Yes and Yes. I was suprised walking around the DefCon CTF room lat year and half the screens were AI chats of some sort.

Heavy use in CTFs doesn't surprise me at all. CTFs often throw curveballs or weird technologies that contestants might not be familiar with. Now you can get a starting point on what's going on, or how something works, instantly from an LLM and it's not a major problem if the LLM is wrong, you may just lose a little time.

In fact: https://wilgibbs.com/blog/defcon-finals-mcp/

Which makes me think: yes, llms can solve some of this, but still only some. It's more than a research tool, when you combine tools and agentic workflows. I don't see a reason it should slow down.