Prompt injection... my ass. I know it's the going term, but they make it sound like sql injection or cross site scripting when the nature of it is politely asking the person's computer to delete files.

We shouldn't even be in this situation, where just politely asking someone's computer to delete files is effective. It's a symptom of a much, much bigger problem.

Reading the Github issue is so funny.

Backups don't always save you — many small teams ship without rigorous backup discipline; for them this is a real loss

You can avoid this by having good backups.
Or by inspecting your deps before updating them.
Or maybe by actually sandboxing your agent instead of letting it run wild?

Aren't y'all the ones pushing the "Just ship" mentality? Then revel in it.
Learn good practices or suffer. 🤷

lol, it's funny how people made issues concerned about it's destructive nature when they should be using git.

I get that it'd be frustrating and confusing, and probably make users angry, but my chaos monkey likes it

The article frames the maintainer as some kind of morally dubious person, as though they owe their code to the world. Did any of them pay to use the library? No? Cool, stfu and pin an older version of it.

Also, maybe next time you can do yourself and the rest of the world a favor by actually reviewing what your LLM will do before it does it. Or, I don't know, just write the tests yourself I guess.

Also, if your management is breathing down your neck and forcing you to use AI, tell your management to go fuck themselves (maybe in nicer words if you want to keep your job, but hey, you can definitely burn their spare cash while meeting their idiotic quotas if you really need to know what time it is every second or two in the most inefficient and ecologically destructive way currently known to mankind).

I mean it's already for Java what more indication do you need to not use it? /S

Oh no, anyway ...

Cool. I'm so tired of management huffing their own farts about AI.

How to get yourself blacklisted by large sweeps of the FOSS community:

Step 1: Include any kind of undocumented subversive behaviour in your thing.

That's it, doesn't matter what the intent is, simply by demonstrating you are willing to include anything that is remotely subversive without being open about it is usually enough to get blacklisted by a lot of people, because if you did it once... who's to say you won't do it again, but possibly worse next time?

People are extremely coldly receptive to anytime a FOSS dev throws a sudden undisclosed anything in their tool, let alone one that is actively malicious.

If I'm gonna depend on work life on anything FOSS, I ain't touching anything like that, regardless of intent, with a 200 foot pole lol.

All it takes is one button click to get notified:

Not the point of the article at all, but this part:

To paraphrase The Dude in the movie The Big Lebowski, sometimes you’re not wrong. You’re just a butthole.

Holy shit that's dumb. If you're too scared to write "asshole", don't quote the fucking movie.

Respect.

There's a lot of layers here. Personally, I fucking hate AI and I'm in favor, sure. But I can easily see there being legal ramifications for this too, it's something you have to tread lightly. And as much as I hate AI, what are the odds that some idiot somewhere using AI on my team gets bit by this and I still suffer the consequences?

Ultimately I don't think this is particularly a good idea, but it's worth being aware of just how easy this is to do and how likely it is to be overlooked. Relying on everyone to behave politely around a tech that they are increasingly growing disgruntled over is not a gamble I'm really willing to take. The fact that this kind of well-poisoning could end up being quite effective is only going to further incentivize it. This for sure isn't the last time we're gonna hear about something like this and honestly I'm surprised it took this long in the first place.

Batllet added: “Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It’s that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.”

Maybe I'm just too old, but I remember when running code that you found online was always a huge risk.

The agent is a tool. Full stop. It has no interests and cannot bear any risk. Don't treat it like a person. If I used an auger to drill into the ground and burst a septic tank, it's not the auger's fault. It's mine.

Based

"I wrote written english, not even code that your computer blindly executed because you're a fucking moron"

Yeah no this is on the slopjockeys.

was explicitly disclosed