i talked to a lot of people who played the defcon ctf finals to understand how llms affected them, both professionally and mentally. i went in hoping to learn that human intuition still mattered. instead, ctfs in their current form as everyone saying is dead, players are forced to operate slot machines because anyone who refuses to token-max loses to those who do. almost everything i learned, including how to learn, came from grinding ctfs. but the pipeline for developing that kind of skill and expertise now seems broken, juniors are rewarded for token-maxxing rather than going through the process of actually understanding things which is quiet sad and ctfs might not produce high quality security researchers any more. this also has serious implications for people who can’t afford tokens. five years ago, i wouldn’t have been able to afford access to something like gpt-5.6, and I would have been locked out of the very competitions that helped me build my career. anyway these are questions i asked if interesting for anyone: did they have fun? almost everyone was unhappy. it has largely become slot-machine operating, if they refuse to use llms, they lose to teams that do. it is not there is no fun at all, playing with friends and competing was all fun just process of solving which is main part and it isn't fun.(please let me know if you had fun) did having a skilled human in the loop still matter? i got mixed answers, but the leaderboard tells a fairly clear story, the top teams aggressively token-maxxed, by pooling gpt accounts and stuff. the #1 team allegedly spent around $50k on tokens xd. how much of the outcome came from human skill versus token-maxxing? its probably 95% token-maxxing and 5% human skill. some challenges, especially visual ones, remain difficult for llms, and human intuition to prompt mattered. but overall, the dominant strategy appears to be throwing more tokens at problems, one interesting observation, people who were better before llms were also better after the llms and they are the ones solving lot of challenges so it seems still 5% operating skill will put u in top and can't be dumb operator. will a new generation of players simply adapt to this new kind of competition? i thought maybe current players are just behaving like boomers who hate every new technology. but unlike previous technology stuff, there doesn’t seem to be much for the human to master here. token-maxxing is literally just token-maxxing. it doesn’t reward human ingenuity, it discourages it, and may eventually atrophies and makes us dumb let me know if i missed something or if you have different opinions