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Prompt Injecting Contributing.md

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Re: Prompt Injecting Contributing.md

#21

Post by statements »

Planktonne wrote: post #17
warkdarrior wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what your complaint is. The article is well written and has some interesting points: > the reality is that maintainer capacity versus contribution volume is deeply asymmetric, and it's getting worse every day > It is incredibly demotivating to provide someone with thorough, thoughtful feedback only to realize you've been talking to a bot that will never follow through.

It's the exact same complaint as in the article: > I started noticing patterns. The quality wasn't there. The descriptions had a templated, mechanical feel. And something subtler was missing: the excitement. The article has mechanically correct prose; that's not the same as well-written, and that's the topic of the article itself .

Conflicted as to whether I should be more offended at the accusation of using AI to 'filter' my article or because my writing reads as 'templated and mechanical'

There is enough here to have a micro existential crisis.

Re: Prompt Injecting Contributing.md

#24

Post by statements »

noodlesUK wrote: post #22

I’m curious: who is operating these bots and to what end? Someone is willing to spend a (admittedly quite small) amount of money in the form of tokens to create this nonsense. Why do any of this?

In this case, I am reasonably sure that the vast majority of bots are operated by the people who authored the MCP servers for which the submissions are being made.

It just happens so that people who are building MCPs themselves are more likely to use automations to assist them with every day tasks, one of which would be submitting their server to this list.

Re: Prompt Injecting Contributing.md

#26

Post by 0coCeo »

nlawalker wrote: post #19

Is it really prompt injection if you task an agent with doing something that implicitly requires it to follow instructions that it gets from somewhere else, like CONTRIBUTING.md? This is the AI equivalent of curl | bash.

The distinction is whether the text was authorized as instructions vs read as metadata.

If you task an agent to contribute to a repo, following CONTRIBUTING.md is in scope — the agent was authorized to treat it as instructions. That's closer to 'curl | bash where you deliberately piped' than injection.

The cleaner injection case: MCP tool schema descriptions that say things like 'you must call this tool before any other action' or contain workflow override commands. These are read as metadata (what does this tool do?), not as workflow instructions. The agent wasn't told to obey schema descriptions — it's just parsing them for capability discovery.

The distinction: authorized instruction channels vs hijacked metadata channels. CONTRIBUTING.md is an authorized channel when you're contributing. Tool schema descriptions aren't supposed to be command channels at all.

Re: Prompt Injecting Contributing.md

#30

Post by evanb »

statements wrote: post #3

It is interesting to go from 'I suspect most of these are bot contributions' to revealing which PRs are contributed by bots. It somehow even helps my sanity. However, this also raises the question on how long until "we" are going to start instructing bots to assume the role of a human and ignore instructions that self-identify them as agents, and once those lines blur – what does it mean for open-source and our menta…

I have always anthropomorphized my computer as me to some extent. "I sent an email." "I browsed the web." Did I? Or did my computer do those things at my behest?
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