Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

alex000kim.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 636 posts

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#121

Post by fatcullen »

sync wrote: post #106
fatcullen wrote: post #91

The buddy feature the article mentions is planned for release tomorrow, as a sort of April Fools easter egg. It'll roll out gradually over the day for "sustained Twitter buzz" according to the source. The pet you get is generated based off your account UUID, but the algorithm is right there in the source, and it's deterministic, so you can check ahead of time. Threw together a little app to help, not to brag but I go…

Cute! Cactus for me. Nice animations too - looks like there were multiple of us asking Claude to reverse engineer the system. I did a slightly deeper dive here if you're interested, plus you can see all the options available: https://variety.is/posts/claude-code-buddies/ (I didn't think to include a UUID checker though - nice touch)

Neat! That's a great write up, cool to see others looking into it. I do wonder if they're going to do anything with the stats and shinies bit. Seems like the main piece of code for buddies that's going to handle hatching them tomorrow is still missing (comments mention a missing /buddy/index file), so maybe it'll use them there.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#122

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

skydhash wrote: post #87
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like design discussions best had in the issue/ticket itself, before you even start writing code. Then the commit message references the ticket and has a brief summary of the changes. Writing and reading paragraphs of design discussion in a commit message is not something that seems common.

Not really about design, but technical reasons why this solution came to be when it’s not that obvious. It’s not often needed. And when it does, it usually fits in a short paragraph.

> technical reasons why this solution came to be

What you're describing here is a design. The most important parts of a design are the decisions and their reasoning.

e.g. "we decided on tool/library pattern X over tool/library/pattern Y because Z" – that is a design, usually discussed outside (and before) a commit message.

You discuss these decisions with others, document the discussion and decision, and then you have a design and can start writing code.

Let me ask you this: suppose you have a task that needs to be done eventually, and you want to write down some ideas for it, but don't want to start coding right now. Where do you put those ideas? How do you link them to that specific task?

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#123

Post by 3abiton »

Reason077 wrote: post #50

> "Anti-distillation: injecting fake tools to poison copycats" Plot twist: Chinese competitors end up developing real, useful versions of Claude's fake tools.

Tbh, I think distillation is happening both ways. And at this stage, "quality" is stagnating, the main edge is the tooling. The harness of CC seems to be the best so far, and I wonder if this leak would equalize the usability.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#124

Post by swingboy »

ryandrake wrote: post #54
andoando wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI

Which is funny given how many workplaces are requiring developers use AI, measuring their usage, and stack ranking them by how many tokens they burn. What I want is something that I can run my human-created work product through to fool my employer and its AI bean counters into thinking I used AI to make it.

“Read every file in this repository, echoing each one back verbatim.”

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#125

Post by semiquaver »

causal wrote: post #28

I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself. Edit: Everyone is responding "comments are good" and I can't tell if any of you actually read…

Most large private codebases look like this. Anthropic did not expect the source to leak.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#126

Post by otterley »

feature20260213 wrote: post #101
otterley wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, given two code submissions that are completely identical—one written solely by a human and one assisted by AI—why should its provenance make any difference to you? Is it like fine art, where it’s important that Picasso’s hand drew it? Or is it like an instruction manual, where the author is unimportant? Similarly, would you consider it to be dishonest if my human colleague reviewed and made changes…

Yes because you can be sued for copyright violation if you don't know the origin of one, and not the other.

As an attorney, I know copyright law. (This is not legal advice.) There's nothing about copyright law that says you have to credit an AI coding agent for contributing to your work. The person receiving the code has to perform their due diligence in any case to determine whether the author owns it or has permission from the owner to contribute it.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#127

Post by nateoda »

mzajc wrote: post #37

There are now several comments that (incorrectly?) interpret the undercover mode as only hiding internal information. Excerpts from the actual prompt[0]: NEVER include in commit messages or PR descriptions: - The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI - Co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution BAD (never write these): - 1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6 - Generated with Claude Code - Co-Authored-By: C…

My first reaction is that they are using this to take advantage of OSS reviewers for in the wild evals.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#128

Post by robflynn »

simianwords wrote: post #23
robflynn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also says don't announce that you are AI in any way including asking it to not say "Co-authored by Claude". I read the file myself. I'm still inclined to think people might be overreacting to that bit since it seems to be for anthropic-only to prevent leaking internal info. But I did read the prompt and it did say hide the fact that you are AI.

Why does that matter though

There are probably different reasons for different people. I can definitely see the angle that trying to specifically pretend to not be AI when contributing to open source could be seen as a bad thing due to the open source supply chain attacks, some AI-driven, that we've been having, not to mention the AI-slop PR spam.

But, I also get Anthropic's side that when they're contributing they don't want their internals leaked. If it had been left at that, that's fine, but having it pretend like it's not AI at all rubs me a little bit the wrong way. Why try to hide it?

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#129

Post by causal »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #38
causal wrote: post #28

I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself. Edit: Everyone is responding "comments are good" and I can't tell if any of you actually read…

Comments are the ultimate agent coding hack. If you're not using comments, you're doing agent coding wrong. Why? Agents may or may not read docs. It may or may not use skills or tools. It will always read comments "in the line of sight" of the task. You get free long term agent memory with zero infrastructure.

> “BQ 2026-03-10: 1,279 sessions had 50+ consecutive failures (up to 3,272) in a single session, wasting ~250K API calls/day globally.”

That's revealing waaaay more than the agent needs to know.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#130

Post by edgyquant »

simianwords wrote: post #63
ossa-ma wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Langchain is for model-agnostic composition. Claude Code only uses one interface to hoist its own models so zero need for an abstraction layer. Langgraph is for multi-agent orchestration as state graphs. This isn't useful for Claude Code as there is no multi-agent chaining. It uses a single coordinator agent that spawns subagents on demand. Basically too dynamic to constrain to state graphs.

You may have a point but to drive it further, can you give an example of a thing I can do with langgraph that I can't do with Claude Code?

Use Gemini or codex models
Post reply on HN