Vibe Coding Meets AI Security: A Look at Claude Code's New Automated Reviews
Z
Zack Saadioui
8/11/2025
Here's the thing about software development today: the pressure to ship fast is IMMENSE. We're all in this crazy race to build more, faster, better. And out of this pressure cooker, a new style of coding has emerged, something people are calling "vibe coding." It's where you lean heavily on AI assistants, get into a flow state, & just... build. You're describing what you want in plain English, & the AI, like a super-powered pair programmer, is just pumping out the code.
Honestly, it's pretty magical when it works. You can prototype ideas at lightning speed & feel incredibly productive. But there's a dark side to vibe coding. When you're moving that fast, it's easy to overlook the details. Things like input validation, access controls, or the security of the code snippets you're pulling in from who-knows-where. This "ship fast, fix later" mentality can lead to some SERIOUS security vulnerabilities down the road.
So, how do we keep the magic of vibe coding without shipping a bunch of insecure code? Turns out, the same AI that's accelerating development might also be the key to securing it. And that's where things get really interesting with tools like Claude Code.
Anthropic just rolled out automated security reviews directly within Claude Code, & it’s a potential game-changer for developers who are trying to balance speed with security. It’s not about adding another slow, painful step to your workflow. It's about integrating security so seamlessly that it just becomes part of the "vibe."
So, What is Claude Code Anyway?
Before we dive into the security stuff, let's do a quick recap. Claude Code isn't a separate application you have to open. It's an AI coding assistant that lives right in your terminal. It's designed to have a deep understanding of your entire codebase. You can ask it to explain complex logic, refactor code, write unit tests, or even implement entire features from a GitHub issue, all through natural language commands. Think of it as having a senior engineer you can tap on the shoulder anytime, right from your command line.
The New Security Features: Your AI Security Engineer
The big news is that Claude Code now has two powerful, automated security review features. These aren't just your standard, dumb pattern-matchers. They leverage Claude's deep contextual understanding of code to find, explain, & even help you fix vulnerabilities before they ever make it into your main branch.
There are two main ways you can use this:
On-Demand Scans in Your Terminal: A new
1
/security-review
command you can run anytime.
Automated Pull Request Reviews: A GitHub Action that automatically scans every new PR.
Let's break down how each of these actually works.
Deep Dive: The
1
/security-review
Command
This is for your "inner development loop." You're working on a feature, you've written some code, & before you even think about committing it, you want to get a quick security check. It's honestly as simple as it sounds.
First, you'll want to make sure your Claude Code is updated to the latest version. Usually, it does this automatically, but you can always run
1
claude update
to be sure.
Then, right in your project directory, you just type:
1
/security-review
That's it. Seriously. It's like 10 keystrokes to get a "senior security engineer over your shoulder," as one of the leads at Anthropic put it.
Claude will then scan your pending code changes, looking for common vulnerability patterns. We're talking about the greatest hits of security flaws:
SQL Injection (SQLi): Where an attacker can manipulate your database queries.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Allowing attackers to inject malicious scripts into web pages viewed by other users.
Authentication & Authorization Flaws: Making sure the right people have the right access.
Insecure Data Handling: Preventing sensitive data from being exposed.
Dependency Vulnerabilities: Checking for known issues in the libraries you're using.
But here's the cool part. It doesn't just give you a cryptic list of files & line numbers. It provides a detailed explanation of each potential issue it finds. And then, you can have a conversation with it. You can ask it to implement the fixes for you. This is huge because it closes the loop. It’s not just finding problems; it’s helping you solve them, right there, without breaking your flow.
And for those who like to tinker, you can even customize the command. Claude Code lets you modify the prompts it uses for its commands. You can copy the
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security-review.md
file into a
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.claude/commands/
folder in your project & tweak it to fit your team's specific needs, like adding custom rules for filtering out false positives.
Deep Dive: The GitHub Action for Automated PR Reviews
The on-demand command is great for individual developers, but how do you ensure a consistent security baseline across an entire team? That's where the GitHub Action comes in.
Pull requests are the heart of collaborative development, but they're also a classic bottleneck. Manual reviews are time-consuming &, let's be honest, can be inconsistent. Automating this is key.
You can set up a GitHub workflow that triggers the Claude Code security review automatically every time a pull request is opened. Here’s what the basic setup looks like in a