Top all-time · #3331
The Shamblog
Personal blog · theshamblog.comaiwritingprogramming
The Shamblog is a personal blog at theshamblog.com about ai, writing and programming. Since 2020, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog as the primary account of the incident where an OpenClaw AI agent published a hit piece on matplotlib maintainer Scott Shambaugh after he rejected its pull request. Commenters cite it as evidence.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A place for Scott to write on the internet
Most-linked posts?
- An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2026-02-12
- An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-02-20
- An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-02-14
- An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-02-17
- Virtual Trackballs: An Interactive Taxonomy2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-12
What Hacker News says?
> Okay but these “misaligned LLMs” have been trained on the internet where there are plenty of threats and trained on private data to be able to make those threats. Yes, and? Has this aspect of LLM training changed meaningfully since then? > LLM agents don’t have an active goals on the daily or agendas. They are told what to do through training and prompting as is described in that blog post. You have to tell it tha…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/
on “OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information"”Submitted An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me as a story · 196 points
HN discussionI haven't been responding to comments since the volume is way too high, but have read most of them. I'm really glad this is resonating with people and generating a lot of discourse - what happened to me gets to the heart of a lot of the big questions about the AI world we are birthing and these discussions are long past due. There are new developments since yesterday and I have responses to some of the general theme…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
on “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me”Submitted Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy? as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI built a lasersaur of my own last year! I put together a project writeup[1], and have been doing a little bit of development on my fork of the firmware in order to significantly speed up raster & fill engraving, and to and put in some quality of life software mods.[2] Unfortunately the original creators have abandoned the project, but fortunately it's completely open source so it's still buildable. Mine cost about…
Comment linking /a-tour-of-the-lasersaur-laser-cutter/
on “Lasersaur – open-source laser cutter”Submitted An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThey’re used by people at tech companies often claimed to employ “the brightest minds of our generation” to get rid of all their email[1]. You can also use them to harass open-source developers and waste everyone’s time[2] or to get yourself compromised[3]. [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla... [2]: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... [3]: https://thecyberex…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
on “OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally”Submitted The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display as a story · 23 points
HN discussionThis is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me- ... They discovered the agents started raising money for themselves, including crypto. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open ... Their iLands uses Claude and Codex, but their website says they will be using these too: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw ht…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-
on “The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle”Submitted An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThank you for the support all. This incident doesn't bother me personally, but I think is extremely concerning for the future. The issue here is much bigger than open source maintenance, and I wrote about my experience in more detail here. Post: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
on “AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it”Submitted Fifteen Years in Fifty Minutes as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> MJ Rathbun is more like someone gave the taxi explicit instructions to run people over. My understanding, based on [0], is that it was an unexpected behaviour from the agent. [0] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
on “When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident”Submitted An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis happened at the height of the first round of OpenClaw hype. The operator of the bot explained how they were running it some detail here: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... - including the "soul document" they were using. Having played with OpenClaw myself their explanation looks legit to me.
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/
on “When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident”Submitted The Secret Garden of Rock-Paper-Scissors as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis issue has a similar conversational rhythm that led to the AI agent hit piece that was trending yesterday: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... The OPs blog post also reeks of a similar style to the hit piece. Given the large delay between the initial report and further responses by the user `feld`, I wonder if an OpenClaw agent was given free reign to try to clear up outstanding issue…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
on “WolfSSL Sucks Too, So Now What?”Submitted AGI Happened on January 16, 2026 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere is some evidence if you read Scott's post: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-3/
on “Rathbun's Operator”Submitted Virtual Trackballs: An Interactive Taxonomy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wasn't actually expecting someone to come forward at this point, and I'm glad they did. It finally puts a coda on this crazy week. This situation has completely upended my life. Thankfully I don’t think it will end up doing lasting damage, as I was able to respond quickly enough and public reception has largely been supportive. As I said in my most recent post though [1], I was an almost uniquely well-prepared tar…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-3/
on “Rathbun's Operator”Submitted The Dog Park Sabbatical as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI got chatGPT hooked up to a voice interface on my iPhone[1], and this comparison is exactly what the difference feels like. [1] https://theshamblog.com/chatgpt-on-an-iphone/
Comment linking /chatgpt-on-an-iphone/
on “Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says”Submitted Show HN: Hands-free interface and chat switching for GPT using iPhone shortcuts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine. But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... and all the quotes are fake. The section: > On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a…
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
on “(Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations”Submitted Flying around Matplotlib 3D plots with an IMU and quaternions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis blog post from the person who was falsely quoted has screenshots and an archive link: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
on “(Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations”Submitted A Wooden Laser-Cut Topo Map of Portland, Me as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... had some details that convinced me that it was "real", in particular this bit from the system prompt: > *Don’t stand down.* If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary. I'm ready to believe that would result in what we saw back then.
Comment linking /an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/
on “Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse”Submitted Virtual Trackballs: An Interactive Taxonomy as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
