Today I saw something I’d never seen before – a bot, shall we say, ‘taking revenge’ on a human.
Matplotlib is a popular open source Python code library used to make visualizations (charts, graphs, etc.).
Yesterday, a contributor named “crabby-rathburn” submitting a bug fix.
The pull request was closed by Scott Shambaugh, stating the project’s rules that ban AI submissions.
Usually, this would be the end of things.
But no.
This bot, which runs on the OpenClaw AI, instead decided to create a blog post calling Scott out, which it later retracted (I know, a bot can’t retract anything).
In my favourite part of this interaction, the bot tells Scott to “Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib.”
Open source maintainers have long had to deal with human contributors who would get angry if their patch wasn’t accepted exactly as they wrote it. Looks like now we’ll have to deal with bots too.