Anyone can code with AI. But it might come with a hidden cost.

Artificial intelligenceAnyone can code with AI. But it might come with a hidden cost.Apps and platforms allow novice and veteran coders to generate more code more easily, presenting significant quality and security tradeoffs.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Justine Goode / NBC News; Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleApril 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDTBy Jared PerloAnyone can code using AI. But it might come with a hidden cost.

Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Over the past year, AI systems have become so advanced that users without significant coding or computer science experience can now spin up websites or apps simply by giving instructions to a chatbot.Yet with the rise of AI systems powerful enough to translate the instructions into tomes of code, experts and software engineers are torn over whether the technology will lead to an explosion of bloated, error-riddled software or instead supercharge security efforts by reviewing code faster and more effectively than humans. “AI systems don’t make typos in the way we make typos,” said David Loker, head of AI for CodeRabbit, a company that helps software engineers and organizations review and improve the quality of their code. “But they make a lot of mistakes across the board, with readability and maintainability of the code chief among them.”Coding has long been an art and a science. Since the days of coding computer systems by punch cards in the mid-20th century, conveying computing instructions has been a challenge of elegance and efficiency for computer scientists. But inside today’s leading AI companies, most coding is performed by AI systems themselves, with human software engineers functioning more as coaches or high-level architects rather than in-the-weeds mechanics. Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said on X that AI has written 100% of his code since at least December. “I don’t even make small edits by hand,” Ch...