Reinventing custom detections and vulnerability management

Nuclei has become a cornerstone of modern security testing, empowering researchers, red teams, and enterprises to detect exploitable vulnerabilities with precision. The security community loves it for its accuracy, transparency, and unparalleled customizability, offering users the ability to define their own detections using simple YAML-based templates.

For those new to Nuclei, it’s an open-source vulnerability scanner that thrives on community-driven intelligence. Its template-based approach makes it incredibly flexible, allowing users to write detections for virtually any security risk, from misconfigurations to zero-day exploits.

Last year, we introduced the AI Template Editor, and the response was incredible with over 40 thousand templates created.

Today, with ProjectDiscovery v1, we’re making it even easier to create and manage custom Nuclei templates. From improvements to AI Template Editor to automating how security teams monitor for regressions, we’re committed to helping security teams protect their organizations from every type of security risk.

And while we continue to invest in our AI experience, one thing remains unchanged: your prompts and templates belong to you. We do not train on any user inputs, ensuring a privacy-first AI experience.

In this post, we’ll break down each of these improvements in detail. But if you're short on time, here’s the TL;DR on what’s new for Nuclei template creation in ProjectDiscovery v1.

TL;DR

• Smarter AI Template Editor – Now with iterative testing and built-in validation to reduce false positives and generate more accurate templates.
• External data integration – AI can now reference external URLs like NIST NVD, CVE databases, and vulnerability writeups for more context-aware templates.
• Higher context limits – Increased prompt capacity allows for more complex detections, reducing back-and-forth adjustments.
• Full-text search for public templates – Search across the entire YAML content of Nuclei templates, including metadata, comments, and protocol definitions.
• New ai flag in Nuclei CLI – Generate and execute templates on the fly for quick, targeted scans without needing a pre-written template.
• Introducing Auto-Regressions – Streamline vulnerability retesting and regressions with ticketing platforms like Linear, Jira, ServiceNow to automate vulnerability lifecycle management

Get started for free or request a demo for Enterprise.

Iterative testing and built-in validation

We're excited to introduce major enhancements to our AI Template Editor, focused on iterative testing and built-in validation to make template creation more accurate and reliable than ever. These improvements streamline your workflow and ensure that every generated template is both functional and precise.

Key enhancements:

• Iterative validation: The AI Template Editor now performs multiple iterations against a target to ensure that the final Nuclei template is valid, functions correctly, and accurately reflects your initial prompt.
• Response data verification: By analyzing response data, the editor confirms that the correct patterns are matched, ensuring the template's effectiveness.
• Thorough logic testing: Before finalizing the template, the AI generator rigorously tests its logic, resulting in significantly fewer false positives and more accurate detections.

These advancements not only improve accuracy but also save valuable time, allowing security teams to focus on what matters most, staying ahead of evolving threats.

Our improved AI Template Editor is available for everyone to try here.

AI Template Editor now supports external links with new UI coming soon

The AI Template Editor now has the ability to access and analyze external URLs directly from your prompts. Instead of relying solely on user-provided input, the AI can reference official documentation, vulnerability reports, and security databases to generate more precise templates with minimal manual effort.

With support for external resources, the editor can pull in relevant data from sources like NIST NVD, CVE databases, framework documentation, and vulnerability write-ups. This allows for more accurate, context-aware template generation without overflowing the prompt field. By leveraging external information dynamically, the AI produces richer, more reliable templates while streamlining the entire creation process.

This new capability is available in both the UI and our API.

Coming soon: we’re rolling out an updated AI Template Editor interface designed for an even smoother experience. We’re also launching an automated workflow that integrates with our CVE dataset via CVEMap, combines internet search, and generates Nuclei templates on the fly, giving security teams instant detections with the right context at the right time.

Expanded context windows for more complex detections

After listening to user feedback, we’ve increased the context window for AI-generated templates, making it easier to work with more complex vulnerability scenarios.

With this update, you can now include larger datasets (logs, tracebacks, and multiple examples) without hitting prompt limits. This is especially useful for handling multi-step vulnerabilities that require state-based validation or multi-attack-vector checks. Whether you're detecting XSS, SQL injection, or multi-protocol misconfigurations, the expanded context capacity streamlines template creation by reducing the need for iterative adjustments.

By allowing users to provide all necessary references and examples in a single prompt, this enhancement significantly improves efficiency and accuracy when crafting custom Nuclei templates.

Introducing the ai flag in Nuclei CLI

Beyond the AI Template Editor, we’re introducing a new way to leverage AI within Nuclei - directly from the command line. With the new -ai flag in Nuclei CLI, users can execute quick, AI-powered detections on the fly without needing predefined templates.

This feature is built for quick, ad-hoc security tasks, providing instant insights without the need for manually writing YAML-based templates. Whether it's detecting secrets in URLs, analyzing API responses for sensitive keys, or flagging potential security misconfigurations in real time, the -ai flag makes it faster and easier to perform quick security checks.

How it works

Simply append the -ai flag to your Nuclei command, followed by a natural language query specifying what you want to detect. The feature dynamically generates a Nuclei template based on your prompt and executes it in real-time, enabling seamless and efficient security scanning.

Example use cases

Here are five practical ways you can leverage the -ai flag in your daily security workflow:

Check for sensitive information leaks in API responses:

Spot debug error messages revealing stack traces:

Identify admin panel endpoints dynamically:

Find hardcoded secrets in URLs:

Detect exposed API keys in HTTP responses:

Future enhancements

While the current -ai implementation is ideal for quick, one-off detections, we’re actively expanding its capabilities to handle more complex, multi-step security tasks.

With this feature, we’re making AI an even more seamless part of the Nuclei experience - allowing users to run smart, adaptive security tests on demand, directly from their CLI.

Introducing Auto-Regressions: the future of vulnerability lifecycle management

Our vision extends beyond making it easier to generate custom detections with the AI Template Editor. We aim to streamline the entire vulnerability lifecycle. Today, we’re introducing Auto-Regressions, an automated way to track, validate, and prevent security regressions with minimal manual effort.

This new capability integrates directly into your ticketing system, starting with Linear. Support for Jira, ServiceNow, and other platforms are coming soon.

With Auto-Regressions:

• A Nuclei template is automatically generated for each security issue created in your ticketing system.
• When issues are marked as fixed, we automatically retest to verify the resolution.
• We continuously monitor your infrastructure for previously fixed vulnerabilities to detect regressions before they become risks.
• We support integrations into development pipelines to catch regressions before they reach production.

By eliminating the manual overhead of triaging, retesting, and back-and-forth coordination with engineering teams, Auto-Regressions saves security teams hours of work. This frees up time to focus on higher-level tasks like proactive threat modeling or refining detection strategies rather than chasing down the same vulnerabilities over and over again.

Auto-Regressions is in early access for Enterprise users. If you'd like to learn more or join the waitlist, please schedule a demo.

Wrapping Up

These enhancements push forward our vision of democratizing vulnerability management and making Nuclei the universal detection engine for all security risks. With AI-powered detections, full-text search, expanded automation, and continuous regression testing, we’re removing friction from the vulnerability lifecycle, helping teams stay ahead of threats while reducing manual work.

This is just the beginning. Try it today in ProjectDiscovery Cloud and see how we’re redefining vulnerability management.

Or, get a demo for enterprise.