This is a quick post I wanted to write about a hobby project I spent a weekend on. It has little to do with real cryptography, and mostly doesn’t expose a particularly exciting vulnerability. But it did teach me a lot about frontier LLM APIs and coding agents. It also got me certified as an OpenAI “cyber researcher” which is something that doesn’t happen every day. In any case, please keep your expectations low. Who knows, perhaps someone else will find something exciting to do with this. What’s encrypted reasoning? Last week I decided it’d be fun to set up an OpenClaw agent. I still don’t know why I did this. I have no use for another AI in my life, and I realized this fact almost immediately after I got through the (surprisingly difficult!) configuration process. But configuring the agent to talk to Claude exposed me to something way more interesting: I got a cool error .…