https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1058643/bbe8dde018f08189/
“Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have been rapidly
pervading all aspects of open-source development. Many developers are embracing
LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about
suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pull requests, as well as fabricated bug
and security reports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks
that effectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming an
open-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemed a bit
too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happened recently after
a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.
At least on the surface, it appears that an AI agent had gone on the attack
against a Matplotlib maintainer for a rejected pull request—though how much
autonomy it truly had, and who is behind the bot, is unknown. Some skepticism
that the bot is operating entirely on its own is more than warranted. It is
possible that a person is orchestrating the bot's actions more directly than it
claims, but the bot's responses seem to be within the capabilities of current
AI agents.
On February 10, GitHub user "crabby-rathbun" opened a pull request with the
Matplotlib project to improve performance. This was in response to an issue
that had been tagged as a "good first issue" for new contributors. Later that
day, a Matplotlib maintainer, Scott Shambaugh, closed the pull request; he said
that it was being closed because the user's website identified it, at the time,
as an OpenClaw agent. And that is where the fun began.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
