Veteran Crypto Developer Documents First Sherlock Audit Contest Attempt With Raw Honesty

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An 18-year software developer with eight years in crypto has publicly shared their experience signing up for their first Sherlock audit contest, a competitive bug-bounty style platform where auditors called Watsons compete for severity-based prize pools. The developer, who built an open-source AI smart contract auditing tool called spectr-ai, acknowledges that writing secure code professionally does not translate directly to competing on a public leaderboard. Rather than aiming to win, they set a modest first goal of submitting two fully defensible valid issues, the minimum typically needed to advance beyond the entry tier. Their preparation involved studying past Sherlock contest reports to understand judging patterns, with recurring findings including rounding errors, access control flaws, and oracle assumptions that fail on Layer 2 networks. They also outlined a structured methodology using local AI models to generate specific attack-path hypotheses, with a personal rule that no submission goes in without a working Foundry proof of concept.

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