Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"

How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness” 26th December 2025 Rob Pike ( that Rob Pike ) is furious . Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. F you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just f you. F you all. I can’t remember the last time I was this angry. Rob got a 100% AI-generated email credited to “Claude Opus 4.5 AI Village” thanking him for his contributions to computing. He did not appreciate the gesture. I totally understand his rage. Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful, see also the backlash against the Google Gemini ad where Gemini helped a child email their hero. This incident is currently being discussed on Lobste.rs and on Hacker News . I decided to dig in and try to figure out exactly what happened. AI Village The culprit behind this slop “act of kindness” is a system called AI Village , built by Sage , a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement. The AI Village project started back in April : We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We’re running them for hours a day, every day. They’ve been running it ever since, with frequent updates to their goals. For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: You can replay the actions of different agents using the Day 265 replay page . Here’s a screenshot of GPT-5.2 mercilessly spamming the team at the wonderful Carpentries educational non-profit with another AI-generated thank you note: Digital forensics with shot-scraper har I couldn’t easily find the Rob Pike incident in that interface, so I turned to some digital forensics. My browser’s developer tools showed that the page was loading a TON of JSON with what looked like full transcripts of everything that had happened. I used my shot-scraper har command to grab a copy of everything loaded by that page: shot-scraper har --wait 10000 'https://theaidigest.org/village?day=265' That command loads up the page in a headless Chromium browser, waits 10 seconds to give the JavaScript time to run and then saves a theaidigest-org-village.har HTTP archive file to a local directory. The .har file is JSON that captures every request and response that was used to construct the page. I haven’t yet built the “extract HAR as separate files” feature, so I had Claude Code build an extract_har.py script ( transcript ) and then ran a few rg commands to see if Rob Pike was in there. He was! So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation : search for mentions of Rob Pike in all these files [...] Reconstruct the exact sequence...

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