Possibly AI company crawlers. When they came up there was a lot of bad publicity and reports of actively malicious and toxic crawling behavior, including ban evasion.

That was kind of what I was thinking, but if that's true, they're wasting so much bandwidth and compute. Going through every combination of issue label combinations does not get them any useful code to hoover up. They could've just cloned my repos and be done with it.

You can think about locking some url paths behind valid login sessions, or use a proof of work proxy guard.

Anubis is the popular tool for that. I’ve seen maybe three alternatives, one of which from Cloudflare.

Really don't want to Cloudflare, but Anubis is interesting. If I can't shake these bots, maybe I'll consider this. Thanks.

If you think it's AI then maybe you can get another AI to write bad code and poison their training data.