Studying LLM Workflows Until They Actually Find Cool Bugs
·42 mins
Two weeks ago I published a deep dive on prompt engineering for security research. This article is about everything that lives one layer above the prompt: the hooks, MCPs, subagents, scope guards, and validators that make those prompts viable in a real bug bounty workflow. Six axes, sourced numbers, and an honest before-and-after between my first attempt (27 slash commands, a 74k-vuln knowledge base, one monolithic configuration) and the rewrite (8 to 12 skills, no embeddings, hard caps everywhere, a deterministic validator MCP at the gate).