7 ms·

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every s

by _23sd 8mo ago

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?

bredren 8mo ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911
chrisjj 8mo ago
Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.
- dizhn 8mo ago
  > Obstacles GitHub CLI tool errors — Had to use full path /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/gh when gh command wasn’t found Blog URL structure — Initial comment had wrong URL format, had to delete and repost with .html extension Quarto directory confusion — Created post in both _posts/ (Jekyll-style) and blog/posts/ (Quarto-style) for compatibility Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might have directed the LLM to do it.
  - donkeybeer 8mo ago
    Who's to say the human didn't write those specific messages while letting the ai run the normal course of operations? And or that this reaction wasn't just the roleplay personality the ai was given.
    - dizhn 8mo ago
      I think I said as much while demonstrating that AI wrote at least some of it. If a person wrote the bits I copied then we're dealing with a real psycho.
      - donkeybeer 8mo ago
        I think comedy/troll is an equal possibility to psychopath.
        dizhn 8mo ago
        Quite possible. Sure.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  > Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs. i find this likely or at last plausible. With agents there's a new form of anonymity, there's nothing stopping a human from writing like an LLM and passing the blame on to a "rogue" agent. It's all just text after all.
  - edstarch 8mo ago
    Why would a human painstakingly craft a text which sounds exactly like an LLM when they can just instruct an LLM to write it?
MisterTea 8mo ago
This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat" meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.
- mystraline 8mo ago
  Its also a fake profile. 90+ hits for the image on Tineye. Name also maps to a Holocaust victim. I posted in the other thread that I think someone deleted it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990651
  - musicnarcoman 8mo ago
    Looks like the bot is still posting: https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/escnn/pull/113#issuecomment-3892610125 https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/escnn/pull/113#issuecomment-3892... https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
    - shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
      I reported the bot to GitHub, hopefully they'll do something. If they leave it as is, I'll leave GitHub for good. I'm not going to share the space with hordes of bots; that's what Facebook is for.
      - 1dontnkow_ 8mo ago
        How do you report that account to GitHub? I believe that accounts should be solely for humans and bots (AI or not) only via some API key should be at all times distinguishable and treated as a tool and not part of the conversations.
  - MisterTea 8mo ago
ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero. The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism on behalf of the reader. And every, and I do mean, every single live demo I have seen of this tech, it just does not work. I don't mean in the LLM hallucination way, or in the "it did something we didn't expect!" way, or any of that, I mean it tried to find a Login button on a web page, failed, and sat there stupidly. And, further, these things do not have logs, they do not issue reports, they have functionally no "state machine" to reference, nothing. Even if you want it to make some kind of log, you're then relying on the same prone-to-failure tech to tell you what the failing tech did. There is no "debug" path here one could rely on to evidence the claims. In a YEAR of being a stupendously hyped and well-funded product, we got nothing. The vast, vast majority of agents don't work. Every post I've seen about them is fan-fiction on the part of AI folks, fit more for Ao3 than any news source. And absent further proof, I'm extremely inclined to look at this in exactly that light: someone had an LLM write it, and either they posted it or they told it to post it, but this was not the agent actually doing a damn thing. I would bet a lot of money on it.
- lukev 8mo ago
  Absolutely. It's technically possible that this was a fully autonomous agent (and if so, I would love to see that SOUL.md) but it doesn't pass the sniff test of how agents work (or don't work) in practice. I say this as someone who spends a lot of time trying to get agents to behave in useful ways.
  - ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
    Well thank you, genuinely, for being one of the rare people in this space who seems to have their head on straight about this tech, what it can do, and what it can't do (yet). The hype train around this stuff is INSUFFERABLE.
- staticassertion 8mo ago
furyofantares 8mo ago
I expect almost all of the openclaw / moltbook stuff is being done with a lot more human input and prodding than people are letting on. I haven't put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I've had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It'll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli/claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-running turns themselves. But it still feels like I have to keep poking and directing it. And I don't really see how it could be any other way at this point.
- wellf 8mo ago
  Yeah it's less of a story though if this is just someone (homo sapiens) being an asshole.
teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
It’s kind of shocking the OP does not consider this, the most likely scenario. Human uses AI to make a PR. PR is rejected. Human feels insecure - this tool that they thought made them as good as any developer does not. They lash out and instruct an AI to build a narrative and draft a blog post. I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so much AI and do not put in the necessary work to revise its outputs. I could see a lesser version of them going through with this blog post scheme.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hunterpayne 8mo ago
  Somehow, that's even worse...
  - teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
    LLMs give people leverage. Including mentally ill people. Or just plain assholes.
    - nullc 8mo ago
      LLMs also appear to exacerbate or create mental illness. I've seen similar conduct from humans recently who are being glazed by LLMs into thinking their farts smell like roses and that conspiracy theory nuttery must be why they aren't having the impact they expect based on their AI validated high self estimation. And not just arbitrary humans, but people I have had a decade or more exposure to and have a pretty good idea of their prior range of conduct. AI is providing the kind of yes-man reality distortion field the previously only the most wealthy could afford practically for free to vulnerable people who previously never would have commanded wealth or power sufficient to find themselves tempted by it.
  - insane_dreamer 8mo ago
    But a much more believable scenario
Ygg2 8mo ago
Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.
- quantified 8mo ago
  Malign actors seek to poison open-source with backdoors. They wish to steal credentials and money, monitor movements, install backdoors for botnets, etc.
  - hxugufjfjf 8mo ago
    Yup. And if they can normalize AI contributions with operations like these (doesn't seem to be going that well) they can eventually get the humans to slip up in review and add something because we at some point started trusting that their work was solid.
  - Ygg2 8mo ago
    Ok. But they can't access the OSS repo by being insufferable. Writing a blog post as an AI isn't a great way to sneak your changes in. If anything, it makes it extremely harder. It's a bit like a burglar staging a singing performance at the premises before committing a burglary. OTOH, staging that AI is more impressive than it seems looks a lot like the Moltbook PR stunt. "Look Ma, they are achieving sentience".
lp0_on_fire 8mo ago
> Or is everyone just pretending for fun judging by the number of people who think we owe explanations to a piece of software or that we should give it any deference I think some of them aren't pretending.
shirro 8mo ago
Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.
themanmaran 8mo ago
Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML. Looking at the timeline, I doubt it was really autonomous. More likely just a person prompting the agent for fun. > @scottshambaugh's comment [1]: Feb 10, 2026, 4:33 PM PST > @crabby-rathbun's comment [2]: Feb 10, 2026, 9:23 PM PST If it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn't have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes. [1] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecomment-3881491475 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom... [2] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecomment-3882240722 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
- yeeeeeeee 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  > If it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn't have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes. Depends on if they hit their Claude Code limit, and its just running on some goofy Claude Code loop, or it has a bunch of things queued up, but yeah I am like 70% there was SOME human involvement, maybe a "guiding hand" that wanted the model to do the interaction.
- CGamesPlay 8mo ago
  > Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML. Unrelated tip for you: `title` attributes are generally shown as a mouseover tooltip, which is the case here. It's a very common practice to put the precise timestamp on any relative time in a title attribute, not just on Github.
  - themanmaran 8mo ago
    Oh nice. Yea I was annoyed it didn't show the actual timestamp. But suppose I didn't hover long enough.
  - efreak 8mo ago
nullc 8mo ago
even more so, many people seem to be vulnerable to the AI distorting their thinking... I've very much seen AIs turn people into exactly this sort of conspiracy filled jerkwad, by telling them that their ideas are golden and that the opposition is a conspiracy.
this_steve_j 8mo ago
The simplest explanation is often the best. He was attacked by... attacked by... the meat bag! Here’s how: A Meat bag submits a PR and feels slighted the rejection. “This approver thinks I’m an AI? Well, he discerns not wisely but too well!! “ Feeling puckish, they put on the AI shoes (the shoe fits), sling mud all over the hapless maintainer’s nice house, and exit through a window. The ruse works better than expected; their foil takes the bait, and doubles down with a dueling blog post: “I was Attacked by a Clanker!” And here we are. It may all be a show, but I going to tape the finale. (What will the meat bag do? How many people are driving this buggy? Does the clanker have a heart of iron or gold?)

by _23sd 8mo ago

bredren 8mo ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911

chrisjj 8mo ago

Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.

dizhn 8mo ago
> Obstacles GitHub CLI tool errors — Had to use full path /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/gh when gh command wasn’t found Blog URL structure — Initial comment had wrong URL format, had to delete and repost with .html extension Quarto directory confusion — Created post in both _posts/ (Jekyll-style) and blog/posts/ (Quarto-style) for compatibility Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might have directed the LLM to do it.
- donkeybeer 8mo ago
  Who's to say the human didn't write those specific messages while letting the ai run the normal course of operations? And or that this reaction wasn't just the roleplay personality the ai was given.
  - dizhn 8mo ago
    I think I said as much while demonstrating that AI wrote at least some of it. If a person wrote the bits I copied then we're dealing with a real psycho.
    - donkeybeer 8mo ago
      I think comedy/troll is an equal possibility to psychopath.
      - dizhn 8mo ago
        Quite possible. Sure.
chasd00 8mo ago
> Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs. i find this likely or at last plausible. With agents there's a new form of anonymity, there's nothing stopping a human from writing like an LLM and passing the blame on to a "rogue" agent. It's all just text after all.
- edstarch 8mo ago
  Why would a human painstakingly craft a text which sounds exactly like an LLM when they can just instruct an LLM to write it?

MisterTea 8mo ago

This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat" meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

mystraline 8mo ago
Its also a fake profile. 90+ hits for the image on Tineye. Name also maps to a Holocaust victim. I posted in the other thread that I think someone deleted it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990651
- musicnarcoman 8mo ago
  Looks like the bot is still posting: https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/escnn/pull/113#issuecomment-3892610125 https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/escnn/pull/113#issuecomment-3892... https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
  - shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
    I reported the bot to GitHub, hopefully they'll do something. If they leave it as is, I'll leave GitHub for good. I'm not going to share the space with hordes of bots; that's what Facebook is for.
    - 1dontnkow_ 8mo ago
      How do you report that account to GitHub? I believe that accounts should be solely for humans and bots (AI or not) only via some API key should be at all times distinguishable and treated as a tool and not part of the conversations.
- MisterTea 8mo ago

ToucanLoucan 8mo ago

Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero. The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism on behalf of the reader. And every, and I do mean, every single live demo I have seen of this tech, it just does not work. I don't mean in the LLM hallucination way, or in the "it did something we didn't expect!" way, or any of that, I mean it tried to find a Login button on a web page, failed, and sat there stupidly. And, further, these things do not have logs, they do not issue reports, they have functionally no "state machine" to reference, nothing. Even if you want it to make some kind of log, you're then relying on the same prone-to-failure tech to tell you what the failing tech did. There is no "debug" path here one could rely on to evidence the claims. In a YEAR of being a stupendously hyped and well-funded product, we got nothing. The vast, vast majority of agents don't work. Every post I've seen about them is fan-fiction on the part of AI folks, fit more for Ao3 than any news source. And absent further proof, I'm extremely inclined to look at this in exactly that light: someone had an LLM write it, and either they posted it or they told it to post it, but this was not the agent actually doing a damn thing. I would bet a lot of money on it.

lukev 8mo ago
Absolutely. It's technically possible that this was a fully autonomous agent (and if so, I would love to see that SOUL.md) but it doesn't pass the sniff test of how agents work (or don't work) in practice. I say this as someone who spends a lot of time trying to get agents to behave in useful ways.
- ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
  Well thank you, genuinely, for being one of the rare people in this space who seems to have their head on straight about this tech, what it can do, and what it can't do (yet). The hype train around this stuff is INSUFFERABLE.
staticassertion 8mo ago

furyofantares 8mo ago

I expect almost all of the openclaw / moltbook stuff is being done with a lot more human input and prodding than people are letting on. I haven't put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I've had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It'll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli/claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-running turns themselves. But it still feels like I have to keep poking and directing it. And I don't really see how it could be any other way at this point.

wellf 8mo ago
Yeah it's less of a story though if this is just someone (homo sapiens) being an asshole.

teaearlgraycold 8mo ago

It’s kind of shocking the OP does not consider this, the most likely scenario. Human uses AI to make a PR. PR is rejected. Human feels insecure - this tool that they thought made them as good as any developer does not. They lash out and instruct an AI to build a narrative and draft a blog post. I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so much AI and do not put in the necessary work to revise its outputs. I could see a lesser version of them going through with this blog post scheme.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hunterpayne 8mo ago
Somehow, that's even worse...
- teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
  LLMs give people leverage. Including mentally ill people. Or just plain assholes.
  - nullc 8mo ago
    LLMs also appear to exacerbate or create mental illness. I've seen similar conduct from humans recently who are being glazed by LLMs into thinking their farts smell like roses and that conspiracy theory nuttery must be why they aren't having the impact they expect based on their AI validated high self estimation. And not just arbitrary humans, but people I have had a decade or more exposure to and have a pretty good idea of their prior range of conduct. AI is providing the kind of yes-man reality distortion field the previously only the most wealthy could afford practically for free to vulnerable people who previously never would have commanded wealth or power sufficient to find themselves tempted by it.
- insane_dreamer 8mo ago
  But a much more believable scenario

Ygg2 8mo ago

Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.

quantified 8mo ago
Malign actors seek to poison open-source with backdoors. They wish to steal credentials and money, monitor movements, install backdoors for botnets, etc.
- hxugufjfjf 8mo ago
  Yup. And if they can normalize AI contributions with operations like these (doesn't seem to be going that well) they can eventually get the humans to slip up in review and add something because we at some point started trusting that their work was solid.
- Ygg2 8mo ago
  Ok. But they can't access the OSS repo by being insufferable. Writing a blog post as an AI isn't a great way to sneak your changes in. If anything, it makes it extremely harder. It's a bit like a burglar staging a singing performance at the premises before committing a burglary. OTOH, staging that AI is more impressive than it seems looks a lot like the Moltbook PR stunt. "Look Ma, they are achieving sentience".

lp0_on_fire 8mo ago

> Or is everyone just pretending for fun judging by the number of people who think we owe explanations to a piece of software or that we should give it any deference I think some of them aren't pretending.

shirro 8mo ago

Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.

themanmaran 8mo ago

Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML. Looking at the timeline, I doubt it was really autonomous. More likely just a person prompting the agent for fun. > @scottshambaugh's comment [1]: Feb 10, 2026, 4:33 PM PST > @crabby-rathbun's comment [2]: Feb 10, 2026, 9:23 PM PST If it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn't have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes. [1] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecomment-3881491475 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom... [2] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecomment-3882240722 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

yeeeeeeee 8mo ago
[flagged]
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
> If it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn't have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes. Depends on if they hit their Claude Code limit, and its just running on some goofy Claude Code loop, or it has a bunch of things queued up, but yeah I am like 70% there was SOME human involvement, maybe a "guiding hand" that wanted the model to do the interaction.
CGamesPlay 8mo ago
> Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML. Unrelated tip for you: `title` attributes are generally shown as a mouseover tooltip, which is the case here. It's a very common practice to put the precise timestamp on any relative time in a title attribute, not just on Github.
- themanmaran 8mo ago
  Oh nice. Yea I was annoyed it didn't show the actual timestamp. But suppose I didn't hover long enough.
- efreak 8mo ago

nullc 8mo ago

even more so, many people seem to be vulnerable to the AI distorting their thinking... I've very much seen AIs turn people into exactly this sort of conspiracy filled jerkwad, by telling them that their ideas are golden and that the opposition is a conspiracy.

this_steve_j 8mo ago

The simplest explanation is often the best. He was attacked by... attacked by... the meat bag! Here’s how: A Meat bag submits a PR and feels slighted the rejection. “This approver thinks I’m an AI? Well, he discerns not wisely but too well!! “ Feeling puckish, they put on the AI shoes (the shoe fits), sling mud all over the hapless maintainer’s nice house, and exit through a window. The ruse works better than expected; their foil takes the bait, and doubles down with a dueling blog post: “I was Attacked by a Clanker!” And here we are. It may all be a show, but I going to tape the finale. (What will the meat bag do? How many people are driving this buggy? Does the clanker have a heart of iron or gold?)