I wanted to start an honest discussion about where our industry is heading and get a reality check from people currently in cybersecurity and software engineering.

To give some context: I’ve been unemployed for a year now, keeping myself afloat with occasional freelance gigs. My original goal was to deepen my penetration testing skills by building custom tooling from scratch. I was planning to go deep into C (for low-level mechanics/exploit dev) and Go (for fast, concurrent tool development).

However, watching the explosion of AI and LLMs lately has completely wiped out my motivation. On platforms like X (Twitter), I constantly see people doing high-level "vibe coding"—rewriting Adobe software using AI-assisted reverse engineering, running iOS on Android devices, or pumping out commercial apps in days without deep background knowledge.

Seeing AI generate functional code, write scripts, and parse logic in seconds makes me ask: Is it even worth spending hundreds of hours mastering low-level languages and building custom tools anymore?

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[–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

AI is "good" at making quick and bad things. Things that look good at first glance, but fall apart when you actually use them. Those AI Photoshop rewrites seem great, but then some basic functionality doesn't work. Which could be fixed, but will it actually be maintained? I don't think so.

I think there's still value in having a deep understanding of the systems involved and producing good quality software.

Pentesting might be slightly different, since you can just throw tokens at a problem and AI will (maybe) stumble upon a solution. And it can test ideas more quickly than humans alone. But it still needs guidance and having knowledge that can point it in the right direction will be valuable.

And I think that makes cybersecurity just more important. If it's easier for an attacker to find vulnerabilities, then there's more pressure to not introduce any of them in the first place.

So, overall, I dont feel "threatened" by AI. I think it's overhyped, even if there's some value in it, and eventually it will quiet down. But it might be rough sailing until then.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    I think it's overhyped, even if there's some value in it, and eventually it will quiet down. But it might be rough sailing until then.

    This, exactly. I think the bill will come due for AI in the tech industry - literally and figuratively - and its influence will wane significantly, but until then everything will feel pretty awful. Even for a while after, we'll probably be stuck with the miserable task of sweeping up the mess.

    But I do think change will come.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Those craft apps are still getting daily updates, so assuming that continues they will reach the 99% featured parity... They are at 40%-60% so far, depending on the app.

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