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?
No, of course it’s not worth spending hundreds of hours mastering low-level languages and building custom tools anymore.
Your existing knowledge will serve you well if you are willing to learn how to use ai to do shit. Being able to immediately clock a loose end that needs focus is useful now.
I read or watched somewhere an analogy, which proposed three options for interfacing with LLMs. The analogy was something like riding a horse, but essentially: Move ahead, ride on top, or move to the side. That was useful framing for me. To what is the current job market subjugating we workers and if I need to pay for food. After a while, I found a job somewhere in between the second and third thing. Still assimilating the first thing.
My plan is to make as half as much money being a mailman.
