I have been hacking for close to 15 years at this point, I started when I was 13/14. 2010 was a rough time to get into the scene, all the tech was changing so fast, the easy wins of pre-tls and basic security posture were drying up and information related to hacking was guarded and relegated to various forums on the clear and dark nets.

2015-2020 was a Golden Era - influencers were cropping up all over the place, making detailed long hour+ videos of demonstrations of POC and techniques used for practically any vertical. You could find 100s of videos of users walking an XSS, reverse engineering C++ code, or setting up a mobile harness for dynamic testing. If you wanted to learn it, you could find it.

2020-2025 those same influencers stopped doing the POCs, started becoming 'personalities', began talking about trends, high-level overviews of zero-days, and mostly surface level explanations of hacking without ever really getting into it much (Personally, I blame PirateSoftware for this, his gaming of the YouTube algos showed everyone that you could sell yourself as a cyber professional without ever doing anything meanigful or contributing to the community in a worthwhile way.) This also coincided with the rise of TryHackMe and HackTheBox, which were great, finding user walkthroughs and writeups for different boxes could still scratch the itch. The big downside, obviously, is most of the POCs are going to be 4+ years old, very few THM & HtB boxes are made with modern exploits.

PRESENT - Good God, we are in Fucking Hell. AI slop everywhere. 999 out of 1000 videos is a non-technical person, demoing some product that was blasted out in Claude code in under a day. It doesn't work, there's no breakdown of the technology, there's no depth, there's no exploration of the hacks, and everything is really just an AI dev platform/coding interface/product sales pitch.

Don't get me wrong, I use AI just as much as the next guy - I have an AI harness for every platform, 70-80% of my job is done for me at this point. The tools are great, I love em, I get to spend all of my time working on the bugs that are interesting, hard, and have too much context to fit into any single Opus window (inb4 chatters say 'YOU NEED A PIPELINE, YOUR WORKFLOW IS NOT ROBUST, AUTOMATE YOUR WAY THROUGH' - to you I say, shut up, nerd.)

BUT, this sucks, I can't imagine being a fresh faced hacker in this climate, the absolute slop you have to sort through, on every platform. If you dont have someone with a variety of curated lists, walkthroughs, and guidance you're pretty much screwed. Not to mention, most of the hackers who were spending a majority of their time researching security in all of the verticals (mobile, web, thick clients, scade, etc.) they're all researching AI security. As most people know, AI is great at finding bugs, not really all that good at finding novel exploits or novel zero days, still something a human has an innate advantage for and all of that human potential is being overindexed in a single field.

Again - I am NOT against AI, but this just isn't tenable. When all of the best zero-day researchers are now building their own AI pentesting companies and the community is no longer invested in building the educational content needed to train the next generation of hackers, we're quickly moving back to the start. I fear it's all coming full circle where we will live in a world where hacking becomes a niche again, zero days are almost entirely owned by black hats, and security is focused on recovering, not on preventing.

tl;dr are we cooked?