A surreal start to the first week of work in 2026—can cybersecurity professionals still crack a smile?

Recently, the phrase "traditional programming" (or "ancient-method programming") has somehow gone viral.

It started when Stanford offered a new course on AI programming, which netizens summarized perfectly: In the future, writing code manually will be considered "traditional programming." It belongs to an expensive, performance-art-like behavior, and it is recommended to apply for intangible cultural heritage status.

If even writing code is being forced into "handicraft" by AI, what about us in cybersecurity? We still rely on the naked eye to read logs, Excel sheets to manage assets, and brain-imaging to make emergency plans... What is this? Traditional defense?

Several major events that occurred recently are like a bucket of cold water poured over the heads of us "craftsmen." They are telling us bluntly: At this point in time, sticking to the traditional ways might really cost you your job, or even lose the entire infrastructure.

The opponent has already industrialized; they don't even need to understand code

We used to think hackers had to be experts in hoodies, tapping on keyboards at lightning speed. However, the recently exposed theft of Mexican government data heavily slapped this stereotype in the face.

Data of 195 million people was stolen, and 10 government agencies fell. The weapon in the attacker's hand was Claude Code.

This is the most typical "industrialized attack." Attackers don't need to laboriously write exploit code themselves; they only need to learn how to jailbreak and how to entice AI with prompts. Did the AI refuse? Change the wording and continue to deceive until Claude spits out executable attack scripts.

What does this mean? It means the barrier to attack has been lowered to the floor level, while the efficiency of attacks has been exponentially raised. In the future, we will face not just a few high-level hackers, but thousands of script kiddies with "AI co-pilots."

At this point, if you are still using the traditional ways, such as relying on manually written rule bases and analysts' experience for determination, then you are using an abacus to fight your opponent's cloud computing. This is no longer a technical issue; it is a dimensional reduction strike in computing power.

Even the "cloud" can be physically destroyed, is traditional disaster recovery still useful?

If AI attacks still belong to the software level, then the bombing of the AWS data center in the Middle East is somewhat magical realism.

Amazon's data center in the Middle East was hit by a flying object, directly triggering a fire. This hit not only zeroed out Iran's internet but also instantly disconnected countless enterprises relying on the cloud services of that region.

This taught a lesson to everyone who believes that going to the cloud means safety. We are used to clicking the mouse on the console to do disaster recovery, and used to thinking that the "cloud" is floating in the sky, indestructible.

But in the hybrid war of 2026, the cloud is on the ground, and it can be bombed by flying objects.

Our traditional emergency plans lying in documents are filled with "what to do if power fails" and "what to do if the fiber optic cable is cut." But is there a single line written: "If the physical room of the cloud service provider is bombed, can our business automatically switch to another continent within 10 minutes?"

This kind of extreme resilience cannot be written out by writing documents; it must be tested by real-world network disconnection drills.

The collapse of the trust chain: when Localhost becomes the insider

There is also the ClawJacked vulnerability that makes developers break into a cold sweat.

OpenClaw, an open-source AI framework, allowed developers' local localhost to be silently hijacked by malicious websites due to a default configuration issue. As long as you have your AI agent on and visit a malicious webpage, hackers can directly control your AI through your computer to do bad things.

Coupled with various malicious IPs and the GTFire technique using Google services for phishing, everything points to the same trend:

The "black-and-white list" logic that "traditional defense" relies on has completely collapsed.

• You trust Google, so you let it through, resulting in phishing getting in.

• You trust the local environment, so you didn't isolate it, resulting in it becoming a springboard.

• You trust open-source components, resulting in variant Trojans hidden inside.

Leave "repetition" to machines, and keep "wisdom" for ourselves

Looking back, the reason why the "traditional programming" meme became popular is actually because it touched a certain chord deep inside all tech people: times have changed, and the way we create value is also changing.

Facing the high-intensity, fast-paced offensive and defensive environment of 2026, relying solely on human labor to fill the gaps in the defense line is not only no longer calm, but even seems somewhat tragic.

We introduce threat intelligence and intelligent security validation not to negate past experience, but to put an "exoskeleton" on the overwhelmed security team.

• Let machines handle the massive amount of boring validation and respond to AI attacks with second-level variants;

• Let our security experts free themselves from trivial brick-laying to think about strategy, play psychological games, and solve complex problems that machines cannot understand yet.

Rejecting the "traditional" is not because the old craft is bad, but because we deserve to have more advanced weapons to protect more important things.