Traditional scanners operate on a checklist model: does this request match a known pattern, yes or no. It’s fast, deterministic, and fundamentally limited to what’s already been catalogued.
Reasoning-based approaches work differently. Instead of asking ‘does this match a signature,’ the question becomes ‘given everything I’ve observed about this application, what’s the most promising path to a meaningful compromise.’ That’s a fundamentally different kind of analysis — closer to how an experienced human tester thinks through a target than how a signature database gets queried.
It’s also why the interesting findings tend to come from combining several unremarkable observations rather than any single alert crossing a severity threshold.
