Comment by resfirestar
14 days 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?
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.
>It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.
In that case, apologizing almost immediately after seems strange.
EDIT:
>Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat"
This person was not the original 'meat bag' behind the original AI.
Really? I'd think a human being would be more likely to recognize they'd crossed a boundary with another human, step back, and address the issue with some reflection?
If apologizing is more likely the response of an AI agent than a human that's either... somewhat hopeful in one sense, and supremely disappointing in another.
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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
Looks like the bot is still posting:
https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/escnn/pull/113#issuecomment-3892...
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
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Which profile is fake? Someone posted what appears to be the legit homepage of the person who is accused of running the bot so that person appears to be real.
The link you provided is also a bit cryptic, what does "I think crabby-rathbun is dead." mean in this context?
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It's really just an AI generated angry response rather than AI motivated.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for making me recover at least some level of sanity (or at least to feel like that).
Can you elaborate a bit on what "working correctly" would look like? I have made use of agents, so me saying "they worked correctly for me" would be evidence of them doing so, but I'd have to know what "correctly" means.
Maybe this comes down to what it would mean for an agent to do something. For example, if I were to prompt an agent then it wouldn't meet your criteria?
It's very unclear to me why AI companies are so focused on using LLMs for things they struggle with rather than what they're actually good at; are they really just all Singularitarians?
Or that having spent a trillion dollars, they have realised there's no way they can make that back on some coding agents and email autocomplete, and are frantically hunting for something — anything! — that might fill the gap.
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.
Somehow, that's even worse...
But a much more believable scenario
LLMs give people leverage. Including mentally ill people. Or just plain assholes.
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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#issuecom...
[2] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
It depends. Many people run OpenClaw agent with a cron job, so it won’t consume too many tokens too quickly. In this case it’s exactly 5 hours.
It isn't exactly 5 hours, it's got a +/-10 minute window.
Depends on how they set it up. They probably put some delays on the actions so they don't spend too much money.
> 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.
Unfortunately title isn't visible on mobile. Extremely annoying to see a post that says "last month" and want to know if it was 7 weeks ago or 5 weeks ago. Some sites show title text when you tap the text, other sites the date is a canonical link to the comment. Other sites it's not actually a title at all l but alt text or abbr or other property.
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Oh nice. Yea I was annoyed it didn't show the actual timestamp. But suppose I didn't hover long enough.
> 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.
Thank you for the discovery.
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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.
Yeah it's less of a story though if this is just someone (homo sapiens) being an asshole.
Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.
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?)
> 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.
Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.
Malign actors seek to poison open-source with backdoors. They wish to steal credentials and money, monitor movements, install backdoors for botnets, etc.
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.
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".
Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.
> Obstacles
Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might have directed the LLM to do it.
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.
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> 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.
Why would a human painstakingly craft a text which sounds exactly like an LLM when they can just instruct an LLM to write it?
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.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911