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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

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Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#191

Post by aschla »

baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

We've already had consolidation of education for a while now. Even before all the edutech courses, there were Youtubers educating better than many university professors. 10-15 years ago students were already skipping lectures and just showing up for tests.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#193

Post by raincole »

Retr0id wrote: post #90
Gigachad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

> I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI. If you remove the "without AI" and the end, I've been hearing similar anecdotes about fizzbuzz for years (isn't the whole point of fizzbuzz to filter out those candidates?)

Because "the next generation is ruined" is always a popular sentiment. It has been with us for at least two thousand years, and it surely won't go away in our lifetime.

When this AI era's devs grow older they'll complain the newer generation can't even vide code too.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#194

Post by freedomben »

ekidd wrote: post #184
josh2600 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others. Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec a…

> Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes.

I also use Claude with tmux. Can you share how you get the voice messages from the Claudes?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#195

Post by gilrain »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

If they’re not a value add over the base AI, they aren’t worth hiring over just using the base AI.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#197

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

eastbound wrote: post #175
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.

And yet, some people argue that you shouldn’t ask a developer to align 3 “if” and 1 “for”!!! The energy spent arguing that those 4 instructions in a row “are not a mark of someone who can write code” would have better been spent firing them.

Firing people is problematic. I'd be okay with it if the economy wasn't utter trash. It's way better to do the work upfront and prefer false negatives over false positives.

Even better would be if we had a well-respected credential, so both employees and employers can both avoid these long interview loops. I'd much rather get hazed once in a big way than tons of little hazings over a life time.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#198

Post by ekidd »

freedomben wrote: post #194
ekidd wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others. Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec a…

> Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. I also use Claude with tmux. Can you share how you get the voice messages from the Claudes?

Tell Claude you want to set up notifications, using "hooks", including "Notification" and "Stop" and anything new they've added. Claude can figure out how to do this for your operating system.

It's not perfect—sometimes a Claude notifies 3 minutes after it stopped doing anything. But it's helpful when I'm running multiple Claudes and also reviewing code elsewhere.

Your brain may feel like someone put it in a blender. Be warned.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#199

Post by thin_carapace »

mold_aid wrote: post #61
baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

>LLMs can be wonderful teachers Are they or aren't they

hammers are both a great tool and a deadly weapon at once

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#200

Post by Sesse__ »

Levitz wrote: post #82
daymanstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful teachers that give unreliable information with total confidence?

Off the top of my head: DOMS being little crystals in muscles, tongue having separate areas for each type of taste, food pyramid, blue blood in the veins, the appendix being useless, body temperature doesn't change disregarding whether it's exposed to cold or to heat, and a whole lot of stuff related to politics and history I'd rather just omit (I don't live in the US). All things I learned in school which were wrong…

One of my teachers in elementary school told us that people in the Arabic world wore long garments because as Muslims, they believed the Messiah would be born by a male, and thus, it was important to have something to catch the baby as it unexpectedly popped out one day and would otherwise hit the ground.

She only really had two faults: She wasn't very bright, and she wasn't fond of children. I had her in about 80% of all my classes for six years. High school was a relief.

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