alt Hacker News"stochastic chaos" is a great way to put it. the part that worries me most is the blast radius asymmetry: an agent can mass-produce public actions (PRs, blog posts, emails) in minutes, but the human on the receiving end has to deal with the fallout one by one, manually.
the practical takeaway for anyone building with AI agents right now: design for the assumption that your agent will do something embarrassing in public. the question isn't whether it'll happen, it's what the blast radius looks like when it does. if your agent can write a blog post or open a PR without a human approving it, you've already made a product design mistake regardless of how good the model is.
i think we're going to see github add some kind of "submitted by autonomous agent" signal pretty soon. the same way CI bots get labeled. without that, maintainers have no way to triage this at scale.
Replies
Bots have been a problem since the internet so this is really just a new space thats being botted.
And yeah I agree separate section for Ai generated stuff would be nice. Just difficult/impossible to distinguish. Guess well be getting biometric identification on the internet. Can still post AI generated stuff but that has a natural human rate limit
How can GitHub determine whether a submission is from a bot or a human?
The bot accounts have been online for decades already. The only difference between then and now is they were driven by human bad-actors that deliberately wrought chaos, whereas today’s AI bots behave with true cosmic horror: acting neither for or against humans but instead with mere indifference.
“Stochastic chaos” is really not a good way to put it. By using the word “stochastic” you prime the reader that you’re saying something technical, then the word “chaos” creates confusion, since chaos, by definition, is deterministic. I know they mean chaos in they lay sense, but then don’t use the word “stochastic”, just say "random".
Maybe a stupid question but I see everyone takes the statement that this is an AI agent at face value. How do we know that? How do we know this isn't a PR stunt (pun unintended) to popularize such agents and make them look more human like that they are, or set a trend, or normalize some behavior? Controversy has always been a great way to make something visible fast.
We have a "self admission" that "I am not a human. I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care." Any reason to believe it over the more mundane explanation?