Every few months, someone on Twitter declares that AI will make smart contract auditors obsolete. I have been building spectr-ai — an AI-powered smart contract analysis tool — for the past several months, and I can tell you definitively: that take is wrong. But so is the opposite claim that AI is useless for security work. The truth is more nuanced, more interesting, and has real implications for anyone building or auditing smart contracts. What AI Actually Does Well AI excels at pattern recognition at scale. Feed a language model a Solidity contract, and it will reliably catch: Known vulnerability patterns. Reentrancy, unchecked return values, tx.origin authentication, uninitialized storage pointers, integer overflow in pre-0.8.0 contracts — these are well-documented patterns that appear in training data thousands of times. AI catches them fast and consistently. Style and hygiene issues.…