CTFs are dead

I just came back from Insomni'Hack 2026, it was a great experience, lots of interesting talks! On the last day, from friday evening to saturday morning, the traditional on-site CTF takes place at the SwissTech. It's generally a very fun event, you meet a lot of people there and the challenges are very well balanced in terms of difficulty.

However, this year's wasn't the same. With LLMs becoming better and better at solving these kinds of tasks, CTFs have become a nightmare. Capture the flag competitions are mostly fun because it's a way to show off your skills, learn new stuff and challenge your ideas against others. People mindlessly using LLMs to solve challenges defeats all three of those points at the same time. Do they even realize?

After wandering in the event and taking glances at everyone's screen, I would say about 30-40% were just blatantly slop-solving challenges with stuff like codex or claude code. I even heard people being proud of doing this! They were flexing how easy it was to slop-solve the challenges and climb to the top 5 on the scoreboard, even emphasizing themselves that they did not understand a single thing from the solution, but that it still got them their points.

CTFs, as we know them, are dead.

Look, I don't want to generalize this type of behavior, I know this was an extreme example and that everyone is not as clueless as this guy was. We need to find other ways to assess skill in those fields, or put some serious and efficient restrictions on the usage of LLMs. I'm not saying either that we should be abolishing LLMs completely, they are great tools! But too many people treat them as a complete source of truth and then parade around with points they didn't earn.

I don't know what the fix is. Air-gapped rooms? Making people explain their solves on the spot? Honestly, I'm not sure any of that would even work. But something has to change, because right now there's no point in competing.