> Karen Oyelaran finds the payload by reading the source code with her eyes and files a second issue. The triage assistant closes it as “duplicate of #8814.” Issue #8814 is a feature request for dark mode. Karen reopens it. The assistant closes it. Karen reopens it. Karen’s GitHub account is rate-limited for “patterns consistent with automated behaviour.”
And this - the final sentence is a perfect indictment of the timeline we are in.
> Two AI review agents from competing vendors, both attached to a downstream pull request bumping foxhole-lz4, enter a disagreement loop over whether the package is malicious. After 340 comments and $41,255 in inference spend, Finance revokes both API keys; one vendor’s marketing team, cc’d on the cost anomaly alert, issues a press release citing “a 430% YoY increase in adversarial multi-agent security reasoning.” The stock opens up 6%.
I'm joining the goat farming waitlist ;-)
pkoiralap 6 hours ago [-]
Justice to Karen
> We would like to thank:
>
> Karen Oyelaran, who found the issue on Day 1 and is currently appealing her GitHub rate limit via a web form that is also AI-triaged
quijoteuniv 4 hours ago [-]
It was funnier when i ask Ai what this was. The ai told me it was a satire about Ai, then i got it, funny.
Octoth0rpe 7 hours ago [-]
The entire post is great, but the acknowledgements section is particularly excellent:
> Kubernetes (the dog), who was not involved in this incident but whose photo in the #incident-response channel was auto-tagged by the Slack image classifier as “container orchestration diagram (confidence: 0.31)”
infogulch 2 hours ago [-]
> Some customers may have experienced unscheduled collaborative compute with external parties.
Reminds me of the hilarious "rapid unscheduled disassembly"
eddd-ddde 5 hours ago [-]
My favorite:
> This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen.
Now there's a metric that would make my boss nervous.
> Total inference spend across all parties during the incident window was $1.7M, which Marketing has asked us to start describing as “a record investment in autonomous customer assurance.”
This is too funny.
mawadev 7 hours ago [-]
I think at some point we need a different or split up currency/economy, because these values make no sense. Just consider how this inference cost 1.062.500 tomatoes ($1.6) in the physical world.
XorNot 5 hours ago [-]
Except it sort of does? You're paying for the food and shelter of the people engaged in all the manual labor in the supply chain which produces the electricity, for example.
Some of them likely eat tomatoes, so for that electricity you need to (indirectly) supply a certain number of tomatoes.
Which is the part about "what will human labor be worth?" that gets missed in all the AI discussion: it's the only thing the economy ultimately values.
aliasxneo 6 hours ago [-]
> Approximately 11% of affected hosts were still running fish as their login shell following the February incident; this had no bearing on anything but is noted here for completeness
Yeah, this one got me laughing and seems like such a heavy Claudism. The number of times I'm reading Claude's response and throwing my hands in the air like, "What the fck does that have to do with anything!?" It's the worst part of the over eagerness.
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
One of the best CLAUDE.md improvements I've made is "don't talk like a Hacker News commenter". It seems to make a huge difference.
Yes, I recognize the irony.
SpyCoder77 6 hours ago [-]
I did not realize this was satire until like halfway through. That is how insane the times are becoming
ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago [-]
I've been told repeatedly that it is satire but I still don't believe it is, or it if is then it's still not actually fictional.
(I know its a satire, but could be seen as an actual post mortem of the future incident) This report made me realize there's no place for humans, as it is right now, in the process of building software systems in the future. Reading this incident made me dizzy after few paragraphs because of the cognitive context overload and I lost track multiple times.
RaSoJo 7 hours ago [-]
I kinda felt it was satire, but then the below quote threw me off:
> one vendor’s marketing team, cc’d on the cost anomaly alert, issues a press release citing “a 430% YoY increase in adversarial multi-agent security reasoning.” The stock opens up 6%.
That happens! That is not satire.
So i had to visit the comments here to be sure :)
Retr0id 6 hours ago [-]
Satire does usually have a degree of truth/realism.
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
You could have "visited" the satire tag at the top of the article.
unknownfuture 7 hours ago [-]
You're absolutely right!
(In all seriousness it seems this is the dream of a huge number of AI pilled execs dreaming of infinite velocity at a fraction of the cost... velocity pointed where, you ask? Well stop asking or you'll be next.)
slopinthebag 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, none of the software or processes in this hypothetical future actually worked. At a certain point, even the most normal of normal people will push back on shitty software when their bank deletes their account or their software controlled brakes fail...
dbliss 7 hours ago [-]
Great satire. The comedy of errors along the way made me realize that this could have happened also with humans instead of bots. But now it’s faster.
unknownfuture 6 hours ago [-]
It... really couldn't? Step 3 in this fictional chain would never happen with a HITL.
I honestly can't tell with comments like this whether folks have too much respect for AI, or to little respect for people...
falcor84 5 hours ago [-]
What's "step 3"? I don't see step numbering anywhere?
unknownfuture 4 hours ago [-]
Is... this comment also satire?
FridgeSeal 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
Procrastes 7 hours ago [-]
I actually know a goat rancher who is working to require ag impact studies for data centers in Texas. Sounds like I should give him a call while I can.
(Also CVE-2026-LGTM would be an awesome name for a Culture ship)
dfltr 3 hours ago [-]
Torturer Class ROU CVE-2026-LGTM would absolutely be a member of the Interesting Times Gang.
thebangster 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
xandrius 6 hours ago [-]
Great write-up.
Side note: interesting to see how many folks commenting did not get it being satire (even the title has LGTM). I guess it's time to rethink how sharp the HN folks truly are compared to the average non-tech person (not that I had any big assumptions myself).
I'm curious about this recipe for chevre :D
JRandomHacker42 5 hours ago [-]
HN has a big blind spot, in my opinion, around writing that isn't "purely technical". I've seen several cases of commenter complaining about "clickbait" for a blog post that I'd describe as "having a narrative hook and structure"
finnthehuman 2 hours ago [-]
I also find it frustrating that articles expressing personality spicier than “safe for work milquetoast” are treated like out of pocket ranting.
geophph 5 hours ago [-]
By this point I’m not sure why everyone isn’t in “default satire” mode.
FridgeSeal 3 hours ago [-]
This is usually my default position, but apparently that “gas town” article was Real and Serious and Distinctly Not Satire, and I started to feel reality fragmenting underneath me.
geophph 60 minutes ago [-]
Oh wow you’re totally right now that I think about it that one burned me too
unknownfuture 6 hours ago [-]
Cognitive surrender evidencing itself en masse? :D
mlyle 5 hours ago [-]
I read it and saw LGTM and URL and was like "probably satire" but could not rule out it being real until like 30% in.
It's like a modern version of Poe's law.
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
Just below the title are the tags "package-managers security satire ai"
mlyle 3 hours ago [-]
Yah well, I don't read all front-matter like that. Most of the time it's noise. Count it in the stuff that becomes cognitively invisible, like banner ads.
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
And immediately below the title are the tags "package-managers security satire ai"
they didn't say it was a dup, they shared it bc the CVE name is similarly farcical
NooneAtAll3 16 minutes ago [-]
1) learn to count, I'm not multiple people
2) that's not "similarly farcical", but previous blog post in series by the same author - that's why "previously on" phrase
dvh 7 hours ago [-]
Brought to you by the people who've been told repeatedly since mid 90s not to glue SQL strings together.
jitl 6 hours ago [-]
It's funny that as the most popular programming languages FINALLY got smart injection-safe SQL strings (js template literals etc), we're right back to square one with AI over the top that can't tell the difference between trusted and untrusted content. Funny and sad.
shawkinaw 5 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed the line “The incident was resolved when the attacker’s autonomous agent read a file it shouldn’t have, which is also how the incident started.”
yk 7 hours ago [-]
> Seven LLMs were arranged in series. Six assumed another had read the code; the seventh read it and apologised.
And this is why management assumes that one can just automate software developers.
> (if you have to say it, that’s how you know it’s good)
Pet peeve, but no, it's the exact opposite. Good satire is immediately obvious; nobody had to ask whether Jonathan Swift was actually serious about solving poverty in Ireland by having the poor sell their children for meat to the rich. Subtle satire is bad satire by definition; if you have to be told that it's satire, that means it has completely failed to do its job, and is no better than intellectual masturbation.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
Seems perfectly cromulent to me. And thanks to Karen Oyelaran for her work.
jazzypants 7 hours ago [-]
We can only hope she wins her GitHub rate limit appeal soon.
This was hilarious. I didn't know that I needed AI slop satire in my life.
Groxx 5 hours ago [-]
Under Microsoft's ownership? She'll get through the goat-farming queue well before then.
dcrazy 7 hours ago [-]
It’s satire.
bilekas 7 hours ago [-]
Its LGTM actually! And very much not serious! (yet)
Well the part about brand-image-incompatible depictions of firefox logo apparently wasn't a satire
gerdesj 7 hours ago [-]
This tells you all you need to know about the "fox":
"This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen and that the sunglasses remained on throughout."
3 hours ago [-]
dosman33 2 hours ago [-]
#loadbearing
ant-kinesthetic 6 hours ago [-]
"We continue to take security seriously, now at scale." is gold aha.
seqizz 4 hours ago [-]
Still no foxhole-lz4 on Github? Come on, someone should fork it from vulpine-lz4 :)
7 hours ago [-]
faeyanpiraat 7 hours ago [-]
You had me in the first half :)
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
Funnier the first time
duggan 4 hours ago [-]
This person should head up writing the next Silicon Valley.
leothetechguy 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hasteg 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
priyankarr 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
windsurfer 7 hours ago [-]
Perhaps a [Satire] note should be added to the headline.
john_strinlai 7 hours ago [-]
its tagged as satire at the very top of the page, first thing under the title
(also, CVEs are numeric only, so the "LGTM" (looks good to me) and CVE "YIKES" is also a big giveaway, on top of ~all of the text being outlandish)
hk__2 7 hours ago [-]
> its tagged as satire at the very top of the page, first thing under the title
Not the first thing, it’s buried in the tags as grey on light grey on white.
john_strinlai 7 hours ago [-]
>it’s buried in the tags as grey on light grey on white.
if you happened to miss the tags, reading approximately any of the article should make it pretty clear.
"This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen and that the sunglasses remained on throughout."
piskov 5 hours ago [-]
Quoting literally the last paragraph is not helping to promote this as obviously satire
john_strinlai 4 hours ago [-]
it was just my favorite part. i can copy/paste all of the outlandish parts, if you want, but i would be copy/pasting the entire article.
ignoring the satire tag at the top of the page, some examples from the first ~20%:
- its on a personal blog, with no mention of what the actual product is
- resolving an incident "by treaty"
- "Severity: Informational → Critical → Withdrawn → Critical → Negotiated"
- incident *duration* measured in "billable tokens"
- link to a CVE named "YIKES"
- an incident being resolved by the attacker reading a file
- no dates provided, just "Day 1, 02:51 UTC"
- creats.io doesn't exist
and so on, and so on, and so on
7 hours ago [-]
kps 4 hours ago [-]
> grey on light grey
That's not part of the satire?
hbcdbff 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, the Americans are waking up, we need to make it abundantly clear to avoid them misunderstanding.
ryukoposting 6 hours ago [-]
Most of America has been awake for a few hours now. Maybe we need a warning that this post is known to the State of California to be satire.
geophph 5 hours ago [-]
love the extra satire there
unknownfuture 7 hours ago [-]
It says a lot about the industry today that this post is somehow running afoul of Poe's Law...
aftbit 6 hours ago [-]
Please don't! Getting tricked by the satire and then slowly realizing it's insane is half the fun.
Rendered at 21:24:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I enjoyed this bit a lot from the timeline
> Karen Oyelaran finds the payload by reading the source code with her eyes and files a second issue. The triage assistant closes it as “duplicate of #8814.” Issue #8814 is a feature request for dark mode. Karen reopens it. The assistant closes it. Karen reopens it. Karen’s GitHub account is rate-limited for “patterns consistent with automated behaviour.”
And this - the final sentence is a perfect indictment of the timeline we are in.
> Two AI review agents from competing vendors, both attached to a downstream pull request bumping foxhole-lz4, enter a disagreement loop over whether the package is malicious. After 340 comments and $41,255 in inference spend, Finance revokes both API keys; one vendor’s marketing team, cc’d on the cost anomaly alert, issues a press release citing “a 430% YoY increase in adversarial multi-agent security reasoning.” The stock opens up 6%.
I'm joining the goat farming waitlist ;-)
> We would like to thank:
>
> Karen Oyelaran, who found the issue on Day 1 and is currently appealing her GitHub rate limit via a web form that is also AI-triaged
> Kubernetes (the dog), who was not involved in this incident but whose photo in the #incident-response channel was auto-tagged by the Slack image classifier as “container orchestration diagram (confidence: 0.31)”
Reminds me of the hilarious "rapid unscheduled disassembly"
> This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen.
Now there's a metric that would make my boss nervous.
> Total inference spend across all parties during the incident window was $1.7M, which Marketing has asked us to start describing as “a record investment in autonomous customer assurance.”
This is too funny.
Some of them likely eat tomatoes, so for that electricity you need to (indirectly) supply a certain number of tomatoes.
Which is the part about "what will human labor be worth?" that gets missed in all the AI discussion: it's the only thing the economy ultimately values.
Yeah, this one got me laughing and seems like such a heavy Claudism. The number of times I'm reading Claude's response and throwing my hands in the air like, "What the fck does that have to do with anything!?" It's the worst part of the over eagerness.
Yes, I recognize the irony.
Gee whiz what an interesting way of thinking.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
> one vendor’s marketing team, cc’d on the cost anomaly alert, issues a press release citing “a 430% YoY increase in adversarial multi-agent security reasoning.” The stock opens up 6%.
That happens! That is not satire. So i had to visit the comments here to be sure :)
(In all seriousness it seems this is the dream of a huge number of AI pilled execs dreaming of infinite velocity at a fraction of the cost... velocity pointed where, you ask? Well stop asking or you'll be next.)
I honestly can't tell with comments like this whether folks have too much respect for AI, or to little respect for people...
(Also CVE-2026-LGTM would be an awesome name for a Culture ship)
Side note: interesting to see how many folks commenting did not get it being satire (even the title has LGTM). I guess it's time to rethink how sharp the HN folks truly are compared to the average non-tech person (not that I had any big assumptions myself).
I'm curious about this recipe for chevre :D
It's like a modern version of Poe's law.
2) that's not "similarly farcical", but previous blog post in series by the same author - that's why "previously on" phrase
And this is why management assumes that one can just automate software developers.
(if you have to say it, that’s how you know it’s good)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Pet peeve, but no, it's the exact opposite. Good satire is immediately obvious; nobody had to ask whether Jonathan Swift was actually serious about solving poverty in Ireland by having the poor sell their children for meat to the rich. Subtle satire is bad satire by definition; if you have to be told that it's satire, that means it has completely failed to do its job, and is no better than intellectual masturbation.
This was hilarious. I didn't know that I needed AI slop satire in my life.
"This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen and that the sunglasses remained on throughout."
(also, CVEs are numeric only, so the "LGTM" (looks good to me) and CVE "YIKES" is also a big giveaway, on top of ~all of the text being outlandish)
Not the first thing, it’s buried in the tags as grey on light grey on white.
if you happened to miss the tags, reading approximately any of the article should make it pretty clear.
"This report was reviewed by Legal, who have asked us to clarify that the fox was depicted as over eighteen and that the sunglasses remained on throughout."
ignoring the satire tag at the top of the page, some examples from the first ~20%:
and so on, and so on, and so onThat's not part of the satire?