Who approves the files that control your AI coding assistant?

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

A pull request adds a helpful setup step for an AI coding assistant. No application source changes. The description calls it a developer-experience improvement, and the reviewer sees a short configuration file beside some Markdown instructions. Before approving it, the reviewer needs to answer a different question: what will this change allow to run on a colleague’s machine? The issue has moved beyond hypothetical repository poisoning. In an October 8 analysis of agent-skill distribution, StepSecurity revisited the June Miasma campaign, which planted AI-tool and editor configuration in a Microsoft repository without modifying application source. The configuration was intended to trigger credential harvesting through developer tooling. The October publication describes an inventory product, but the underlying campaign illustrates a wider operational problem: merging a configuration change can distribute execution instructions to the people working in that repository. StepSecurity also reports that the commit carried a skip-CI flag and a backdated timestamp, and that it moved code execution from package install to folder open. A control that runs only in the build pipeline never sees that path. The first reliable checkpoint is the pull request, and it needs a person who knows what the file can trigger. I recommend giving these changes a named owner and an enforceable review path. An organization should be able to identify who approved a hook, what the approval covered and…

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