A Post-AI CTF Format Could Be a Research Retreat
A Post-AI CTF Format Could Be A Research RetreatAugust 11, 2026The state of DEF CON CTF 2026 has left people in quite the mix of bittersweet doom and gloom. I would hate to see it die out as some AI benchmark, and figured I'd sketch out a (really rough) form of it that might survive post-AI. Teams now point these AI agents at CTF challenges and let them grind it out, and the agents get most of the way there on their own.
- ▪A Post-AI CTF Format Could Be A Research RetreatAugust 11, 2026The state of DEF CON CTF 2026 has left people in quite the mix of bittersweet doom and gloom.
- ▪I would hate to see it die out as some AI benchmark, and figured I'd sketch out a (really rough) form of it that might survive post-AI.
- ▪Teams now point these AI agents at CTF challenges and let them grind it out, and the agents get most of the way there on their own.
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| Original publisher | Jessicaruan |
| Canonical URL | https://jessicaruan.com/posts/save-ctfs |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:54:30 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T15:05:42.556Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T15:05:42.556Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hA4EMmhNftGb · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Post-AI CTF Format Could Be A Research RetreatAugust 11, 2026The state of DEF CON CTF 2026 has left people in quite the mix of bittersweet doom and gloom. AI has killed CTFs for good! Farewell!! I know that we are young and I know that you may love me but I just can't be with you like this anymore, Alejandro~~ 🥀 I've been retired for quite some time since I started 8 (9?) years ago, but the community has given me so much in friends and mentors, and I would love for someone starting out in 2026 to still find that in the scene. I would hate to see it die out as some AI benchmark, and figured I'd sketch out a (really rough) form of it that might survive post-AI.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jessicaruan.
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