Let it iterate, give it access to the cheap models, and tell it part of the requirements is that the cheap models shouldn't be able to solve it with such and such a prompt. I expect it will be able to zoom in on something.

One shot generating a problem of exactly the difficulty the user has in mind is a very difficult problem for anyone. "IT security students" span a wide range of capabilities, but I would expect most of them are worse than qwen3.8-2.7b at this kind of work.

To use a motor analogy: A lot of people just run these things on idle and never realize that you can put a load and apply power.

Give it a goal, a test for the goal, a harness to iterate in, and tell it to iterate. It'll top out a wee bit higher.

Train it on human content, get human emulating behaviour, including all the perverse incentives and bad acting we see from people, fictional or otherwise.

I would worry more about 5D chess or 6D and even 7D chess. This article talks about teaching models to be good and methods that could train goodness, but it sounds like there are some unsolved problems to graduate to 8D+ chess.