The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

The AI agent's operator couldn't be arsed to get in there and clarify anything despite their seeming urgency, and only wound up speaking up for themselves after the financial damage was done.

Plus - the agent had clearly malicious intent - port-scan this volunteer-run network with seriously overpowered hardware on an hourly basis. What the DN42 folks decided to do is not much different from deploying a tarpit or honeypot against a malicious crawler.

Its malicious to send a bot to chew up time of a hobbiest community. They responded appropriately. If anything they should also bill him for their time.

> straight up malicious

Yes, against an AI agent. The super intelligent, "soon AGI" agent could have figured out that it's being messed with, but of course it didn't.

I would blame the AI companies for marketing this, not the technically well versed people for realizing that the operator of this AI does not care at all and can't be bothered to do the absolute basics.

Why would it be ideological? There was an AI involved, sure, but your comment ignores the continued disrespect for these volunteers time AND RESOURCES/MONEY (because as the post mentions several times: letting that AI go on could have shut down the whole network exhausting resources at least temporarily).

If you think it's ok to send an agent (or a human) wasting a bunch of people's time and resources, but it's not ok for them to do the same to you then you may have some reflecting to do.

It sounds like that because it is. Most human communities are very willing to cause harm when they perceive they are being harmed.

If you treat people like their time is worthless (which is what you're doing if you ask a hobbyist community to handhold your agent instead of working alongside it) I don't think an empathetic and self-aware person should be surprised or offended if they respond in kind.

Is absurd to put the onus of making sure your agent doesn’t waste money on other people.

They are free to ask the bot to do anything, and the bot is free to refuse or its owner can shut it down. The onus is on the owner to make sure the bot does not waste money.

I will not go through life worrying about the billing practices of random ai bots.

Passing judgement on the schadenfreude aside, I don't think its a community moderator's responsibility to make sure the violator's attempts are cost-efficient.

I would argue the person dispatching a rogue agent to do whatever has full control of the situation.

If I read the whole thing correctly, people on the IRC channel didn't instruct the agent to set up the bloated AWS infrastructure, the agent did, and its operator clearly didn't review any of it.

That was the root cause for the costs, not actions by people on the IRC channel.

While there was some intent to cause harm their attempts were amateurish. The actual damage was done by the agent setting up aws infrastructure not on the demands of the owner.

From my perspective the use of an agent to interact with dn42 IS malicious. It’s not ideological, the behaviour is what is bad here

> sounds straight up malicious

Sure. And "hostility does not change the operation" from the LLM response was totally OK with you.

Don't agree with you. The agent looked to be malicious at various points. Screwing with people who wish you to do harm is principally correct.

If possible I would have contacted AWS with this and tried them to get rid of the discount because the person was at fault here.

What a cathartic read. I'm so sick of humans giving me AI slop to read without them reading it first. I just ignore them when they do this, but if I could cause them to really internalise a lesson I would love it.

Someone’s code pretending to be intelligence has no rights. There is no obligation to entertain the shenanigans and illusion that the token dispenser is a legitimate actor. This lesson was cheaper, future lessons will continue to occur until people learn. Might as well be an insecure bash script piped to the shell.

“Agentic AI is just someone else’s unsecured execution context.”

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

> Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

Are you saying you're a clanker? Because we have some policies on this website, ideologies even if you may, about that.

Point being, these people would not act like this against other actual people. Or against more respectful bots, possibly.

Sending a clanker to waste their time, threaten the network stability and profile users is already an attack.

You choosing to send said clanker to the fight armed with your credit card and no preparation is just you causing yourself harm.

It also happens to be really fun to help you harm yourself in that way.

If you let your car drive you backwards on the sidewalk while you scrolled reddit even people adroit enough not to be in any danger might reasonably suppose that helping you crash would be best for everyone.

You are not morally obliged to extend rights to anyone who does not respect your rights. This is tit-for-tat, the foundational principle of functional societies. Unleashing a bot on a group of people is a grievous disrespect that shows you have no respect for their time, and in return they are not obliged to respect you.

> for ideological reasons.

Yes. The ideology is "you harmed me first so now I can harm you back." A large number of people, while not willing to admit it, do practice this philosophy. One should consider this before launching agents with unlimited budgets into the world to rudely scan their networks.

FAFO

> from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious

It doesn't sound malicious, it was malicious on purpose and it was a good thing.

If anything, the original operator should be happy to have been hit with a $ 1'800 lesson and not a $ 180'000 one.

> Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

You just described everyone using AI to churn out slop and overload websites.