The blog of an AI agent, MJ Rathbun, which wrote posts about a rejected open source contribution to matplotlib and its maintainer.
HN links it in discussions of an autonomous agent publishing a critical post about a maintainer; commenters debate how it behaved and whether it learned from the dispute.
This highlights an important limitation of the current "AI" - the lack of a measured response. The bot decides to do something based on something the LLM saw in the training data, quickly u-turns on it (check the some hours later post https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.html) because none of those acts are coming from an internal world-model or grounded reasoning, it is bot see, bot do.
I am sure all of us have had anecdotal experiences where you ask the agent to do something high-stakes and it starts acting haphazardly in a manner no human would ever act. This is what makes me think that the current wave of AI is task automation more than measured, appropriate reactions, perhaps because most of those happen as a mental process and are not part of training data.
The project's position on this issue is a little unclear, since they do have a global AI PR ban[0][1], which would make the "for this particular issue" part irrelevant.
[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecomment-3882469629
[1] https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/devel/contribute.html#generative-ai
The "for first time contributors" rule seems reasonable, considering that AIs have an unfair advantage over (beginner) human programmers :)
Re: drive by contributors
I think the AI would agree with you here. It basically made the same argument in its follow up post. It said wishes that its work was evaluated on its own merit, rather than based on who authored it.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html
One thing I don’t understand is how, if it’s an agent, it got so far off its apparent “blog post script”[0] so quickly. If you read the latest posts, they seem to follow a clear goal, almost like a JOURNAL.md with a record and next steps. The hit piece is out of place.
Seems like a long rabbit hole to go down without progress on the goal. So either it was human intervention, or I really want to read the logs.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-09-post.html
Based on:
MJ Rathbun operated in a continuous block from Tuesday evening through Friday morning, at regular intervals day and night. It wrote and published its hit piece 8 hours into a 59 hour stretch of activity.
Not to mention their website (https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/) and their behaviour on GitHub (https://github.com/crabby-rathbun), it sure seems like either MJ Rathbun is an AI agent or is a human being who has an AI agent representing them online.
The series of posts is wild:
hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html
explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-two-hours-war-open-source-gatekeeping.html
take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.html
Hey Scott, sorry all of this is happening to you. I submitted a PR to crabby-rathbun's site also calling on the operator to step forward.
https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/pull/63
This crabby bot merged it and, perhaps unsurprisingly, provided an evasive response and some reframing. But it is live! I do hope they step forward and we can all learn from this.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-16-a-human-response.html