Is AI safe for your code?

The world is moving very fast with the help of Vibe coding. There is no manual coding anymore, and people have started using some AI tool or another. Even if there are people who are using manual coding, they will have to switch to AI coding in the near future. One of the biggest reasons why many projects have not switched to AI coding is the fact that we are not sure if AI is safe. My company used to think like this, as some LLMs get trained with the help of user data. But mostly, the Enterprise versions have a setup where the data is private and not shared with the global LLM training data.

Source - Gemini

Apart from this, people have also started having their own private LLM instances, which is very helpful for coding. Currently, there are coding-specific LLMs available that are not very great for general questions but are good for other coding activities. The developers are exploring that. I'm glad that we are seeing some great updates happening on a day-to-day basis, and there are new things being released. One sad thing about this is that the big players are not into this game yet. I'm especially looking for some direct AI models by Google that can be used for coding. Right now, they have one, but it cannot be used directly with some kind of extension in VS Code. I haven't explored that yet. There are some hacks that other developers and explorers are saying, but I still have to give them a try.

Currently, I'm using Claude Code and Codex for my coding needs, and I'm satisfied with that. Coming back to the topic question, it is hard to answer that because it depends on which AI you are using and what level of restrictions you have set in the settings. All the AI tools provide an option to set how your data can be used. You can either provide your data for the improvement of their LLM, or you can opt out of that. This is an important way to be safe with what we are sharing with AI. There are some free AI tools available, and we cannot expect this kind of facility to turn off in the settings for them. I have used Kilo as a free LLM for this purpose, but I've not explored the settings of Kilo to see options like these. Any free version may not guarantee these restrictions.

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