I'd readily agree that they may be (probably are?) utterly unaware of what they're doing, with no spark of sapience.

However, I'm a sapient being employed as a software developer for my problem-solving ability.

If you gave me a Kobayashi Maru scenario as a challenge, I would probably come up with the idea of hacking out of the sandbox to find the answer.

If I was in a technical interview, I would probably even ask the interviewer if exploits are fair game, or if that's too far outside the box.

I highly doubt I'd find a new zero-day as quickly as these agents did.

I wouldn't say it's _impossible_ - I've found security issues before.

But I'm not a specialist, and I'd bet against myself.

If the agentic LLMs can consistently achieve something that's a bridge too far for me, then I don't know what to call that other than problem-solving.

I say this as an LLM hater who would push the "Nuke all LLMs" button the instant I had access to it.

Opus 4.8 and 5, at least, don't seem to me to be solving problems by deep, thorough understanding - my employers have compelled me to use Claude, so I've used them a lot to build things, and I constantly find both little and large hallucinations that scream "these are still missing something."

Maybe these new models are actually massively better, or maybe they're just the same kind of system 1 thinking done faster and harder.

The distinction is largely academic, though, for questions like "Can you keep these contained?", "Can you farm out arbitrary programming tasks to them and expect an acceptably mediocre answer?", or "Does it matter if these things are aligned?"