𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 “𝗭𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴”.

Hacking used to require patience. That bottleneck just disappeared.

When I was at university I read Richard Thieme’s Zen and the Art of Hacking. I don’t remember every line, but I remember what it left in me. Thieme described hackers as people obsessed with understanding how things actually work. You observed before you touched. You taught yourself, late at night, through manuals and trial and error, because nobody was going to hand you the knowledge at the plodding pace of a curriculum. The ones who were good, as the essay put it, saw the big picture, with incredible amounts of knowledge at incredibly deep levels.

What stayed with me most was that the craft was gated by patience. The tools were never really the bottleneck. Scanners got better, frameworks got better, exploit kits got better, and every few years someone announced that security was about to get easy. It never did, because the hard part lived in the person, not the tooling. Reaching the depth of a real specialist took years of reading, breaking, rebuilding, and the kind of stubborn observation Thieme wrote about. That slow accumulation was the gate. The zen was the gate.

Anthropic’s Mythos model changes the ecosystem. Fable 5 (released yesterday), is built on it. For the first time the tool itself reasons with the depth of a top specialist, and it does it at a speed and a scale no human ever could. The bottleneck that defined the entire field, the years of patience it took to become genuinely dangerous or genuinely useful, has been replaced by something immediate. You no longer wait a decade to see the whole board. The system sees it for you, now.

This cuts both ways, and that is the part worth sitting with. The same collapse that lets a defender reason about an entire attack surface in minutes lets an attacker do the same. The depth is real on both sides. Security has always been an asymmetric game, and we just handed both players a much sharper instrument. I find that exciting and sobering in the same breath.

So the question stops being how do we get good enough, fast enough. Skill is no longer the scarce thing. What stays scarce is judgment, knowing what to point this at, what to protect first, and what not to do with it. The years used to buy you both the depth and the wisdom to use it well. Now the depth comes for free, and the wisdom is the only part still earned the slow way.

That is the shift I want to keep writing about.