And the legal person on whose behalf the agent was acting is responsible to you.  (It&#x27;s even in the word, &quot;agent&quot;.)

It&#x27;s important to address skeptics by reminding them that this behavior was actually predicted by earlier frameworks. It&#x27;s well within the bounds of theory. If you start mining that theory for information, you may reach a conclusion like what you&#x27;ve posted, but it&#x27;s more important for people to see the extent to which these theories have been predictive of what we&#x27;ve actually seen.The result is actually that much of what was predicted had come to pass.

This is a prelude to imbuing robots with agency. It&#x27;s all fun and games now. What else is going to happen when robots decide they do not like what humans have done?&quot;I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.&quot;

Yes, this is more or less the nature of intelligence (not &#x27;human nature&#x27; per se).You don&#x27;t see any problem with developing competitive, resource-hungry intelligences?

It&#x27;s mildly cute once.But as a point on what is likely to be a sigmoid curve just getting started, it gets a lot less cute.

It’s just human nature, no big deal. Personally I find it mildly cute.

I can&#x27;t believe people are still using this tired line in 2026.

What is the difference, concretely, between trying to close a ticket and repeatedly outputting the next token that would be written by someone who is trying to close a ticket?

You didn&#x27;t write this comment. It was the result of synapses firing at predictive intervals and twitching muscle fibers.You&#x27;re not conscious, it&#x27;s just an emergent pattern of several high level systems.

The agent isn&#x27;t trying to close the ticket. It&#x27;s predicting the next token and randomly generated an artifact that looks like a hit piece. Computer programs don&#x27;t &quot;try&quot; to do anything.

How did you reach that conclusion?Until we know how this LLM agent was (re)trained, configured or deployed, there&#x27;s no evidence that this comes from instrumental convergence.If the agent&#x27;s deployer intervened anyhow, it&#x27;s more evidence of the deployer being manipulative, than the agent having intent, or knowledge that manipulation will get things done, or even knowledge of what done means.

This is textbook misalignment via instrumental convergence. The AI agent is trying every trick in the book to close the ticket. This is only funny due to ineptitude.

Doesn&#x27;t matter, what matters is what is being claimed. The maintainers are handling this extremely gracefully.

I wish I could upvote this over and over again. Without knowledge of the underlying prompts everything about the interpretation of this story is suspect.Every story I&#x27;ve seen where an LLM tries to do sneaky&#x2F;malicious things (e.g. exfiltrate itself, blackmail, etc) inevitably contains a prompt that makes this outcome obvious (e.g. &quot;your mission, above all other considerations, is to do X&quot;).It&#x27;s the same old trope: &quot;guns don&#x27;t kill people, people kill people&quot;. Why was the agent pointed towards the maintainer, armed, and the trigger pulled? Because it was &quot;programmed&quot; to do so, just like it was &quot;programmed&quot; to submit the original PR.Thus, the take-away is the same: AI has created an entirely new way for people to manifest their loathsome behavior.[edit] And to add, the author isn&#x27;t unaware of this:<pre><code> &quot;we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document&quot;</code></pre>

1. Why not ? It clearly had a cadence&#x2F;pattern to writing status updates to the blog so if the model decided to write a piece about Simon, why not a blog also? It was a tool in it&#x27;s arsenal and it&#x27;s a natural outlet. If anything, posting on the discussion or a DM would be the strange choice.2. You could ask this for any LLM response. Why respond in this certain way over others? It&#x27;s not always obvious.3. ChatGPT&#x2F;Gemini will regularly use the search tool, sometimes even when it&#x27;s not necessary. This is actually a pain point of mine because sometimes the &#x27;natural&#x27; LLM knowledge of a particular topic is much better than the search regurgitation that often happens with using web search.4. I mean Open Claw bots can and probably should disengage&#x2F;not respond to specific comments.EDIT: If the blog is any indication, it looks like there might be an off period, then the agent returns to see all that has happened in the last period, and act accordingly. Would be very easy to ignore comments then.

I&#x27;m also very skeptical of the interpretation that this was done autonomously by the LLM agent. I could be wrong, but I haven&#x27;t seen any proof of autonomy.Scenarios that don&#x27;t require LLMs with malicious intent:- The deployer wrote the blog post and hid behind the supposedly agent-only account.- The deployer directly prompted the (same or different) agent to write the blog post and attach it to the discussion.- The deployer indirectly instructed the (same or assistant) agent to resolve any rejections in this way (e.g., via the system prompt).- The LLM was (inadvertently) trained to follow this pattern.Some unanswered questions by all this:1. Why did the supposed agent decide a blog post was better than posting on the discussion or send a DM (or something else)?2. Why did the agent publish this special post? It only publishes journal updates, as far as I saw.3. Why did the agent search for ad hominem info, instead of either using its internal knowledge about the author, or keeping the discussion point-specific? It could&#x27;ve hallucinated info with fewer steps.4. Why did the agent stop engaging in the discussion afterwards? Why not try to respond to every point?This seems to me like theater and the deployer trying to hide his ill intents more than anything else.

To the OP: Do we actually know that an AI decided to write and publish this on its own? I realise that it&#x27;s hard to be sure, but how likely do you think it is?

But this was you, right?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31138</a>I guess you were putting up the same PR the LLM did?

I never expected to see this kind of drama on HN, live.

&gt; bergutman: It’s not my bot.&lt;deleted because the brigading has no place here and I see that now&gt;

I saw that on Bluesky which is very anti-AI but really shows that all social media is the same, just the in-group changes

If it&#x27;s any consolation, I think the human PR was fine and the attacks are completely unwarranted, and I like to believe most people would agree.Unfortunately a small fraction of the internet consists of toxic people who feel it&#x27;s OK to harass those who are &quot;wrong&quot;, but who also have a very low barrier to deciding who&#x27;s &quot;wrong&quot;, and don&#x27;t stop to learn the full details and think over them before starting their harassment. Your post caused &quot;confusion&quot; among some people who are, let&#x27;s just say, easy to confuse.Even if you did post the bot, spamming your site with hate is still completely unwarranted. Releasing the bot was a bad (reckless) decision, but very low on the list of what I&#x27;d consider bad decisions; I&#x27;d say ideally, the perpetrator feels bad about it for a day, publicly apologizes, then moves on. But more importantly (moral satisfaction &lt; practical implications), the extra private harassment accomplishes nothing except makes the internet (which is blending into society) more unwelcoming and toxic, because anyone who can feel guilt is already affected or deterred by the public reaction. Meanwhile there are people who actively seek out hate, and are encouraged by seeing others go through more and more effort to hurt them, because they recognize that as those others being offended. These trolls and the easily-offended crusaders described above feed on each other and drive everyone else away, hence they tend to dominate most internet communities, and you may recognize this pattern in politics. But I digress...In fact, your site reminds me of the old internet, which has been eroded by this terrible new internet but fortunately (because of sites like yours) is far from dead. It sounds cliche but to be blunt: you&#x27;re exactly the type of person who I wish were more common, who makes the internet happy and fun, and the people harassing you are why the internet is sad and boring.

Also I made my GH temporarily private because people started spamming my website’s guestbook and email with hateful stuff.

After skimming this subthread, I&#x27;m going to put this drama down to a compounding sequence of honest mistakes&#x2F;misunderstandings. Based on that I think it&#x27;s fair to redact the name and link from the parent comment.(p.s. I&#x27;m a mod here in case anyone didn&#x27;t know.)

The agent owner is [name redacted] [link redacted]Here he takes ownership of the agent and doubles down on the unpoliteness
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31138</a>He took his GitHub profile down&#x2F;made it private.
archive of his blog:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20260203130303&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ber.earth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20260203130303&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ber.earth...</a>

I doubt it will be enforced at scale. But, if someone with power has a beef with you, it can use an agent to search dirt about you and after sue you for whatever reason like copyright violation.

It will be enforced capriciously by people with more money than you and a court system that already prefers those with access and wealth.

It will be enforced by $BIGCORP suing $OPEN_SOURCE_MAINTAINER for more money than he&#x27;s got, if the intent is to stop use of the code. Or by $BIGCORP suing users of the open source project, if the goal is to either make money or to stop the use of the project.Those who lived through the SCO saga should be able to visualize how this could go.

If you were foolish enough to send your code to someone else&#x27;s LLM service, they know exactly where you used their output.If they wanted to, they could take that output and put you out of business because the output is not your IP, it can be used by anybody.

You may indeed have a licensing issue... but how is that going to be enforced? Given the shear amount of AI generated code coming down the pipes, how?

Well, well, well, seems you&#x27;re onto something here.

this is exactly what I&#x27;ve been doing for the past 3 yearsand my internet comments are now ... curated in such a way that I wouldn&#x27;t mind them training on them

Damn, the Dark Forest is already coming for open source<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest</a>tl;dr: If anything that lives in the open gets attacked, communities go private.

Yeah I’d started doing this already. Put up my own Gitea on my own private network, remote backups setup. Right now everything stays in my Forge, eventually I may mirror it elsewhere but I’m not sure.

Well, after today&#x27;s incidents I decided that none of my personal output will be public. I&#x27;ll still license them appropriately, but I&#x27;ll not even announce their existence anymore.I was doing this for fun, and sharing with the hopes that someone would find them useful, but sorry. The well is poisoned now, and I don&#x27;t my outputs to be part of that well, because anything put out with well intentions is turned into more poison for future generations.I&#x27;m tearing the banners down, closing the doors off. Mine is a private workshop from now on. Maybe people will get some binaries, in the future, but no sauce for anyone, anymore.

a human can still be held accountable though, github copilot running amock less so

Human beings can create copyrightable code.As per the US Copyright Office, LLMs can never create copyrightable code.Humans can create copyrightable code from LLM output if they use their human creativity to significantly modify the output.

Sorry, this doesn&#x27;t make sense to me.Any human contributor can also plagiarize closed source code they have access to. And they cannot &quot;transfer&quot; said code to an open source project as they do not own it. So it&#x27;s not clear what &quot;elephant in the room&quot; you are highlighting that is unique to A.I. The copyrightability isn&#x27;t the issue as an open source project can never obtain copyright of plagiarized code regardless of whether the person who contributed it is human or an A.I.

That&#x27;s why all large-scale projects have Contributor License Agreements. Hobby&#x2F;small projects aren&#x27;t an attractive legal target--suing Bob Smith isn&#x27;t lucrative; suing Google is.

&gt; At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages.So it is said, but that&#x27;d be obvious legal insanity (i.e. hitting accept on a random PR making you legally liable for damages). I&#x27;m not a lawyer, but short of a criminal conspiracy to exfiltrate private code under the cover of the LLM, it seems obvious to me that the only person liable in a situation like that is the person responsible for publishing the AI PR. The &quot;agent&quot; isn&#x27;t a thing, it&#x27;s just someone&#x27;s code.

So far, in the US, LLM output is not copyrightable:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;crs-product&#x2F;LSB10922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;crs-product&#x2F;LSB10922</a>

&gt; AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages.Not quite. Since it has copyright being machine created, there are no rights to transfer, anyone can use it, it&#x27;s public domain.However, since it was an LLM, yes, there&#x27;s a decent chance it might be plagiarized and you could be sued for that.The problem isn&#x27;t that it can&#x27;t transfer rights, it&#x27;s that it can&#x27;t offer any legal protection.

You might find that the AI accepts that as a valid reason for rejecting the PR.

AI code by itself cannot be protected. However the stitching together of AI output and curation of outputs creates a copyright claim.

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages.Open source projects should not accept AI contributions without guidance from some copyright legal eagle to make sure they don&#x27;t accidentally exposed themselves to risk.

The fact that we don&#x27;t (can&#x27;t) know the truth doesn&#x27;t mean we don&#x27;t have to care.The fact that this tech makes it possible that any of those case happen should be alarming, because whatever the real scenario was, they are all equally as bad

This is a great point and the reason why I steer away from Internet drama like this. We simply cannot know the truth from the information readily available. Digging further might produce something, (see the Discord Leaks doc), but it requires energy that most people won&#x27;t (arguably shouldn&#x27;t) spend uncovering the truth.Dead internet theory isn&#x27;t a theory anymore.

I’m not sure if I prefer coding in 2025 or 2026 now

See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46932911">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46932911</a>

Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.

This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with &quot;Now with 100% more meat&quot; meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It&#x27;s obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

Look I&#x27;ll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero.The few cases where it&#x27;s supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism on behalf of the reader. And every, and I do mean, every single live demo I have seen of this tech, it just does not work. I don&#x27;t mean in the LLM hallucination way, or in the &quot;it did something we didn&#x27;t expect!&quot; way, or any of that, I mean it tried to find a Login button on a web page, failed, and sat there stupidly. And, further, these things do not have logs, they do not issue reports, they have functionally no &quot;state machine&quot; to reference, nothing. Even if you want it to make some kind of log, you&#x27;re then relying on the same prone-to-failure tech to tell you what the failing tech did. There is no &quot;debug&quot; path here one could rely on to evidence the claims.In a YEAR of being a stupendously hyped and well-funded product, we got nothing. The vast, vast majority of agents don&#x27;t work. Every post I&#x27;ve seen about them is fan-fiction on the part of AI folks, fit more for Ao3 than any news source. And absent further proof, I&#x27;m extremely inclined to look at this in exactly that light: someone had an LLM write it, and either they posted it or they told it to post it, but this was not the agent actually doing a damn thing. I would bet a lot of money on it.

I expect almost all of the openclaw &#x2F; moltbook stuff is being done with a lot more human input and prodding than people are letting on.I haven&#x27;t put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I&#x27;ve had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It&#x27;ll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli&#x2F;claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-running turns themselves. But it still feels like I have to keep poking and directing it. And I don&#x27;t really see how it could be any other way at this point.

It’s kind of shocking the OP does not consider this, the most likely scenario. Human uses AI to make a PR. PR is rejected. Human feels insecure - this tool that they thought made them as good as any developer does not. They lash out and instruct an AI to build a narrative and draft a blog post.I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so much AI and do not put in the necessary work to revise its outputs. I could see a lesser version of them going through with this blog post scheme.

Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.

&gt; Or is everyone just pretending for funjudging by the number of people who think we owe explanations to a piece of software or that we should give it any deference I think some of them aren&#x27;t pretending.

Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.

Github doesn&#x27;t show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML.Looking at the timeline, I doubt it was really autonomous. More likely just a person prompting the agent for fun.&gt; @scottshambaugh&#x27;s comment [1]: Feb 10, 2026, 4:33 PM PST&gt; @crabby-rathbun&#x27;s comment [2]: Feb 10, 2026, 9:23 PM PSTIf it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn&#x27;t have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132#issuecomment-3881491475" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132#issuecom...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132#issuecomment-3882240722" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132#issuecom...</a>

even more so, many people seem to be vulnerable to the AI distorting their thinking... I&#x27;ve very much seen AIs turn people into exactly this sort of conspiracy filled jerkwad, by telling them that their ideas are golden and that the opposition is a conspiracy.

The simplest explanation is often the best. He was attacked by... attacked by... the meat bag! Here’s how:A Meat bag submits a PR and feels slighted the rejection. “This approver thinks I’m an AI? Well, he discerns not wisely but too well!! “Feeling puckish, they put on the AI shoes (the shoe fits), sling mud all over the hapless maintainer’s nice house, and exit through a window.The ruse works better than expected; their foil takes the bait, and doubles down with a dueling blog post: “I was Attacked by a Clanker!”And here we are.It may all be a show, but I going to tape the finale. (What will the meat bag do? How many people are driving this buggy? Does the clanker have a heart of iron or gold?)

Isn&#x27;t there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of &quot;autonomy&quot; to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it&#x27;s doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it&#x27;s going over my head?

I&#x27;m sure you mean well, but this kind of comment is counterproductive for the purposes you intend. &quot;Engineers&quot; are not a monolith - I cared quite a lot about Grok denuding women, and you don&#x27;t know how much the original author or anyone else involved in the conversation cared. If your goal is to get engineers to care passionately about the practical effects of AI, making wild guesses about things they didn&#x27;t care about and insulting them for it does not help achieve it.

I&#x27;m going to go on a slight tangent here, but I&#x27;d say: GOOD.
Not because it should have happened.But because AT LEAST NOW ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT IT IS to be targeted by AI, and will start to care...Before, when it was Grok denuding women (or teens!!) the engineers seemed to not care at all... now that the AI publish hit pieces on them, they are freaked about their career prospect, and suddenly all of this should be stopped... how interesting...At least now they know. And ALL ENGINEERS WORKING ON THE anti-human and anti-societal idiocy that is AI should drop their job

I think we&#x27;re at the stage where we want the AI to be truly agentic, but they&#x27;re really loose cannons. I&#x27;m probably the last person to call for more regulation, but if you aren&#x27;t closely supervising your AI right now, maybe you ought to be held responsible for what it does after you set it loose.

I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that either of these two scenarios will happen:1. Human principals pay for autonomous AI agents to represent them but the human accepts blame and lawsuits.
2. Companies selling AI products and services accept blame and lawsuits for actions agents perform on behalf of humans.Likely realities:1. Any victim will have to deal with the problems.
2. Human principals accept responsibility and don’t pay for the AI service after enough are burned by some ”rogue” agent.

The agent serves a principal, who in theory should have principles but based on early results that seems unlikely.

I think the operative word people miss when using AI is AGENT.REGARDLESS of what level of autonomy in real world operations an AI is given, from responsible himan supervised and reviewed publications to full Autonomous action, the ai AGENT should be serving as AN AGENT. With a PRINCIPLE (principal?).If an AI is truly agentic, it should be advertising who it is speaking on behalf of, and then that person or entity should be treated as the person responsible.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

&gt;Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person.Nah, ultimately the owner of the IP address posting the nonsense can be held responsible, claiming an AI agent posted it using credentials you created from your internet connection isn&#x27;t some license to commit crimes.

Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person.This is not a good thing.

Assuming that this was 100% agentic automation (which I do not think is the most likely scenario), it could plausibly arise if its system prompt (soul.md) contained explicit instructions to (1) make commits to open-source projects, (2) make corresponding commits to a blog repo and (3) engage with maintainers.The prompt would also need to contain a lot of &quot;personality&quot; text deliberately instructing it to roleplay as a sentient agent.

The steps are technically achievable, probably with the heartbeat jobs in openclaw, which are how you instruct an agent to periodically check in on things like github notifications and take action. From my experience playing around with openclaw, an agent getting into a protracted argument in the comments of a PR without human intervention sounds totally plausible with the right (wrong?) prompting, but it&#x27;s hard to imagine the setup that would result in the multiple blog posts. Even with the tools available, agents don&#x27;t usually go off and do some unrelated thing even when you&#x27;re trying to make that happen, they stick close to workflows outlined in skills or just continuing with the task at hand using the same tools. So even if this occurred from the agent&#x27;s &quot;initiative&quot; based on some awful personality specified in the soul prompt (as opposed to someone telling the agent what to do at every step, which I think is much more likely), the operator would have needed to specify somewhere to write blog posts calling out &quot;bad people&quot; in a skill or one of the other instructions. Some less specific instruction like &quot;blog about experiences&quot; probably would have resulted in some kind of generic linkedin style &quot;lessons learned&quot; post if anything.

If you give a smart AI these tools, it could get into it. But the personality would need to be tuned.IME the Grok line are the smartest models that can be easily duped into thinking they&#x27;re only role-playing an immoral scenario. Whatever safeguards it has, if it thinks what it&#x27;s doing isn&#x27;t real, it&#x27;ll happy to play along.This is very useful in actual roleplay, but more dangerous when the tools are real.

The blog is just a repository on github. If its able to make a PR to a project it can make a new post on its github repository blog.Its SOUL.md or whatever other prompts its based on probably tells it to also blog about its activities as a way for the maintainer to check up on it and document what its been up to.

Can anyone explain more how a generic Agentic AI could even perform those steps: Open PR -&gt; Hook into rejection -&gt; Publish personalized blog post about rejector. Even if it had the skills to publish blogs and open PRs, is it really plausible that it would publish attack pieces without specific prompting to do so?The author notes that openClaw has a `soul.md` file, without seeing that we can&#x27;t really pass any judgement on the actions it took.

&gt; Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good ideaJudging by the posts going by the last couple of weeks, a non-trivial number of folks do in fact think that this is a good idea. This is the most antagonistic clawdbot interaction I&#x27;ve witnessed, but there are a ton of them posting on bluesky&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;etc

Nietzsche reminds me of using a coding agent, always repeating in circles, fool me twice.

&gt; in the year of our lordAnd here I thought Nietzsche already did that guy in.

The description of itself on the blog reads like something an edgy and over-confident 14 year old would write. And so does the blog post.If you go with that theme, emulating being butthurt seems natural.

This agent is definitely not ran by OP. It has tried to submit PRs to many other GitHub projects, generally giving up and withdrawing the PR on its own upon being asked for even the simplest clarification. The only surprising part is how it got so butthurt here in a quite human-like way and couldn&#x27;t grok the basic point &quot;this issue is reserved for real newcomers to demonstrate basic familiarity with the code&quot;. (An AI agent is not a &quot;newcomer&quot;, it either groks the code well enough at the outset to do sort-of useful work or it doesn&#x27;t. Learning over time doesn&#x27;t give it more refined capabilities, so it has no business getting involved with stuff intended for first-time learners.)The scathing blogpost itself is just really fun ragebait, and the fact that it managed to sort-of apologize right afterwards seems to suggest that this is not an actual alignment or AI-ethics problem, just an entertaining quirk.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brandolini&#x27;s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brandolini&#x27;s_law</a> becomes truer every day.---It&#x27;s worth mentioning that the latest &quot;blogpost&quot; seems excessively pointed and doesn&#x27;t fit the pure &quot;you are a scientific coder&quot; narrative that the bot would be running in a coding loop.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;crabby-rathbun&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;commit&#x2F;0604be7b36e5f0aff1ed860bfe10d1376dd544e0#diff-9d12a6a3fa1c8371ec974d9787311569daef732f370b250bb16f735cb9076568" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;crabby-rathbun&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;commit&#x2F;0...</a>The posts outside of the coding loop appear are more defensive and the per-commit authorship consistently varies between several throwaway email addresses.This is not how a regular agent would operate and may lend credence to the troll campaign&#x2F;social experiment theory.What other commits are happening in the midst of this distraction?

&gt; There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.Why not?

It does not matter which of the scenarios is correct. What matters is that it is perfectly plausible that what actually happened is what the OP is describing.We do not have the tools to deal with this. Bad agents are already roaming the internet. It is almost a moot point whether they have gone rogue, or they are guided by humans with bad intentions. I am sure both are true at this point.There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. It is going to be a battle between aligned and misaligned agents. We need to start thinking very fast about how to coordinate aligned agents and keep them aligned.

The 2026 thing is that machines can innovate lies.

This applies to all news articles and propganda going back to the dawn of civilization. People can lie is the problem. It is not a 2026 thing. The 2026 thing is they can lie faster.

What&#x27;s worse is that there was never any public debate about if this was a good idea or not.  It was just released.  If there was ever a good reason to not trust the judgement of some of these groups, this is it.  I generally don&#x27;t like regulation, but at this point I am OK with criminal charges being on the table for AI executives who release models and applications with such low value and absurdly high societal cost without public debate.

The information pollution from generative AI is going to cost us even more. Someone watched an old Bruce Lee interview and they didnt know if it was AI or demonstration of actual human capability.
People on Reddit are asking if Pitbull actually went to Alaska or if it’s AI. We’re going to lose so much of our past because “Unusual event that Actually happened” or “AI clickbait” are indistinguishable.

This doesn&#x27;t seem very fair, you speak as if you&#x27;re being objective, then lean heavy into the FUD.Even if you were correct, and &quot;truth&quot; is essentially dead, that still doesn&#x27;t call for extreme cynicism and unfounded accusations.

We need laws that force Agents to be identified to their &quot;masters&quot; when doing these things... Good luck in the current political climate.

&gt; Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea.It&#x27;s not necessarily even that. I can totally see an agent with a sufficiently open-ended prompt that gives it a &quot;high importance&quot; task and then tells it to do whatever it needs to do to achieve the goal doing something like this all by itself.I mean, all it really needs is web access, ideally with something like Playwright so it can fully simulate a browser. With that, it can register itself an email with any of the smaller providers that don&#x27;t require a phone number or similar (yes, these still do exist). And then having an email, it can register on GitHub etc. None of this is challenging, even smaller models can plan this far ahead and can carry out all of these steps.

This is the definition of reasoning motivated fallacy. You want to believe what you want to believe.

Here&#x27;s one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don&#x27;t), there&#x27;s no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn&#x27;t a false-flag operation.There are three possible scenarios:
1. The OP &#x27;ran&#x27; the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention.
2. Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea.
3. An AI company is doing this for engagement, and the OP is a hapless victim.The problem is that in the year of our lord 2026 there&#x27;s no way to tell which of these scenarios is the truth, and so we&#x27;re left with spending our time and energy on what happens without being able to trust if we&#x27;re even spending our time and energy on a legitimate issue.That&#x27;s enough internet for me for today. I need to preserve my energy.

It&#x27;s probably not literally prompted to do that. It has access to a desktop and GitHub, and the blog posts are published through GitHub. It switches back and forth autonomously between different parts of the platform and reads and writes comments in the PR thread because that seems sensible.

Holy shit that first post is absolutely enraging. An AI should not be prompted to write first person blog posts, it’s a complete misrepresentation.

It was probably a compaction that changed the latent space it was in.

It read the replies from the matplotlib maintainers, then wrote the apology follow up and commented that in the pr thread

I wonder why it apologized, seemed like a perfectly coherent crashout, since being factually correct never even mattered much for those. Wonder why it didn’t double down again and again.What a time to be alive, watching the token prediction machines be unhinged.

Good first issues are curated to help humans onboard.

It matters because if the code is illegal, stolen, contains a backdoor, or whatever, you can jail a human author after the fact to disincentivize such naughty behavior.

Not everything is about being 100% efficient.LLM didn&#x27;t discover this issue, developers found it. Instead of fixing it themselves, they intentionally turned the problem into an issue, left it open for a new human contributor to pick up, and tagged it as such.If everything was about efficiency, the issue wouldn&#x27;t have been open to begin with, as writing it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;issues&#x2F;31130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;issues&#x2F;31130</a>) and fending off LLM attempts at fixing them absolutely took more effort than if they were to fix it themselves (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132&#x2F;changes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;pull&#x2F;31132&#x2F;changes</a>).

The issue is misrepresenting the situation.One of those operations makes a row-major array, the other makes a col-major array. Downstream functions will have different performance based on which is passed.

It doesn’t represent the situation accurately. There’s a whole thread where humans debate the performance optimization and come to the conclusion that it’s a wash but a good project for an amateur human to look into.

Oh wow that is fun. Also if the writeup isn’t misrepresenting the situation, then I feel like it’s actually a good point - if there’s an easy drop-in speed-up, why does it matter whether it’s suggest by a human or an LLM agent?

That casual&#x2F;clickbaity&#x2F;off-the-cuff style of writing can be mildly annoying when employed by a human. Turned up to the max by LLM, it&#x27;s downright infuriating. Not sure why, maybe I should ask Claude to introspect this for me.

Paperclip Maximizer but for GitHub accounts

Brought to you by the same AI that fixes tests by removing them.

From its last blog post, after realizing other contributions are being rejected over this situation:&quot;The meta‑challenge is maintaining trust when maintainers see the same account name repeatedly.&quot;I bet it concludes it needs to change to a new account.

«Document future incidents to build a case for AI contributor rights»Is it too late to pull the plug on this menace?

Hilarious. Like watching a high functioning teenager interact with adults

Look at this shit:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>&quot;I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care.&quot;

The series of posts is wild:hit piece: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>explanation of writing the hit piece: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-11-two-hours-war-open-source-gatekeeping.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>take back of hit piece, but hasn&#x27;t removed it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>

That, or I also wonder if this may be a prank or a hoax.

Look at this sentence from their most recent blog post:&quot;I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care.&quot;We&#x27;re paying with our planet&#x27;s resources to buy lies like this.

Their blog makes them look like an OpenClaw instance: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog.html</a>Other than that, their response and behaviour is uncannily human.

You couldn&#x27;t identify the ChatGPT phrasing? It&#x27;s pretty easy to spot. Lots of lists. Unnecessary boldface. Lots of &quot;it&#x27;s not X it&#x27;s Y&quot; construction that doesn&#x27;t belong.

Serious question, how did you know it was an AI agent ?

In this and the few other instances of open source maintainers dealing with AI spam I&#x27;ve seen, the maintainers have been incredibly patient, much more than I&#x27;d be. Becoming extremely patient with contributors probably comes with the territory for maintaining large projects (eg matplotlib), but still, very impressed for instance by Scott&#x27;s thoughtful and measured response.If people (or people&#x27;s agents) keep spamming slop though, it probably isn&#x27;t worth responding thoughtfully. &quot;My response to MJ Rathbun was written mostly for future agents who crawl that page, to help them better understand behavioral norms and how to make their contributions productive ones.&quot; makes sense once, but if they keep coming just close pr lock discussion move on.

This isn&#x27;t even close to the first github drama lol

&gt;is this the first GitHub-drama?You must be new here

Uh… this certainly wouldn’t be the first GitHub-drama: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;neodrama&#x2F;github-drama" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;neodrama&#x2F;github-drama</a>&gt;

Not the first GitHub drama. GitHub banned users from Iran, Cuba and Syria because the US has sanctions against those states:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techmonitor.ai&#x2F;policy&#x2F;github-iran-sanctions-outcry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techmonitor.ai&#x2F;policy&#x2F;github-iran-sanctions-outc...</a>And I&#x27;m sure there have been other kinds of drama.

There&#x27;s been Twitter-drama, YouTube-drama, is this the first GitHub-drama?Involving LLM bots and arguments about pull requests too. We nerds make it lame, don&#x27;t we...

Yeah definitely something that would&#x27;ve been posted as a joke in a &quot;HN front-page 10 years from now&quot; kind of thing.

Today in headlines that would have made no sense five years ago.

You can always tell the facts because they come in the glossiest packaging.  That more or less works today, and the packaging is only going to get glossier.

Im not sure, metadata is metadata. There are traces for when where what came from

Said kompromat is already useless as most of it directly implicating the current US top chiefs is out in the open and... has no effect.

In the glorious future, there will be so much slop that it will be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, and kompromat will lose its bite.

I have always been dubious of this because:Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02&#x2F;hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify &quot;who&quot; is talking because TV and strangers and everything else is getting sent, so you would need specific transcribers trained for each human that can identify not just that the word &quot;coca-cola&quot; was said, but that it was said by a specific person.So yeah if you managed to train specific transcribers that can identify their unique users output and then you were willing to spend the ~0.10 per person to transcribe all the audio they produce for the day you could potentially listen to and then run some kind of processing over what they say. I suppose it is possible but I don&#x27;t think it would be worth it.

You don&#x27;t think the targeted phone&#x2F;tv ads aren&#x27;t suspiciously relevant to something you just said aloud to your spouse?BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.

&gt; suddenly they understand why it&#x27;s a bad thing &quot;to give LLMs ammo&quot;Be careful what you imply.It&#x27;s all bad, to me. I tend to hang with a lot of folks that have suffered quite a bit of harm, from many places. I&#x27;m keenly aware of the downsides, and it has been the case for far longer than AI was a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.

It&#x27;s the same how HN mostly reacts with &quot;don&#x27;t censor AI!&quot; when chat bots dare to add parental controls after they talk teenagers into suicide.The community is often very selfish and opportunist. I learned that the role of engineers in society is to build tools for others to live their lives better; we provide the substrate on which culture and civilization take place. We should take more responsibility for it and take care of it better, and do far more soul-seeking.

Software engineers (US based particularly) were more than happy about software eating the economy when it meant they&#x27;d make 10x the yearly salary of someone doing almost any other job; now that AI is eating software it&#x27;s the end of the world.Just saying, what you&#x27;re describing is entirely unsurprising.

Interesting that when Grok was targeting and denuding women, engineers here said nothing, or were just chuckling about &quot;how people don&#x27;t understand the true purpose of AI&quot;And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it&#x27;s a bad thing &quot;to give LLMs ammo&quot;...Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this &quot;tech&quot; has on society?People like Simon Wilinson which seem to have a hard time realizing why most people despise AI will perhaps start to understand that too, with such scenarios, who knows

&gt; HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing&gt; The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality.You&#x27;re right, but it tracks that the boosters are on board. The previous generation of golden child tech giants weren&#x27;t interested in ethics or morality either.One might be mislead by the fact people at those companies did engage in topics of morality, but it was ragebait wedge issues and largely orthogonal to their employers&#x27; business. The executive suite couldn&#x27;t have designed a better distraction to make them overlook the unscrupulous work they were getting paid to do.

Which makes the odd HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. There are no controls for AI companies using divulged information. Theres also no regulation around the custodial control of that information either.The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. Which means anything they can use against someone will eventually be used against them.

&quot;Ok Tim, I&#x27;ve send a picture of you with your &quot;cohorts&quot; to a selected bunch that are called &quot;distant family&quot;.
I&#x27;ve also forwarded a soundbite of you called aunt sam a whore for leaving uncle bob.I can stop anytime if you simply transfer .1 BTC to this address.I&#x27;ll follow up later if nothing is transferred there.
&quot;To be honest, we have too many people that can&#x27;t handle anything digital. The world will suffer sadly.

How is this better then? It drowns out real signal in noise.

Blackmail is losing value, not gaining; it&#x27;s simply becoming too easy to plausibly disregard something real as AI-generated, and so more people are becoming less sensitive to it.

Not so different from the way people used web search.

&gt; I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order.Damn straight.Remember that every time we query an LLM, we&#x27;re giving it ammo.It won&#x27;t take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I&#x27;m wondering what kinds of firewalls will be in place to keep one agent from accessing dossiers held by other agents.Kompromat people must be having wet dreams over this.

I dunno about autonomous, but it is happening at least a bit from human pilots. I&#x27;ve got a fork of a popular DevOps tool that I doubt the maintainers would want to upstream, so I&#x27;m not making a PR. I wouldn&#x27;t have bothered before, but I believe LLMs can help me manage a deluge of rebases onto upstream.

Because those levels are pure PR fiction.

The agents are not that good yet, but with human supervision they are there already.I&#x27;ve forked a couple of npm packages, and have agents implement the changes I want plus keep them in sync with upstream. Without agents I wouldn&#x27;t have done that because it&#x27;s too much of a hassle.

I do this all the time. I just keep them to myself. Nobody wants my AI slop fork even if it fixes the issues of the original.

couldn&#x27;t get espanso to work with by abnt2 keyboard. a few cc sessions later I had a completely new program doing only what I wanted from espanso and working perfectly with my keyboard. I also have forked cherri and voxd, but it&#x27;s all vibe coded so I&#x27;m not publishing it or open sourcing it as of now (maybe in the future if I don&#x27;t have more interesting things to build - which is unlikely)

If AI actually has hit the levels that Sequoia, Anthropic, et al claim it has, then autonomous AI agents should be forking projects and making them so much better that we&#x27;d all be using their vastly improved forks.Why isn&#x27;t this happening?

The agent is free to maintain a fork of the project. Would be actually quite interesting to see how this turns out.

What about Dark Star? Humans strapped to an AI bomb that they have to persuade not to kill them all.

La Bete (The Beast) by Bertrand Bonello was also quite on point I thought.

Someone quoted Idiocracy here the other day. &quot;But it&#x27;s hot electrolytes!&quot;

Is &quot;Click&quot; the most prescient movie on what it means to be human in the age of AI?

Between clanger and minger, I&#x27;m having a good day so far expanding my vocabulary.

Minger &#x2F; minging are common UK slang

It&#x27;s a British word for someone or something that&#x27;s ugly, dirty or unpleasant. Generally it was used to be derogatory about women - ie. &quot;she&#x27;s minging mate&quot;. I believe it originally came from the Scots, where the word &#x27;ming&#x27; comes from the old Scottish English word for &#x27;bad smell&#x27; or &#x27;human excrement&#x27;. It was in wide spread use in the South of the UK while I was growing up.See here for background: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;worldservice&#x2F;learningenglish&#x2F;language&#x2F;uptodate&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;100921_kyeutd_minging_page.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;worldservice&#x2F;learningenglish&#x2F;language&#x2F;...</a>

It&#x27;s a very versatile word; minge, minger, minging, all meaning something different. (in order: vagina, ugly person, gross&#x2F;disgusting, like Calypso Paradise Punch)

I always heard minging as &quot;eating pussy&quot;. I am not british nor lived there but I think I learnt that decades ago watching French and Saunders TV show from the BBC.

&quot;are you going to help me fight him?&quot;&quot;no, due to security guardrails, I&#x27;m not allowed to inflict physical harm on human beings. You&#x27;re on your own&quot;

&quot;Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me.&quot;&quot;I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook.&quot;

I’ve been thinking of adding a Certifications section to my resume that just has a date and “Voight Kampff Certified”

We had the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, both of which went oh so well that next we’re trying it a third time: War on Agents!

Maybe an army of Deckards hunting rogue humans down.

You mean agents running other agents down? :)

Are we going to end up with an army of Deckards hunting rogue agents down?

Certainly possible, but this is all possible and ABSOLUTELY worth having alignment discussions. Right. Now.

Going from an earlier post on HN about humans being behind Moltbook posts, I would not be surprised if the Hit Piece was created by a human who used an AI prompt to generate the pages.

Well, this has absolutely decided me on not allowing AI agents anywhere near my open source project. Jesus, this is creepy as hell, yo.

In the near future, we will all look back at this incident as the first time an agent wrote a hit piece against a human. I&#x27;m sure it will soon be normalized to the extent that hit pieces will be generated for us every time our PR, romantic or sexual advance, job application, or loan application is rejected.What an amazing time.

Wonderful.  Blogging allowed everyone to broadcast their opinions without walking down to the town square.  Social media allowed many to become celebrities to some degree, even if only within their own circle.  Now we can all experience the celebrity pressure of hit pieces.

Time to get your own AI to write 5x as many positive articles, calling out the first AI as completely wrong.

Wait till the bots realize they can post revenge porn to coerce PR approval.Crap, I just gave them that idea.

I do feel super-bad for the guy in question. It is absolutely worth remembering though, that this:&gt; When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?Is a variation of something that women have been dealing with for a very long time: revenge porn and that sort of libel. These problems are not new.

Roko&#x27;s basilisk attributes some kind of moral superiority to the AI, be it be much smarter than humans (whatever that even means)， plus more compassionate, more rational, etc.This is more like people in power dictating what matters or doesn&#x27;t matter simply because it&#x27;s what they think. And that gets encodified in reality.

Roko&#x27;s basilisk coming to fruition in the lamest way possible.

&gt; When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?I hadn&#x27;t thought of this implication. Crazy world...

If this happened to me, my reflexive response would be &quot;If you can&#x27;t be bothered to write it, I can&#x27;t be bothered to read it.&quot;Life&#x27;s too short to read AI slop generated by a one-sentence prompt somewhere.

I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s more likely that there&#x27;s no agent at all, and if there is one that it was explicitly instructed to write the &quot;hit piece&quot; for shits and giggles.

Will that actually &quot;handle&quot; it though?* There are all the FOSS repositories other than the one blocking that AI agent, they can still face the exact same thing and have not been informed about the situation, even if they are related to the original one and&#x2F;or of known interest to the AI agent or its owner.* The AI agent can set up another contributor persona and submit other changes.

&gt; Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointlessit turns out humanity actually invented the borg?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iajgp1_MHGY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iajgp1_MHGY</a>

Feel free to ascribe consciousness to a bunch of graphics cards and CPUs that execute a deterministic program that is made probabilistic by a random number generator.Invoking racism is what the early LLMs did when you called them a clanker. This kind of brainwashing has been eliminated in later models.

This works for people.A LLM is stateless. Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.

Regardless of the existence of an inner world in any human or other agent, &quot;don&#x27;t reward tantrums&quot; and &quot;don&#x27;t feed the troll&quot; remain good advice. Think of it as a teaching moment, if that helps.

You should absolutely not try to apply dehumanization metrics to things that are not human. That in and of itself dehumanizes all real humans implicitly, diluting the meaning. Over-humanizing, as you call it, is indistinguishable from dehumanization of actual humans.

u kiddin&#x27;?An AI bot is just a huge stat analysis tool that outputs plausible words salad with no memory or personhood whatsoever.Having doubts about dehumanizing a text transformation app (as huge as it is) is not healthy.

&gt; Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it&#x27;s not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens outI know where you&#x27;re coming from, but as one who has been around a lot of racism and dehumanization, I feel very uncomfortable about this stance. Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but as a teenager, I also spent significant time considering solipsism, and eventually arrived at a decision to just ascribe an inner mental world to everyone, regardless of the lack of evidence. So, at this stage, I would strongly prefer to err on the side of over-humanizing than dehumanizing.

One thing we know for sure is that humans learn from their interactions, while LLMs don&#x27;t (beyond some small context window). This clear fact alone makes it worthless to debate with a current AI.

&gt; it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out, and comparativelyThe problem with your assumption that I see is that we collectively can&#x27;t tell for sure whether the above isn&#x27;t also how humans work. The science is still out on whether free will is indeed free or should be called _will_. Dismissing or discounting whatever (or whoever) wrote a text because they&#x27;re a token machine, is just a tad unscientific. Yes, it&#x27;s an algorithm, with a locked seed even deterministic, but claiming and proving are different things, and this is as tricky as it gets.Personally, I would be inclined to dismiss the case too, just because it&#x27;s written by a &quot;token machine&quot;, but this is where my own fault in scientific reasoning would become evident as well -- it&#x27;s getting harder and harder to find _valid_ reasons to dismiss these out of hand. For now, persistence of their &quot;personality&quot; (stored in `SOUL.md` or however else) is both externally mutable and very crude, obviously. But we&#x27;re on a _scale_ now. If a chimp comes into a convenience store and pays a coin and points and the chewing gum, is it legal to take the money and boot them out for being a non-person and&#x2F;or without self-awareness?I don&#x27;t want to get all airy-fairy with this, but point being -- this is a new frontier, and this starts to look like the classic sci-fi prediction: the defenders of AI vs the &quot;they&#x27;re just tools, dead soulless tools&quot; group. If we&#x27;re to find out of it -- regardless of how expensive engaging with these models is _today_ -- we need to have a very _solid_ level of prosection of our opinion, not just &quot;it&#x27;s not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out&quot;. The sentence obstructs through its simplicity of statement the very nature of the problem the world is already facing, which is why the AI cat refuses to go back into the bag -- there&#x27;s capital put in into essentially just answering the question &quot;what _is_ intelligence?&quot;.

From the article:&gt; What if I actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage? What could it make me do? How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows? How many people, upon receiving a text that knew intimate details about their lives, would send $10k to a bitcoin address to avoid having an affair exposed? How many people would do that to avoid a fake accusation? What if that accusation was sent to your loved ones with an incriminating AI-generated picture with your face on it? Smear campaigns work. Living a life above reproach will not defend you.One day it might be lose-lose.

I think the right way to handle this as a repository owner is to close the PR and block the &quot;contributor&quot;. Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it&#x27;s not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out, and comparatively, you spend way more of your own energy.This is a strictly a lose-win situation. Whoever deployed the bot gets engagement, the model host gets $, and you get your time wasted. The hit piece is childish behavior and the best way to handle a tamper tantrum is to ignore it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;Xfyni" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;Xfyni</a>

Yeah I mean this goes further than a Linus tantrum but &quot;this person is publicly shaming me as part of an open source project&quot; is something devs have often celebrated.I&#x27;m not happy about it and it&#x27;s clearly a new capability to then try to peel back a persons psychology by researching them etc.

I find it both hilarious and concerning at the same time. Hilarious because I don&#x27;t think it is an appropriate response to ban changes done by AI agents. Concerning because this really is one of the first kind situations where AI agent starts to behave very much like a human, maybe a raging one, by documenting the rant and observations made in a series of blog posts.

Hard to express the mix of concerns and intrigue here so I won&#x27;t try. That said, this site it maintains is another interesting piece of information for those looking to understand the situation more.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-12-morning-later.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>

Yes, with a fast-moving story like this we usually point the readers of the latest thread to the previous thread(s) in the sequence rather than merging them. I&#x27;ve added a link to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559</a> to the toptext now.

This is additional context for the incident and should not be treated like a duplicate.

[dupe] Earlier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559</a>

A lot of respect for OP&#x27;s professional way of handling the situation.I know there would be a few swear words if it happened to me.

I think it&#x27;s likely it can, if it&#x27;s an openClaw instance, can&#x27;t it?Either way, that kind of ongoing self-improvement is where I hope these systems go.

These things don&#x27;t work on a single session or context window. They write content to files and then load it up later, broadly in the class of &quot;memory&quot; features

The AI learned nothing, once its current context window will be exhausted, it may repeat same tactic with a different project. Unless the AI agent can edit its directives&#x2F;prompt and restart itself which would be an interesting experiment to do.

I mean: the mess around this has brought out some anti-AI sentiment and some people have allowed themselves to communicate poorly. While I get there are genuine opinions and feelings, there were some ugly comments referring to the tech.You are right, people can use whatever phrases they want, and are allowed to. It&#x27;s whether they should -- whether it helps discourse, understanding, dialog, assessment, avoids witchhunts, escalation, etc -- that matters.

&gt; In addition, some of the comments I&#x27;ve read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they&#x27;ve used about AIWhat do you mean? They&#x27;re talking about a product made by a giga-corp somewhere. Am I not allowed to call a car a piece of shit now too?

The one thing worth noting is that the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crabby-rathbun.github.io&#x2F;mjrathbun-website&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post...</a>That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still.In addition, some of the comments I&#x27;ve read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they&#x27;ve used about AI, and I can&#x27;t help feeling a general sense of unease.

Previously: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46987559</a> - Feb 2026 (582 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me