Brian McManus August 16th, 2026 No Plan Survives First Contact What preparing an autonomous agent for HalCTF at DEF CON 34 taught me about model routing, harness design, and adaptation Seventeen years after my last DEF CON, I knew almost immediately where I would spend every waking hour: the AI Village, competing in HalCTF. In a traditional capture-the-flag competition, or CTF, you hack a vulnerable system and score points by extracting flags: secret strings that prove you got in. HalCTF, the…
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The potential of one person
The potential energy of one person is great. A single brilliant person can generate a good idea, break it down into its components and execute. Language developers Booth, Hamilton, Hopper, Guido, Stroustrup, Ritchie, Matz, and Eich initially designed and developed their programming languages entirely by themselves. With one person, you have ultimate consensus. There is no communication impedance, communication complexity, miscommunication, competing biases, or […]