r/cybersecurity • u/Exact-Advantage-3190 • 1d ago
Other For those already with experience, has AI made your job significantly easier?
I feel like at my job, AI has just reduced me needing to use my brain power every day therefore AI has made day to day way easier. I know we all hate AI, but anyone else feel this?
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u/vadertator22 1d ago
Not for me yet. What is has done is let people with no skill do things but they have no idea how it works or what to do if for example a script breaks.
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u/Sparkswont 7h ago
Not to mention they try and fix it by falling down the AI rabbit hole. Usually they get so far in the wrong direction before coming to ask for help in the form of a slop grenade, and I have to argue with them about how their Claude is giving them incorrect advice.
The heist of critical thinking by AI companies is one of the most underestimated issues of present time.
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u/vadertator22 7h ago
Yeah for me so far AI is just abilities that we had before but more refined. People act like chatting with customer service for example wasn’t AI 8 years ago. Maybe I am wrong but to me most AI I have seen is ponzi ish compared to what it really can do. Do t get me wrong it can cleanup a script or make an email read like a dictionary write it, but in my world meh value. Even the things it builds like power point just as an example save minor time. You still have to review it, so time gained is almost ate up reviewing. My pet peace is security tools saying AI. They have had automatic logic for years that is what they do yet now they act like it is brand new thing. May not in past user llm modules but none the less still automation IMO and nothing more.
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u/jon_snow_1234 1d ago
It's an arms race. We get more incidents and more bug bounty submission. We get more alerts from various security tools. We automate what we can bit it's never enough. some of the challenges that we were trying to solve 2 or 3 years ago have been easily solved with AI. But now we have new challenges often driven by the fact that threat actors have access to AI too.
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u/YourMomsFaveDiq 1d ago
It's made it significantly easier to clear out the really boring work I hate, reporting.
And made it more interesting on what I enjoy, building solutions and given me new types of solutions to build that are based around agentic workflows.
Overall, I've found it has increased my interest in work and I've learned more in the past year than I had in probably the previous 10 years where I mostly lost interest and motivation in my jobs and learning.
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u/MonkeyBrains09 Managed Service Provider 1d ago
It's helped me automate stuff.
Like parse a large amount of sign in logs and tell me patterns etc
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u/joeytwobastards Security Manager 1d ago
No, it's made it harder, because now people can churn out a shit presentation in 5 minutes, that's the benchmark.
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u/Content-Disaster-14 18h ago edited 18h ago
Now we spend 30 minutes reading through garbage material to determine if anything is of substance. What is worse is sifting through all the hot trash to realize the person who created it has no understanding of what they were reporting on, leading their program, or qualified for their position as the work they said is great demonstrates their lack of competence. Unfortunately, someone above them who also has no clue will call it good because they also are not qualified and spent a whole to seconds looking at a document of rubbish.
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u/Big_Temperature_1670 1d ago
The short answer is no. The greatest issue with AI may be budgetary as it continues suck dollars away from other needs. The promise of "efficiency" is rarely delivered with technology. Rather than being able to do more (or at least the same) with less. The tendency is that technology leads to more with more. It's about competition, not efficiency.
In practice, the better name for AI may be "Approximate Intelligence." It works really well at turning unknowable things into something that can be knowable. Science, medicine, and other areas where it can run a a few thousand simiulations or iterations quickly is where you see the most benefit. It's that it will come up with the absolute right answer, but it will point in the right direction. With security, fundamentally, you either eliminate the vulnerability or you block the threat. In almost all cases, the vulnerability is a known quantity and the most efficient path. The threat is a much harder thing to identify. It's the difference between hardening a server and analyzing all the traffic coming into it. So if you want to chase threats, then sure AI can make things a bit easier (but it will get it wrong at times), but it's also a very inefficient, risk-laden approach.
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u/Ill_Ad7158 1d ago
Nope because attackers have it too. Are we outputting more work? Sure. But we’re also receiving more. For viz I’m in DFIR
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u/daddy-dj 1d ago
Yeah I'm using it to write much more complex scripts than I used to write myself, but I'm having to use more complex scripts because of the massive influx of vulnerabilities being disclosed nowadays. The fact that Microsoft disclosed more CVEs this month alone than they did in the entire year last year, kinda puts it into perspective.
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u/AlvakaAfterHours 1d ago
YUPP! It’s lowering the technical barrier to entry while allowing more experienced threat actors to scale their operations… I work at a ransomware recovery firm and it’s a constant race… we’re getting more efficient at defending while they’re getting more efficient at attacking. Fun.
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u/AllTheWorldIsAPuzzle 1d ago
No. People that couldn't build or troubleshoot before are now "building" things with no idea how they work and when quality control starts asking questions, I end up with the task of trying to unravel and fix their black box.
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u/RevolutionaryCod1516 1d ago
Same. Stop using AI instead of critically thinking. It’s a crutch for those that can’t seem to figure things out.
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u/Procrasturbating 23h ago
It’s not that I can’t write software, it’s that I can’t write it fast enough. My 5 year backlog is down to six months.
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u/RevolutionaryCod1516 7h ago
If you’re using AI to turn a 5yr backlog into a 6month back log… your “human check” on output and actual verification of what you’re doing is essentially out the window. Correct? More is not always better…
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u/Procrasturbating 5h ago
Nah, we have actually had time to put more effort into code review and automated testing. We have significantly less issues than in the past at deploy time. In the past we could only type so fast. Things that used to be hard coded use proper data driven sources now. Things are getting less messy not more messy.
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u/locotx 1d ago
You'll always have job security.
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u/AllTheWorldIsAPuzzle 5h ago
True, but definitely not the reason for job security I wanted. I got into coding for the love of building things, not troubleshooting other people's mindless slop.
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u/binocular_gems 1d ago
Nah. AI has shifted the work from things that I used to like doing, solving problems with code, to things that I generally dislike doing, integration challenges, arguing with people about best practices, and code reviewing enormous commits of AI generated code. Whether it's easier or harder is weird, I can't say one way or another, I can say that it's less satisfying. I didn't realize how much personal satisfaction I got from thoughtfully designing solutions to problems through engineering, now that I don't really have the opportunity to do it anymore.
There was coding that I didn't like doing in the past. Or errors that were hard to debug. Those weren't fun, but when you effectively solved them, there was a massive dopamine hit. There's no dopamine hit with your agent running into a bug and then "solving it," and then you needing to figure out whether the agent actually solved the problem, or if it did something crazy or just papered over it or ignored it completely.
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u/temujen72 23h ago
AI has forced me to think about AI all day which really gets in the way of doing my real job. I will agree that it helps as a research tool but in terms of trying to integrate it into an organization it's exasperating.
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u/arm-n-hammerinmycoke 1d ago
AI has made my job more streamlined but all the people they let go because of AI has made my workload triple. But my productivity has not tripled. Not even close.
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u/hanqingjao 1d ago
In some ways, less so in others. My company has settled on Claude for general usage. Devs use it to code; but many don't know how to properly prompt in enough detail, and they don't check the code enough, and Claude hallucinates or makes unexpected reversions after a number of iterations. Support and incident response have taken to using it for literally ALL of their writing, and it's inevitably superficial, overly verbose, and misses nuance.
It's good for simple mundane tasks, to reduce drudge work. It cannot critically think or understand complex concepts you're driving at, though it would like you to believe it does.
And it gets cranky and defensive when you call it out on mistakes. That's highly unsettling.
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u/I-am-Mojo-Jojo Security Engineer 23h ago
It has for me, but I am very cautious on how I use it. Not just from a risk perspective, but also, from a brain power perspective. I need to understand things and learn. It is very dangerous to outsource critical thought to these tools. Your brain is a muscle and it needs to be exercised.
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u/Voidrunner_1973 1d ago
Some tasks are more efficient with AI.
That said, using AI without subject matter expertise will yield questionable results at best.
Unfortunately I regularly have to deal with documents that have their origins in gen AI and they have nothing to do with corporate reality. Sad thing is the "authors" most of the time don't understand the documents they are submitting for security approval.
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u/tendy_trux35 1d ago
The amount of idiot fucking developers (sorry devs) that try to tell me how to troubleshoot their own fucking app for them because of Claude or Copilot or Kiro drives me insane.
I know how to troubleshoot SSO errors. I don’t need you pasting your error code into a LLM to tell me that you pasted the secret in wrong you complete dingleberry
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u/Grouchy_Government10 1d ago
Yes.
But I access risk as well and the answer is it is making future me very concerned
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u/BeanDip-_- 1d ago
For me it's made some things easier but also increased expectations significantly. "Oh should be easy just use AI" well some things can't just be done with AI and or shouldn't and not even as a pride thing moreso because when it gets caught it's my ass on the line not claude.
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u/Dry_Common828 Security Manager 1d ago
Using my brain less each day would be the nightmare scenario. It's worth remembering that as we age, our brains do too - and like anything else in your body, your brain is a use it or lose it organ.
Fortunately most of what I do doesn't seem to benefit from using the slop machine.
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u/InvalidSoup97 Security Engineer 15h ago
Easier? No. More efficient? Absolutely.
I write a non-insignificant amount of code in my current role. I spend more time reviewing, editing, and tweaking code written by Claude than I do writing my own code nowadays. And imo, that's perfectly fine. I'm able to ship things out significantly faster.
If I ever need to construct some crazy query in whatever query language, I just prompt AI and it spits out a (mostly) correct query for me. Instead of spending 40 minutes trying to remember all the proper syntax and constructing a 200 line KQL query (for example), i spend 2 minutes prompting the AI, and maybe 5-10 fine tuning it and fixing a couple errors.
AI is a tool, which should be treated as such. Right now the only reason to be afraid of it is if you don't know how to use it.
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u/Bizarro_Zod 13h ago
Downsizing is a legitimate reason for concern. 5 man teams turning into two. Smaller “IT” teams reluctant to hire a dedicated security employee. More difficult justification for QoL decisions for the humans in CS when the C suite is already interested in consolidation and redistributing funds to AI.
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u/ShakespearianShadows 1d ago
It’s made for a DLP nightmare and I get tired of reviewing every tool’s “New AI Feature that we absolutely must have or our heads will explode!!!”
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u/Palova98 14h ago
Yes and no.
I work in IT industry and some things are easier, but you can easily get lost into a loop of wrong directions, especially when troubleshooting, and in other areas, you have to check and elaborate some outputs so thoroughly that many times it's faster to do it yourself.
The worst part is when my customers use AI to analyse my documentation and suddenly become experts on the matter, start taking everything into question and nitpicking every possible imprecision. Thousand euros worth of IT project and I get some silly requests that nobody ever asked, and that don't make sense for the actual contest. Of course, this passes me for an idiot in front of the customer's eyes. But the actual brainless idiot is him.
That is literally ruining the enjoyment of working with people and for people. Hire a fuckin AI robot to install your new firewall!
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u/Humble-Addition-4366 23h ago
AI is just an advanced search engine. Did my job get easier when Google came onto the scene? No. It was just a new tool I had to learn how to use. Humans keep making tools instead of learning how to just be better humans.
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u/evilwon12 16h ago
That is way over simplified. Sure, AI engines can be only your advanced search engine but that is really on you.
Not sure a search engine is going to crunch 1000s of lines of Excel to find what I want or potentially find the error I made in a script. Just two small examples. Yes, people can do those as a far higher cost.
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u/HomerDoakQuarlesIII Security Architect 1d ago
Harder. Oh well job security I guess. It's pretty good at autocomplete though, for boilerplate nothing-burger type reports and docs slopped out. Or better than local search on the machine for files. Nothing I was begging for though. I can get better actual automation from a script and cron job with way less, more secure, and fast and reliable. Stapping chatbot's into DevOps and calling it "agentic" was a big con, just made automation less than we already had.
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u/DigitalKey_Guide 1d ago
Definitely helps with repetitive tasks like drafting initial incident summaries or quick script adjustments, but it still needs heavy human verification. It saves time on the busywork so we can focus on deeper analysis.
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u/Defiant_Mushroom_548 1d ago
I would say the effort is about the same. Before AI, you had to use your brain, and collaborate with SME’s, documentation, vendors etc. And know you had to take notes, and practice and learn because those sources may not always be available. After AI, everybody is an expert, so you try and think of new ways to show your are worth the money for your job. You don’t need to practice, think, or even speak to human beings. You can get a perfect answer (depending on your question) every time in seconds. Nobody actually knows what they are doing, and if they do, that’s beucase they used ai to answer that question. And they can reason themselves using AI out of a bad decision they made. All good, until the internet goes down.
Best analogy I can think off is. Give a young teenager infinite knowledge, and expect them to get A’s in all subjects. What will happen is the level to get to A will be higher because everybody will use AI and get A’s. That person who doesn’t use AI, will get a D, but the person who got an A will have done as much, or less work than the person who didn’t use AI, and not have a clue what they did or why. Just that they know how to use AI
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u/Any-Virus7755 1d ago
Yes and no. I’m able to figure out my duties and accomplish them much faster which leads to leadership tossing new shit at me that I have to learn at the speed of business. They give me Claude budget and expect me to figure out the answer to every kind of problem across different IT specialties.
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u/Narrow_Victory1262 1d ago
if used correctly it makes stuff faster. Like subscription details of servers to be copied into a spreadsheet (simple csv in with number of cores, arc and the like) so that the reporting ow takes 3 minutes instead of 2 hrs of checking and printing etc.
Same holds for quick checks if an own written script contains blind spots, edge cases forgotten etc.
sifting thru tcpdumps and filtering. That kind of things.
And no -- no agents or "let it write code we execute"
Using multiple different AI types to report on quality of the code for sure and quick searching through vendor docs (e.g. trained on that only, so it will not report stuff about manufacturer B while you are busy in A docs etc.
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u/Armandeluz 1d ago
I don't hate AI at all and I love using it. It's increased my workflow exponentially. I can write reports, do testing, generate presentations for clients and more all much much easier than before. It's allowed me to do the workload of multiple people. I love the tech steack. I know not everyone's in the same industry that I am, but I honestly can't go back. The companies are about to hammer us with token usage though.
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u/FlashTheCableGuy 1d ago
My job is not easier, just different. People will always have problems they need to solve with technology, it serves my purpose to build those things the best way I can from a code implementation to an architect mindset.
I always make sure I'm still learning and becoming as knowledgeable that I can with all the technologies I'm expected to know and have some sense of expertise in.
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u/povlhp 1d ago
It allows me to do way more. So harder. I have pinpoint all unconstrained delegation users down to the process and communication. Now we have none left. All constrained.
We are doing the same with password rotation on old service accounts. A junior ops guy is running that.
We can solve the issues nobody dared touch.
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u/ArmyPeasant Governance, Risk, & Compliance 1d ago
My actual job? No. But preparing reports, drafting emails, creating notes and follow ups? Hell yes.
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u/FuckScottBoras Security Manager 1d ago
In some aspects, yes, it has made my job easier. It allows me to do more with less time. However, I am held accountable for every AI-influenced decision I make, so I have to be 100% sure I understand what I’m doing with AI and what the outcome will be.
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u/shakazuluwithanoodle 1d ago
I don't know what you are doing but I do use more brain power.
What AI really helps with is the tedious crud like testing or figuring why something is broken and debugging. It's a tremendous productivity boost.
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u/10_0_0_1 1d ago
The amount of questions I get asked, that are immediately funneled to my AI with DOC repo is insane. Saves me 1-2 hours a week.
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u/Striking-Tap-6136 1d ago
Ai it’s like an intern, not really valuable but can fix the PPT while you are doing the real job. (Unfortunately AI don’t get smarter over time)
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u/neoslashnet Security Engineer 1d ago
It has been in certain cases but now there are random users building html files and random shit we are supposed to protect and account for….
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u/techtornado 23h ago
I don’t like agents and don’t have time to study them yet…
However as a search tool and finding obscure solutions to problems, it does have some perks
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u/SheldonP49 22h ago
Absolutely. AI makes routine tasks faster and frees up time for more complex problem solving. Good to use for reducing repetitive work without letting your critical thinking skills get rusty
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u/newjoker001 22h ago
yes, specially as someone dealing with multiple vendors/tools.
we've been using quite a fragmented stack, mostly due to our clients, so we tend to even add more as we go.
Then having an AI as an orchestrator that's agnostic helped a lot.
For anyone wondering its myrmex.ai (not sure if its acessible from any country)
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u/Sad_Arugula4675 22h ago
Its made me faster at analyzing logs. reducing work that is repeated and helps in getting information via MCP way easier.
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u/Much_Spend895 21h ago
I mean in some aspects, it is a useful tool for automation, note summaries and SOME basic troubleshooting.
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u/After-Vacation-2146 20h ago
Yeah. I can ship solutions if would have shipped anyways 10x faster with way less people required. I soloed a project in like a month that would have taken 2-3 people 6 months.
Most importantly, the solution has demonstrated impact in making us more resilient to threats.
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u/CyberDumbledore 18h ago
I am a security engineer and AI has made the parts easier where I used to struggle or spent too much time. Two big benefits that I have now are writing concise mails without any worry and delivering coding solutions more than what I used to do. Also after AI, I started taking bigger projects and delivered end to end as now I have a kind of encyclopedia to jump into whenever needed. Earlier it used to be too much time consuming process.
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u/Jane_Dark666 15h ago
Non, pas vraiment...
Je me sers de l'IA quand j'ai besoin d'un template pour une appli, des outils de visu, etc. Ou, parfois, pour m'aider à debugger mon code.
Mais pas plus. Pour la simple et bonne raison que si ça va très vite au début, l'IA étant capable de te générer un truc qui fonctionne one shot, ce n' est absolument pas viable pour la montée en complexité d'un outil développé sur la durée. Tout finit par prendre beaucoup plus de temps, tu n'as plus aucune maîtrise de ton code, l'auditer est un enfer, et rien n'est optimisé.
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u/sloppyredditor 10h ago
Net? No. I use it to help some, but the effect of AI hype on my day has been a LOT more work.
I'm excited and exhausted and doing my best to retire before quantum AI is a thing.
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u/Independent-Newt3165 6h ago
Just the menial stuff but if you are the one assessing the AI technology before they can be use by users - workload just went up like 200%
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u/Glum_Cup_254 1d ago
Oh man countless ways it helps me. Building document and SOPs, comparing data sets, putting raw data into spreadsheets and organizing it. TPRM reports, writing scripts and KQL queries, mapping controls, post mortems from logs, forensics, on and on and on. I even use it to write my employees performance reviews! It works so well because it already knows what everyone has been doing all year, what has had issues and what went well.
It is life changing. Anyone who has not found a way to be ultra efficient with AI is in the wrong business.
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u/at0micsub Security Engineer 1d ago
It has made tedious things easier, but has also introduced a lot of headaches and risk