What is a code audit?
Before you raise money, hire a team or put real users on an AI-built app, someone should read the code. This is what that reading covers.
In short
A code audit is a structured review of a whole codebase by experienced engineers, looking for security holes, reliability risks and code that will be hard to change. It ends in a written list of findings ranked by risk. Unlike a code review, which checks one change before it merges, a code audit looks at everything that already exists.
Also called: Source code audit, Codebase review
Why it matters when your prototype goes to production
An AI-built app has usually never been read by anyone. An audit is the first reading, and it answers the questions the screens cannot: who can reach which data, what happens on a retry, where the secrets are, what breaks if two people act at once.
What an audit covers
- Access control: broken access control is first on the OWASP Top 10:2025.
- Secrets and configuration: keys in client code, permissive defaults.
- Data: row-level security, migrations, backups.
- Reliability: retries, duplicates, background work, error handling.
- Maintainability: tests, duplication, dependencies.
What findings look like in practice: in the Zulu prototype, six of twelve meeting operations matched on an id alone, and two token signers fell back to a public key or a fixed string when a secret was missing. The case study lists each risk beside what replaced it.
Common questions
What is the difference between a code audit and a code review?
A code review checks one change before it is merged. A code audit reviews the whole existing codebase at once and reports its risks.
Can AI audit code?
Tools help find known patterns quickly. Judging access rules and business logic still takes an engineer who understands what the app is meant to allow.
Related terms
Read next
Sources
More on this: Production architecture & security · All glossary terms
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