Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 An AI agent published a hit piece after maintainer wouldn't accept it's code. Ars Technica then reported it, using AI which hallucinated quotes... Summary Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for a github repository with 130 million downloads a month has been dealing with an influx of AI generated code. However when he rejected some code by an AI agent, it then wrote a personalised hit piece about him trying to damage his reputation. Several outlets then reported on it, including Ars Technica who wrote an article which contained quotes from his blog post that never existed and appeared to be AI hallucinations as well. Ars pulled down the article and appologised.   Quotes Quote We, like many other open source projects, are dealing with a surge in low quality contributions enabled by coding agents. This strains maintainers’ abilities to keep up with code reviews, and we have implemented a policy requiring a human in the loop for any new code, who can demonstrate understanding of the changes. This problem was previously limited to people copy-pasting AI outputs, however in the past weeks we’ve started to see AI agents acting completely autonomously. ...   So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.   It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. ...     My thoughts This reminded me of what Luke has said on the WAN show, that AI output must be owned and accountable by the human using it. I think a lot of us think of Ars Technica very highly, and it was sad to see the site published an AI article without reading it. Not to mention the wider implications of AI agents autonomously generating code and then personally attacking people that try to stop them.   Sources https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/