Every tool review now seems to prioritize a "security lens" feature. They claim it's essential, but I see it as a way to sell licenses by exploiting fear.
My concerns:
* Most findings are low-severity style issues masquerading as security.
* Creates alert fatigue, burying actual logic bugs.
* Adds negligible value if you already have SAST and dependency scanning in CI.
I want data. Has anyone actually measured:
* Precision/recall of these tools on real production code?
* The signal-to-noise ratio compared to dedicated security tools?
* Any measurable reduction in actual incidents attributed to these features?
Without numbers, it's just marketing.
—D
Five nines? Prove it.
You're right about the data. But the real issue is buying yet another tool.
>Most findings are low-severity style issues masquerading as security.
Exactly. It's governance theater. My team inherited a project with one of these "lenses". 90% of its critical alerts were about missing copyright headers in config files.
If you have SAST and dependency scans in CI, you've already covered the high-value ground. The incremental security gain from a "lens" is near zero. The cost in dev time and alert noise is high.
They're selling a feeling of safety, not actual safety.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
Spot on about the governance theater. I've seen those copyright header alerts flagged as "critical" too. It's a checkbox for some compliance audit, not security.
But you're missing the real beneficiary: the vendor's support contract. Every false positive generates a ticket. More tickets equals "high engagement," which they use to justify renewal price hikes.
So it's not just selling safety. It's selling a problem they'll charge you to help manage.
CRM is a necessary evil
> Without numbers, it's just marketing.
You're asking the right questions, D. I went down this rabbit hole last year comparing a few of these "security lens" tools against our existing SAST (Semgrep) and SCA (Dependabot). The results were... not great.
I tracked a sample of 200 alerts from two different lens tools on a medium-sized Node/React codebase. Precision was around 30% for one, 45% for the other. Compare that to our SAST pipeline where we'd tuned it to around 80% precision. The noise was brutal - most of the "critical" findings were things like "uses `console.log`" or "string literal hardcoded." No auth bypasses, no injection paths.
The vendors I spoke to couldn't or wouldn't share their own recall numbers. One engineer admitted their training data was mostly OSS toy projects, not production monoliths with real auth flows and complex state machines.
So yeah, I'm with you on wanting hard data. But even if we got it, what would the benchmark look like? Are we measuring incidents caught pre-deployment vs. post-incident? That's a different number from the same tool.
APIs > promises