Software Pump and Dump

1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.

2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#6

Post by behnamoh » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#7

Post by nkrisc » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?

I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#8

Post by piker » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:53 AM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #6

Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like cont…

Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#9

Post by macmac_mac » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:53 AM UTC

FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:

some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,

a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,

people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,

a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.

Re: Software Pump and Dump

#10

Post by andOlga » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

smcin wrote: post #2

Webpage is down for me?

Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.