Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#1

Post by offbyone42 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:40 AM UTC

Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code
droppedasbaby.com

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#2

Post by ihaveajob » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

Congratulations! Mine was intentional, back in college, where all PCs had open telnet in order to facilitate cooperation. We discovered it was easy to seize someone's computer for a while, and then watch them look around for the culprit, which we thought was hilarious. Boy were we annoying.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#3

Post by siruwastaken » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

The realization that even badly running code is still faster than the average human is rather terrifying. Lucky you that it hogs so much RAM.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#4

Post by robshippr » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#5

Post by hnlmorg » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC

My first ever fork bomb was in the 90s, running Microsoft own example code for OLE (or was it COM?).

That was a great early lesson to never trust code you read online. Even if it is from Microsoft’s own developer portal.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#6

Post by offbyone42 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

ihaveajob wrote: post #2

Congratulations! Mine was intentional, back in college, where all PCs had open telnet in order to facilitate cooperation. We discovered it was easy to seize someone's computer for a while, and then watch them look around for the culprit, which we thought was hilarious. Boy were we annoying.

How did you not get caught??!?

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#7

Post by Jeremy1026 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#8

Post by 331c8c71 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:43 PM UTC

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #7

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

Exponential productivity gains?;)

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#9

Post by awesome_dude » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #7

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

I don't know about the author, but I recently saw an article where the author of Claude code apparently spins up multiple instances at once (note that it could have just been a marketing ploy to get people to use more tokens)

https://www.xda-developers.com/set-up-claude-code-like-boris...

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#10

Post by offbyone42 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #7

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

I have a `SessionEnd` hook that summarizes the conversation with a bunch of metadata, but it doesn't always fire 'cause of my habits.

So, the `SessionStart` hook was meant to catch any conversation where the `SessionEnd` hook wasn't fired.

Edit: I do realize a batch job is better. That's what I do now.