Post by @jianmin@defcon.social

2026-03-15 16:51 UTC

I have been bearish on LLMs for several years, all the way back to getting Bing to leak its system prompt as my procrastination pastime. But in the last two weeks I've witnessed multiple reasonable, smart people in the computer security space take hard pivot to LLMs. I tried evaluating Gemini, Claude, and GPT for CTFs. GPT 5.4 writes code quite well. Opus 4.6 can write good code and hack computers incredibly well. People have been predicting the deprecation of jobs for several years now, but this is the first time I believe it. Right now, expert users in the computer security space are finding great use from LLMs and agents. But maybe in a year or two, expert users will be taking direction from the LLMs. The speed of improvement year over year is startling.

Replies (2)

@jianmin@defcon.social 2026-03-15 16:53

And so I feel the risk of the power differential between big companies with significant compute and the rest of us is quite significant. I feel there's intense pressure to acquire local compute as a hedge while I still can.

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@jtk@infosec.exchange 2026-03-15 21:19

@jianmin@defcon.social My own view of all this might best be described as budding nostalgic, doomerism skeptic. Where there were sysadmins in the org, many are now little more than cloud vendor management admins. The skills needed are different and arguably require less techical wizardry than ever. It seems to me, AI is going to drive many devops and in-house developers to the same fate - centralization of the engineering into big backend orgs and their platforms. Someone(s) remains behind to manage tech deployment in the org, let's call it a tech janitor. A hollowing out of the old school geeks in every org continues, but on the bright side maybe never quite fully eliminated? Everyone becomes a little more geek in the process?

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