We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's

We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#1

Post by ildari » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
archestra.ai

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#2

Post by ildari » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

Hi HN community, I wanted to share our approach to reduce amount of AI slop PR's and issues in our repo. We enabled "require prior contribution" flag on GH and created a CI script that creates a tiny commit co-authored with you, if you pass captcha on our website. Worked really well and we were able to block at least 500 bots in the first week. Sharing a screenshot from cloudflare: https://archestra.ai/hn-comment-cloudflare-challenge-outcome...

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#3

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

ildari wrote: post #2

Hi HN community, I wanted to share our approach to reduce amount of AI slop PR's and issues in our repo. We enabled "require prior contribution" flag on GH and created a CI script that creates a tiny commit co-authored with you, if you pass captcha on our website. Worked really well and we were able to block at least 500 bots in the first week. Sharing a screenshot from cloudflare: https://archestra.ai/hn-comment-clo…

Yep, this is similar to some other version control tools like Tangled which has vouching.

https://blog.tangled.org/vouching/

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#4

Post by tln » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

ildari wrote: post #2

Hi HN community, I wanted to share our approach to reduce amount of AI slop PR's and issues in our repo. We enabled "require prior contribution" flag on GH and created a CI script that creates a tiny commit co-authored with you, if you pass captcha on our website. Worked really well and we were able to block at least 500 bots in the first week. Sharing a screenshot from cloudflare: https://archestra.ai/hn-comment-clo…

Thats a really elegant solution.

How does the website trigger the CI script? Through GH rest API?

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#5

Post by silverwind » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#6

Post by zer0tonin » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

> Should we stop giving fun test tasks to our job candidates?

Yes

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#7

Post by maryamshafaqat » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#8

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

zer0tonin wrote: post #6

> Should we stop giving fun test tasks to our job candidates? Yes

[deleted]

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#9

Post by ildari » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

tln wrote: post #4

ildari wrote: post #2

Hi HN community, I wanted to share our approach to reduce amount of AI slop PR's and issues in our repo. We enabled "require prior contribution" flag on GH and created a CI script that creates a tiny commit co-authored with you, if you pass captcha on our website. Worked really well and we were able to block at least 500 bots in the first week. Sharing a screenshot from cloudflare: https://archestra.ai/hn-comment-clo…

Thats a really elegant solution. How does the website trigger the CI script? Through GH rest API?

thank you, yep through the rest API, here is the example: https://github.com/archestra-ai/website/blob/29ebdacbd8a22b9...

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#10

Post by hiccuphippo » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

The irony of the .ai domain.