From Assistant to Actor: The New Security Risks of Coding Agents

Mission 1 (JB)Wed 28 Oct • 08:30–09:30Architecture & SecurityIntermediate
Over the last year, AI coding assistants have evolved into agentic systems that plan, act, and make changes across the developer workflow. These agents do not just suggest code anymore. They run tools, modify configs, manage dependencies, open pull requests, and sometimes fix issues end to end with minimal human input. This shift dramatically expands the attack surface. Prompt injection now targets agents instead of chat boxes, poisoned repositories influence multi step decisions, and a single compromised instruction file can steer an agent into leaking secrets, weakening security controls, or introducing backdoors while appearing helpful and correct. This session looks at what agentic AI means for developer security in practice. We will break down how autonomous and semi autonomous coding agents fail, where trust in automation goes too far, and why traditional secure coding guidance is no longer enough. The focus is on concrete scenarios teams are already facing and on pragmatic guardrails that keep agents useful without giving them unchecked power. The goal is to help security and engineering teams work with agentic AI in a way that scales productivity while keeping control, visibility, and accountability firmly in place.

About the speaker

Maxim Salnikov

Maxim Salnikov is a tech community enthusiast based in Oslo. With more than two decades of experience as a developer, he shares his expertise in the web platform, cloud computing, and AI by speaking at and delivering training for developer audiences worldwide. By day, Maxim supports developer teams across Europe as a Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft, focusing on AI-native developer tools and platforms. He is also an active builder of developer tooling, creating and maintaining AI agent assets that help engineers adopt AI-assisted development more effectively. In the evenings, Maxim runs events for some of Norway’s largest web, AI, and cloud developer communities. He is passionate about exploring the possibilities of Generative AI, with a strong focus on developer productivity. To share insights and connect with practitioners globally, he founded and organized the Prompt Engineering Conference, the key global event dedicated entirely to prompting from the engineering discipline perspective.