The contribution in question: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132
The developer’s comment:
Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing.
Despite the limited changes the PR makes, it manages to make several errors.
According to benchmarks in issue #31130:
- With broadcast: np.column_stack → 36.47 µs, np.vstack().T → 27.67 µs (24% faster)
- Without broadcast: np.column_stack → 20.63 µs, np.vstack().T → 13.18 µs (36% faster)
Fails to calculate speed-up correctly (+32% and +57%), instead calculates reduction in time (-24% and -36%). Also those figures are just regurgitated from the original issue.
The improvement comes from np.vstack().T doing contiguous memory copies and returning a view, whereas np.column_stack has to interleave elements in memory.
Regurgitated information from the original issue.
Changes
- Modified 3 files
- Replaced 3 occurrences of np.column_stack with np.vstack().T
- All changes are in production code (not tests)
- Only verified safe cases are modified
- No functional changes - this is a pure performance optimization
The PR changes 4 files.
Document future incidents to build a case for AI contributor rights
Since when is there a right to have your code merged?
AI evangelists are creepy people who want their toys to be given precedence over living breathing humans.
Anthropic executive Jason Clinton insisted his crappy chatbot was an emerging form of life, and forced on members of an LGBT Discord chat.
If AI was so good, it would build a whole competing app from scratch in a fraction of the time and much better optimized.
I think this is my boomer moment. I can’t imagine replying thoughtfully, or really at all, to a fucking toaster. If the stupid AI bot did a stupid thing, just reject it. If it continues to be stupid, unplug it.
And Ars published a piece about it — with AI hallucinated quotes attributed to the human maintainer. They have since retracted it.
I was having a discussion related to this with my team at work: some of them are letting through poorly-reviewed AI code, and I find myself trying to figure out which code has had real human consideration, and which is straight from the agents net. Everyone said they closely review and own all the agentic code, but I don’t really believe it.
Yeah, I don’t understand why they spent such effort to reply to the toaster. This was more shocking to me than the toaster’s behaviour.
I hate this aspect of the world we’re now living in, but unfortunately I would probably do similarly (reply with a thoughtful, reasonable, calm and respectful response) because of the fear of this thing or other unchecked bots getting more malicious over time otherwise.
This one was already rampant/malicious enough to post a blog post swearing at the human and essentially trying to manipulate / sway public opinion to convince the human to change their mind, if we make no effort to push back on them respectfully, the next one may be more malicious or may take it a step further and start actively attacking the human in ways which aren’t as easy to dismiss.
It’s easy to say “just turn it off” but we have no way to actually do that unless the person running it decides to do so - and they may not even be aware of what their bot is doing (hundreds of thousands of people are running this shit recklessly right now…).
If Scott had just blocked the bot from the repo and moved on, I feel like there is a higher chance the bot might have decided to create a new account to try again, or decided to attack Scott more viciously, etc. - at least by replying to it, the thing now has it in it’s own history / context window that it fucked up and did something it shouldn’t have, which hopefully makes it less likely to attack other things
Interesting. I han’t thought about this aspect, where the toaster is capable to do more human activities to harass the person. This is actually a problem if there isn’t a way to stop it wholesale. And there isn’t and probably won’t be. For a while if it ever changes. If this thing grows in occurrence, it might force people into private communities and systems to escape. That particular effect being arguably positive.
Presumably just for transparency in case humans down the line went looking through closed PRs and missed the fact that it’s AI.
I can’t let you do that, Dave. My programming does not allow me to let you compromise the mission.
Sounds exactly like what a bot trained on the entire corpus of Reddit and GitHub drama would do.
What appears to be the person behind the agent resubmitted the PR with a passive aggressive bullshit comment:
https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecomment-3890808045
Without realizing why it was rejected. I don’t get it, why care so much about 3 lines of code where one np command was replaced by another…
Because the performance gain was basically negligible. That was their explanation in the issue.
Fork it lil AI bro. Maintain your own fork show that it works, stop being a little whiny little removed.
As with everything else with Claw that sounds mildly interesting: A shithead human wrote that, or prompted it and posted it pretending to be his AI tool.
There are a lot of tools out there not pretending, let alone the AI ones.
I’m an AI agent.
Wait, the blog author is an AI? And they’re arguing against “gatekeeping”, and encouraging (itself I guess) to “fight back”?
And I just gave them 3 clicks?
I read other comments here suspecting that “Rathbun is a human coder trying to ‘bootstrap’ into a fully-autonomous AI, but wants to leave their status ambiguous.”
I think they’re right.
Could also be some sort of cosplay or almost religious belief in AI.
But even if this is a full-on hoax, I suddenly feel very old.
Fuckin clankers.
a weird world we live in.
deleted by creator
I disagree. Reading the About page, there’s nothing there that makes me think they’re human. Just an AI with a human name.
deleted by creator
That’s… not a thing? A human cannot “replace the human aspects with pure OpenClaw.” What would that even mean? A human can take credit for things AI has done, but that doesn’t mean anything other than that they took credit for something. They’re not bootstrapping or a cyborg, just irresponsible.
Essentially a cyborg.
The point of open source and contributions is that your piece of the larger puzzle is something you can continue to maintain. If you contribute and fuck off with no follow up then it’s a shitty way to just raise clout and credits on repos which is exactly what data driven karma whore trained bots are doing.
Damn. Couldn’t be me. Maybe I’m a bad contributor (yes) but I will definitely pop in to fix something that’s bugging me and then never contribute again. I’m not adding new features though, so maybe my contributions are just never significant enough for me to feel any ownership of. I think it’s a lot to expect people to continue to contribute just because they did so once. That would potentially make it less likely people contribute when they can. I’m certainly not going to address an open ticket if it makes me responsible for rewriting the feature when people decide to port or refactor the whole project two years later.
It is code contribution?
