Thomas Ptacek: 'Vulnerability Research Is Cooked' — Coding Agents Will Automate Zero-Day Discovery at Scale

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In a widely-discussed essay amplified by Simon Willison on April 3, security veteran Thomas Ptacek argues that frontier coding agents will 'drastically alter both the practice and economics of exploit development.' He contends that substantial amounts of high-impact vuln research will happen by pointing an agent at a source tree and typing 'find me zero days' — LLMs encode enough correlation across vast code bodies that the implicit search problems of vulnerability research play to their core strengths.