Comment by raphman

9 days ago

Interesting and well written article that mirrors/foreshadows how LLMs do and will change other scenes.

As I don't know much about the CTF scene, I looked for other takes on this topic.

Here's an article from 2015 about how tool-assistance already changed CTFs:

> Individual skill will undoubtedly be a factor next year. But, I'm left wondering whether next year's DEFCON CTF will tell us anything more than how well-developed each team's tools are (and how well they can interpret the results).

https://fuzyll.com/2015/ctf-is-dead-long-live-ctf/

But there are quite a few recent (2026) articles with the same core message as in the original article, e.g., https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/04/ctfs-in-the-ai-era/ or https://k3ng.xyz/blog/ctf-is-dead

And here's someone explaining how Claude Max allowed them to win CTFs:

> I had always been interested in CTF as one of the only ways people could compete and show off their skill in coding/problem solving on a global scale. It was just too difficult and didn't make sense for me to learn the fundamentals as an electrical engineer. As time went on, I got better and better, and it was hard to tell whether it was because of experience or if it was because of improvements in AI.

> I accomplished my goals, and for that reason I'm quitting CTF, at least for now. [...] I'd like to think I highlighted the problem before it became a bigger issue. So, how do we fix this? Teams and challenge authors losing motivation is not good. CTF dying is not good. AI bad. Or is it?

https://blog.krauq.com/post/ctf-is-dying-because-of-ai

The only article that saw LLMs as a non-negative force for CTFs was this one. Fittingly, it sounds like LLM output ("Let's be honest", "This is where things get interesting.") and only contains hallucinated references.