlick is, who it's for, and what kind of security tooling actually makes sense for the way developers are building today. So this is a note to developers: not a product announcement, not a comparison chart. Just an honest account of what I'm building and why.
The logic that stopped making sense
Security has always felt like someone else's problem when you're building fast and shipping alone. Compliance checklists, SOC 2 audits, enterprise scanners. None of that was built for you. It was built for the team with a dedicated security department. Treating it as irrelevant made sense. Not good, but rational.
The AI layer made that assumption embarrassing.
You're now shipping code you didn't fully write. A model generated your auth handler. A copilot autocompleted your API route. Another model suggested the dependency that installed it. None of them have ever been held accountable for a breach. None of them know your users or your data model.
You shipped it anyway. And you haven't looked at it since.
That's not moving fast. That's outsourcing responsibility to a system that has none, calling it productivity. The complacency that was just sloppy before is actively dangerous now.
What ownership actually means
Security that lives in a YAML file in your repo (version-controlled, readable by anyone on your team, changeable via PR) is yours. Security pushed via an enterprise platform, configured by a CISO you've never met, deployed via MDM to a machine you don't fully control, is not. One of those you can understand in five minutes. The other you just trust. And the moment you're trusting someone else's security layer is the moment you've stopped owning what you ship.
The moment you realize the auth logic came from a model that has never been held accountable for a breach. That's when security stops being someone else's problem.
This isn't anti-enterprise. Enterprise teams have enterprise problems: compliance mandates, auditor requirements, org-level policy enforcement. Those are real. But most developers building with AI today are not enterprise teams. They're individuals and small groups shipping fast, making real architectural decisions, deploying to production without a security department. CodeSlick is built for that reality, not for the org chart.
What that looks like in practice
Three things that matter to the developer who is actually building.
Your code doesn't leave your machine
Structural privacy, not a policy promise. The CLI and MCP server analyze locally. If you use your own API key for model-generated fixes, that call goes directly from your machine to your chosen model. CodeSlick never intermediates it. Privacy here is architecture. Not a checkbox.
Thirty seconds to install
One line in your cursor_mcp.json or claude_desktop_config.json. Or npm install -g codeslick and a scan command. No sales call. No IT ticket. No enterprise deployment process.
Developer time is the only non-renewable resource. Tools that cost thirty minutes to install are tools that don't get installed.
It watches the layer everyone else ignores
Consider this: an MCP tool handler that fetches external content and returns it directly into agent context, unsanitized. A prompt injection attack doesn't need to compromise your server. It needs to get one poisoned document into the tool's response. The agent reads it, executes the instruction, and your system does something it wasn't supposed to. This is not theoretical. It's trivially constructable with any MCP server that calls an external API.
No traditional SAST tool was scanning for this eighteen months ago because the attack surface didn't exist. Most still aren't. CodeSlick has 19 checks specifically for MCP server implementation security: tool poisoning, prompt injection pass-through, secret exfiltration through tool descriptions, missing auth gates on financial API connections. Plus 164 signals for AI-generated code: hallucination patterns, LLM fingerprints, the structural mistakes models make consistently.
Nothing else is looking at this. Not because it's hard. Because it's new.
I started building CodeSlick because the tooling available to individual developers and small teams is either too slow, too noisy, or requires an enterprise contract to access. That gap has gotten wider as the AI layer added a whole new class of risk that existing tools weren't designed to see.
If you're shipping AI code and want to actually understand what the hell is in your repo, this is for you. Not for the CISO. Not for the compliance team. Free to start. One command to install. Your code stays on your machine.
Start in thirty seconds
MCP Server for Cursor and Claude Desktop. CLI for pre-commit. WebTool for a quick scan right now.