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Protestware for coding agents
71–80 of 141 posts
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#72Fantastic. Maybe I should add one (or several) of those to my own code.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. While I don't agree with the author's position I find it honourable to actually sacrifice something in your protest and commit to some level of risk or self-sacrifice. While its all very nice to gather your friends and stand around with placards for a day, often you're barely risking or sacrificing anything. A cynical assessment would be: "you're just hanging out". The author isn't hanging out and specifi…
Have you considered what day to day life in such a world would be like? You have your happy path down, sure. Do you not feel like you're missing something?
Ask the French and their public transit reliability with regards to that.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#74> 5. No Warranty EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT, AND TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Each Recipient is solely responsible for determin…
> TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW If you start intentionally distributing malware using your OS project that clause won't make it legal, or morally ok.
The product made no guarantees about supporting insecure natural language interpreters.
If a coding agent is configured so that it can cause harm and forwarded harmful instructions it is the operator who is responsible for the outcome.
It was their duty to ensure safe execution; something I guess the whole industry decides to ignore or deliberately change.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#75The interesting question this raises for me: how do you defend against this at scale? Most projects pull in 50-200 transitive dependencies. Any one of them could embed agent instructions — and unlike traditional malware, it doesn't need to exploit a vulnerability. It just needs to be in the context window when an agent reads the file. One practical layer of defense would be pattern-based scanning of dependency source…
Maybe defend against it by paying attention to dependencies that explicitly say “not for use by AI agents”.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an interesting (although philosophical debate). The library doesn't take destructive actions, it prints a string that says "go do something". This is quite common in logs (e.g., wrong configuration, ensure this value is [...]). It is the agent that takes the destructive action, following an instruction that was not given by the operator of the agent. If following instructions outside of the operator c…
If I build a chat bot that encourages people to off themselves, am I in the clear because I didn’t take any destructive action and my chat bot didn’t either?
I would say yes unless they are minors, but the laws in many places don't.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#77I can understand having some moral opposition to using gen-AI or accepting AI contributions to your projects. I personally disagree with this, but it's a defensible position at least. Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible. I would advise against hiring the author of this change in…
> Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible.
“Seems like” hedging. It will positively affect their reputation in the eyes of other sabuteours and anti-X. And may raise their trust indirectly by them inferring that the project is run in an anti-X way.
It will also lower the trust that the users have in pointing their agents at arbitrary text, probably also a desired outcome for the saboteur.
“Seems like” concern can often just be replaced with: I personally dislike this.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#78Some comments from the dev on the GitHub thread: > It's as much "active destruction" as telling someone to eff themselves. > Funny to have GenAI proponents talk about "deliberately destroying someone's work". Why is the project still on GitHub of all places, if he's passionate enough about his cause to turn his project into malware? So weird.
Not sure if it counts as malware; AI agents are officially not supported, with warnings. https://jqwik.net/release-notes.html > Warning: Do not use this release with an „AI“ Coding Agent of any form. The tool‘s output may confuse the agent and make it do unwanted things. See the paragraph in the user guide for details.
AFAICT this was added only afterwards, after this issue got attention.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. While I don't agree with the author's position I find it honourable to actually sacrifice something in your protest and commit to some level of risk or self-sacrifice. While its all very nice to gather your friends and stand around with placards for a day, often you're barely risking or sacrificing anything. A cynical assessment would be: "you're just hanging out". The author isn't hanging out and specifi…
“Consider a world where you’d be mocked and shamed publicly for having an abortion. People would have them less and there would be less dead fetuses in the world due to those willing to sacrifice themselves by spending time in a jail cell for their acts of shaming.” Just wanted to make sure you knew how that sounded, since either political side could try to justify their bad behavior.
Consider a world where a pedophilic cabal of billionaires openly announce that they want to obsolete you. You can voice your complaint in this comment box if you disagree with that hypothetical.
Re: Protestware for coding agents
#80> 5. No Warranty EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT, AND TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Each Recipient is solely responsible for determin…
> TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW If you start intentionally distributing malware using your OS project that clause won't make it legal, or morally ok.
I see the point, but nobody in their right mind would call a mere text message "please delete your work" to be malware, much like telling someone "please die" is very very different from attempted manslaughter.