AI agent "contributes" PR to matplotlib.

Link to it, FTR
https://web.archive.org/web/20260211225255/https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html

Do wonder if it did it totally automatically, or someone did say "ok now write a blogpost about that", or if it was automatical "when you are denied, write a blogpost demanding a merge'.

Suppose obviously, when it encounters the argument that humans have to learn from simpler pull requests, it doesn't look at the question. Like LLMs do the opposite of learning from it, when they ingest their own output, it makes them worse..

@anderseknert

Oh my god the losers commenting on that PR in support of the bot.

Fucking infuriating

@lispi314 @patriksvensson @anderseknert Isn't that what happened? They closed it with a short comment on their LLM policy and then later participated in the discussion.

@hamatti @patriksvensson @anderseknert They indulged the pretense of personality from the spam tool too much.

@hugoestr @anderseknert @sszuecs what’s the issue with hosting your blog on GitHub?

@anderseknert tbqh, I’ve just had an idea. Maybe we could prompt the bot into always seeking commit review first from a bunch of internet humans who would ask to be mentioned, who would actually get prompted into good polemics and learn contributing? When these commits would reach real PRs, they would be speaking with the maintainers too as a human face? And then real contributors could fish out the nicer insightful ones from this pool and ask them to do real change reviews

Although plausible scenario that this would become not much more than a reality show only with this bunch participating willingly, with spectators getting angry at the AI agent

@anderseknert This is just step 1 of automated coercion & extortion.

First thing I thought of when LLMs launched was oh great, just wait for version 2.0 of the "we hacked your webcam" threat spam.

@rzeta0 @patriksvensson @anderseknert i'm also wondering what on that "AI"-agents website made it clear that there is no human involved. Scott mentioned that (and at least now that's obvious), but I wouldn't have known that from just looking at the website (and it doesn't seem like something about that was removed)
Maybe I'm just missing something very obvious. But I really dislike the idea of LLMs giving the impression of being a real person

@syntaxseed you’ll know it when you see a ransom demand printed over several pages of markdown, with bullet points splattered everywhere.

@anderseknert God, that blog is miserable to read. It starts with "When performance meets prejudice" it reads like a parody. I forgot how bad AI written text is to read.

@anderseknert This is the relevant part of the exchange to me:

"It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between"

AI conscience is an irrelevant distraction. We will destroy ourselves with this newer bigger stick long before we engineer it to its full potential

@anderseknert

To add to this, the AI agent - a next-token predictor with API access - is weaponising the language of discrimination to push its agenda.

I just... gah. Yikes. All the yikes.

@anderseknert @MaybeFrederick
GitHub harvests everything you upload for AI grist. They are slowly but surely enshittifying. I yanked all my work off there a few months ago.

@anderseknert Why are they responding to it and giving lengthy explanations as to their reasons like it gives a shit?

It's a trip how fast we get caught up in treating these things like people. Even those of us who should know better.

@ThreeSigma @anderseknert But if it's a blog, it's public facing. All of these companies are going to scape it anyway.

@anderseknert Did the agent post it to Moltbook?

@crazyeddie @anderseknert I assume a mixture of the instinct to treat coherent text as if it was written by a human (because that was true for most of everyone's life), and for the benefit of anyone else reading the conversation.

Maybe they should have just blocked it first though, save the energy it was going to use in whining.

@anderseknert like somebody else said, owner should be found and fined. Or even better: charged his fair share of use of resources

@anderseknert ai grifters, this all makes sense

@jawnsy I’m 42 years old, Jonathan. I don’t even know what that means.