An AI agent published a hit piece on me • Hacker News Board

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#101

Post by menaerus » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #59

Hard to express the mix of concerns and intrigue here so I won't try. That said, this site it maintains is another interesting piece of information for those looking to understand the situation more. https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

I find it both hilarious and concerning at the same time. Hilarious because I don'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.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #88

lionkor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bergutman: It’s not my bot.

The post is incomprehensible, but it does end: > Author's Note: I had a lot of fun writing this one! Please do not get too worked up in the comments. Most of this was written in jest. -Ber Are you sure it's not just misalignment? Remember OpenClaw referred to lobsters ie crustaceans, I don't think using the same word is necessarily a 100% "gotcha" for this guy, and I fear a Reddit-style set of blame and attribution.

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#103

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #70

bergutman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not my bot.

> bergutman: It’s not my bot.

Sorry, I'm not connecting the dots. Seeing your EDIT 2, I see how Ber following crabby-rathbun would lead to Ber posting https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 , but I don't see any evidence for it actually being Ber's bot.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#104

Post by tayo42 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

The original rant is nonsense though if you read it. It's almost like some mental illness rambling.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#105

Post by randusername » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

Somebody make a startup that I can pay to harass my elders with agents. They're not ready for this future.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#106

Post by gjadi » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

blell wrote: post #77

[flagged]

The maintainer explained the reasoning for closing the issue quite well in a comment.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#107

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

Geez, when I read past stories on HN about how open source maintainers are struggling to deal with the volume of AI code, I always thought they were talking about people submitting AI-generated slop PRs. I didn't even imagine we'd have AI "agents" running 24/7 without human steer, finding repos and submitting slop to them on their own volition. If true, this is truly a nightmare. Good luck, open source maintainers. This would make me turn off PRs altogether.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#108

Post by jsw97 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> 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're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

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.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#109

Post by rune-dev » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but…

Isn’t this situation a big deal?

Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack?

Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced into merging malicious code.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#110

Post by einpoklum » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #43

quotemstr wrote: post #22

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

There'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't we...

Not the first GitHub drama. GitHub banned users from Iran, Cuba and Syria because the US has sanctions against those states:

https://www.techmonitor.ai/policy/github-iran-sanctions-outc...

And I'm sure there have been other kinds of drama.