It was March of 2026 and I remember playing a CTF where some players had automated almost every part of the competition. I won’t name the CTF or any teams for obvious reasons because this is not meant to call out anyone in particular. But that was probably the moment where I started questioning whether I still enjoyed CTFs or if I was only continuing because I had been doing them for so long
I am not against using AI. I use AI myself and completely rejecting it would be stupid. Back in 2024 and 2025 AI was already being used in CTFs but it was still dumb enough that you had to guide it through the challenge. You had to understand what it was doing correct its assumptions run the scripts fix the errors and keep giving it more context. Even if AI helped you solve something you would still learn at least a thing or two because you had to be involved in the process
By early 2026 this had changed a lot
People were now building entire setups which could download challenges analyse files generate solve scripts connect to remote services and sometimes even submit flags automatically. At that point the human solving part had started disappearing
I remember one CTF where the top ranking team had apparently invested around 1000 USD into their AI setup. Maybe that is not a huge amount for a company or sponsored team but for students and small independent teams it is a lot. CTFs had somewhat started becoming pay to win. The teams with enough money for better models more tokens more compute and better automation had an obvious advantage
Teams which did not even exist before 2026 suddenly started appearing near the top. Maybe the people behind them were talented as well and I am not trying to take that away from them but it was obvious that the playing field had changed
The spirit of CTFs was always to learn and test your skills. You would spend hours stuck on one challenge read documentation try random ideas fail repeatedly and then finally understand the small concept behind it. Sometimes you would not even solve the challenge but you would still walk away knowing something you did not know before
That was the fun part
The flag mattered but the process mattered more. The frustration the stupid mistakes and the moment where everything finally clicked were what made CTFs memorable. When all of that gets reduced to uploading a zip file and waiting for a model to produce a script the challenge stops feeling like a challenge
It becomes a benchmark for your setup
This also affected BlitzHack. By late 2025 many members were already becoming inactive because of school college work internships and personal life. That was normal. But AI made it even harder to stay motivated because competitions no longer felt like the same thing we had originally joined for
We built BlitzHack around learning together solving together and helping each other improve. When CTFs started becoming races between automated systems that human part started feeling less important
By April 2026 we decided to take a step back from CTFs. The decision got mixed reactions but I still felt it was the right thing to do. Continuing only for rankings would have been worse than stopping
Maybe competitions will eventually adapt and maybe BlitzHack will return properly someday. I do not think AI completely destroyed CTFs and I do not think everyone using AI is cheating. But I do think AI changed what CTFs reward and for me the new version stopped rewarding the things which made me enjoy them in the first place
I joined CTFs to learn how systems break
I stayed because I enjoyed solving problems with people
And I stepped away when solving the problem was no longer the main part of the competition
