For reasons I still don’t fully understand, Miami Beach has enormous
colonies of turkey vultures. You’ll see them circling over the city and the
interstates, perched like huge awkward toddlers on lampposts, or standing
motionless as a shadow in the strip of grass between the road and the blue
water of the bay. If you look up at almost any moment, there’s a column of
them somewhere overhead, wings spread wide, fingers splayed, feeling the
air as they rise and fall until they’re just brown pinpricks against the
sky.
They’re not hunting in the way people imagine. They’re reading the
environment. Thermals, pressure changes, subtle signals you don’t see from
the ground. To understand the shape of the air, you have to spend a lot of
time inside it.
Lately, the hacking community looks exactly the same. Everyone is circling
LLMs. Probing them. Stressing them. Flying the same invisible currents with
different models, different agentic systems, different targets. Not because
there’s a single exploit waiting up there, but because you only learn
what’s possible by living in the flow and finding where lift suddenly
appears.
And it’s been a ridiculous year to do that. 2025 opened with SharePoint
bugs, rolled straight into a design-level auth failure in Entra, delivered
a steady drumbeat of humiliating appliance RCEs, and closed out with
react2shell. An objectively unhinged year. One that made it hard to pretend
we’re still in the old world where software is written one way and analyzed
another.
Something has shifted. Software is changing how it’s built, but just as
importantly, how it’s *understood*. Analysis is no longer a static act.
It’s dynamic, exploratory, and increasingly continuous. Tools aren’t just
checking artifacts anymore, they’re moving through systems, adapting,
accumulating intuition.
That’s the environment AARDVARK grew out of. It’s not about a single clever
trick. It’s about living in the air long enough to learn where the lift is,
over and over again, across real systems at real scale.
Which is why we’re hiring. If you know software engineers who want to work
on systems that explore, adapt, and actually understand complex software in
motion, we’re rapidly building that team now:
https://openai.com/careers/software-engineer-security-products-san-francisc…
– dave
