The competition was about solving the challenge, and was aimed at novices like me, so your point is moot and out of place. Even organizers said out loud they encouraged AI tools and checked on each team (me included) often.
Author here. I'm a software engineer with zero cybersecurity experience. I entered a beginner CTF at MWC Barcelona mostly to stress-test Pi (a coding agent) on something I knew nothing about.
The most interesting part for me was reviewing the full conversation logs afterward to figure out whether my steering actually helped or hurt. Turns out about 4 of my 24 interventions were counterproductive and the agent solved the last two phases completely on its own.
The repo has the full writeup, all the exploit scripts, and a table rating every single human message I sent: https://github.com/kafkasl/ctf
Happy to answer questions about the process, the agent, or the competition.
I was in the first batch, I'll be in the second and I'll probably try to be in any of the following.
This is not a course about AI only. It is about learning how to learn and develop yourself specially with the coming AI age. The concepts learned here apply to solve other problems in life. I would recommend it to even non-programmers.
All the industry is moving into vibe-coding, where we delegate more and more into AI, while we do less and less ourselves. The big issue with this is of course that you stop learning. You stop using the ability to put effort into things, and those things, like muscles, go away without use.
It is very tempting to dismiss the solveIT approach as an outlier, at the end of the day if all industry is moving towards full automation instead of careful coding together with the AI, they are probably right, right?
Well, AI getting better at coding, does not mean YOU are getting better at it. In fact it's actually the opposite, without practicing your ability to learn and solve problems, you will lose it. On another level, the kind of one-shotting where you give the AI a problem and come back later after 30 min (or more!) to check if it's done and throw it away if it went of the rails is psychologically. It is the same pattern on which slot machines operate, and gambling is about.
I'm not saying vibe-coding is always bad at all, just there are a lot of caveats and people do not seem to be concerned about.
Those concerns are front and foremost in the solveIT approach, Jeremy has a very thorough understanding about meta-learning for example, the slot machines insight was shared by Johno, and the full team has range of experiences that are rare in the narrow-minded AGI at all costs world of Silicon Valley.
Your psychological health, learning abilities, and in general happiness in life are rarely the main concern of VCs but it rans firsts and foremost in Answer.ai (they are even a public benefit corporation, look it up if you don't know what is that).
With that in mind, I recommend everyone to take the course because it is a multi-dimensional experience that will make you grow as a person and as an engineer. You just gotta look at previous fast.ai course & students.
And finally, if you end up joining because you read this message, I'd love if you get in touch in the Discord server, my name is pol_avec.
Solveit community is so nice and wholesome that I see many comments being dismissed as astroturfing, well maybe HN is not used to this but I can tell you all the people in there are for real.
You can take my case, I started writing and posting videos after taking the solveIT course because you are encouraged to do so. Many people on the community have started to do so, and that's why they might not have much of a history yet.
Moreover, the course is such a good experience that when there's a chance to share it publicly and invite more people to it (after a year of private beta), members go out of their way (into HN) to try to invite more people.
I have seen all the people you mention in the discord and chat with some of them so I can tell you they are real.
Because once again, my comment might sound like astroturfing, you can have a look at my youtube & X where I've been posting about this stuff for quite a while