Re: New chatbot AI companions for poorly socialised agentic developers

+ <3 !

Sincerely,

Giovanni Maruzzelli
OpenTelecom.IT
cell: +39 347 266 56 18


On Wed, Apr 1, 2026, 16:49 Alex Balashov via sr-users <
[email protected]> wrote:

> For immediate release:
>
> ATLANTA, Georgia (1 April 2026)--Evariste Systems are pleased to announce
> a fully
> inked partnership with the Kamailio project to provide a specially
> fine-tuned
> AI chatbot companion for poorly socialised developers who submit
> AI-generated
> pull requests to open-source projects.
>
> The problem of AI-generated pull requests (PRs) has become endemic in
> recent
> months in many telecom-related open-source projects, including Kamailio and
> Asterisk. These pull requests consist of minimal developer involvement or
> comprehension of the code submitted, and proffer a narrative form widely
> referred
> to as "AI slop", consisting of signature large language model (LLM)
> authorial
> traits such as emojis, inaccurate or overly general bullet points,
> emdashes,
> trite clichés, often adopting a cloying, hokey tone.
>
> Alex Balashov, chairman of Evariste, was on hand to outline the novel
> findings
> of Evariste's ongoing research programme into this peculiar phenomenon.
>
> Balashov first recapitulated the well-known problems with AI slop PRs for
> the
> benefit of a more general audience:
>
> "Contributions to open-source projects, like code contributions to any
> software
> project, go into a living organism and must be properly metabolised.  Most
> challenges of software development are not code-shaped. Given a practically
> infinite ability to generate code, the bottleneck is unquestionably human
> bandwidth: what are we doing and why? If we do not ask these questions,
> 'vibe-coded' projects degenerate from the accumulation of design entropy
> and
> errors, hallucinations and so on.
>
> In addition, there is of course the problem of accountability for code
> created
> outside of one's mental control, as well as subtle incompatibilities with
> project practices and established culture of problem-solving, potential
> intellectual property claims by AI companies in the future, and lots of
> other
> complications. But the most basic fallacy of AI slop pushers is plugging a
> fire hydrant into the water pipes of a house and expecting a fire hose
> worth of
> water pressure from the residential plumbing of their kitchen faucet."
>
> The problems Balashov describes have led many open-source projects to adopt
> rapidly evolving manifestos or contribution policies related to AI, with a
> special focus on generated patches and commit messages in which the human
> contributor appeared to have minimal involvement.
>
> As a frontier expert on the psychological dimension of this social problem,
> Balashov shared the arc of clinical thinking over the past year or so:
>
> "We have tended to think of this as an intellectual problem. There were two
> camps here: on the one hand, people who thought it was just a failure of
> understanding--that if we just tell them why this is bad, they'll stop
> doing
> it, or maybe if we craft a sufficiently in-tune policy to fit the cultural
> moment or something. On the other hand, there were people who thought this
> was
> a developmental disorder. Some said it was a kind of cretinism."
>
> Balashov paused to note: "The cretinism angle seemed the closest fit, and I
> have to admit, on the surface, it's still the most persuasive. Much as the
> stigma has been removed from many mental health topics over the years, we
> have
> come around to a more nuanced and compassionate view.
>
> This is essentially an emotional problem, an outgrowth of incapacity to
> relate to
> normal human beings, an inability to construct an adequate theory of mind
> and
> get inside the head of another. There is a throughline here to more
> traditional
> pathologies of Silicon Valley technocracy, as in the idea that all
> problems of
> politics, governance, morality, and so on can be understood as an
> insufficiency
> of apps or code, that what hungry people in extreme poverty most need is
> to be
> showered with iPads, that kind of thing. Just one more app, one more
> platform,
> and all will be solved.
>
> At root, it's a paucity of socialisation and acculturation in the digital
> age.
> These are deeply lonely people who are first and foremost keyed to interact
> with inert and lifeless machines, not people. To them, Github usernames of
> fellow human beings represent something no more conscious or alive than a
> jackhammer."
>
> Balashov added abruptly: "From a comorbidity and confounder standpoint,
> which
> impacts study design, this pathology is coeval with the much-discussed 'AI
> psychosis', or what James Howard Kunstler--in talking about American-style
> suburban automobile sprawl--called 'technosis externality clusterfuck.'
> This
> makes it challenging to address. They don't understand how ridiculous these
> pull requests look from the outside, that any normal person can tell their
> code was spit out by Claude, and even when it's pointed out to them, they
> don't
> see the problem. They can't hear this critique because they don't really
> connect
> with normal humans, just the Hacker News comments section."
>
> And where to go from here?
>
> "Sadly," said Balashov with a heavy sigh, "where we've landed is that this
> defective mentality is so widespread that we can't really put the milk back
> into the cow at this point. We have to move on to a strategy of
> containment,
> the way we limit the damage blast radius of all deeply antisocial
> phenomena."
>
> Asked about seemingly obvious parallels to the institutionalisation of
> mental
> health patients or the American carceral state, Balashov was quick to
> dismiss
> the validity of such a comparison.
>
> "We're not proposing to confine LLM slop-slingers to a padded room,
> although
> many would welcome that. They are able to carry on as free individuals in a
> free society. What we need is fundamentally a way to absorb their energy,
> to
> let them spin their wheels in a way that results in the least vandalism to
> open source."
>
> Asked by a member of the business press about the Kamailio and Asterisk
> connection, Balashov said that due to the close involvement of Evariste
> Systems with both projects, he has unwittingly had the opportunity to
> conduct
> retrospective studies on sufficiently large data sets of pull requests and
> forum posts with AI slop.
>
> "What makes these projects interesting is that they rely on relatively
> specialised domain knowledge, as open-source goes--these aren't REST
> microservices or JavaScript widgets or something--so the contours of the
> ignorance stand in sharper relief. I think this is what attracted our
> research
> interest."
>
> Balashov continued:
>
> "You know the Napoleon complex, of course. The thing that keeps surfacing
> is
> something akin to a delusion of grandeur, that one is being 'agentic'.
> That's
> what we keep finding. These people, who by and large have lacked agency
> with
> code throughout their lives, have allowed themselves to believe that they
> have
> now transcended the need to 'think in code', that they are 'embracing
> exponentials' with 'parallel agents' and thinking about 'business
> requirements'. Incidentally, on the 'thinking in code' thing, they don't
> seem
> to have asked themselves why they call it a large language model, but I
> digress. Anyway, it dawned on us that what we really need is to somehow get
> these people feeling 'agentic', but take away the sharp objects.
>
> This leads us to the companion chatbot. Its sole social interface is as a
> Github commenter. I won't go into the details of the post-training or all
> our LoRAs, but we have tuned it uniquely to the clinical texture of the
> 'agentic' delusion."
>
> To further questions of tuning, Balashov remarked: "Look, it does a lot of
> stuff that would be hard for people with relatively normal social habits,
> like
> journalists, to understand, but it's stuff that you can't just stuff
> inside a
> system prompt or push into context.
>
> For one, it's laser-focused on talking in terms of 'SWE benchmarks', it
> does
> extensive mock code reviews, simulated grateful patch acceptances, and
> offers
> sycophantic commentary to reassure the author that they're 'really on the
> right
> track with all these agents', and it generates what we call 'honeypot'
> Github
> projects. We can't disclose what these are, of course, but it'll be
> obvious to
> most people with an adequately developed medial prefrontal cortex.
> Naturally,
> the projects are thematically tuned to attract these people like a dim
> light
> attracts insects.  One of our staff doctors seemed to find that they
> respond
> best to 'AI agent harnesses', whatever that is."
>
> Do these chatbot companions do anything special to 'gameify' the
> experience,
> we wondered?
>
> "They do, actually!" said Balashov. "They're really big on rewarding the
> user
> for littering the project with .md (Markdown) files. These tortured souls
> are
> really big on 'skills', so there is a lot of thumbs-up emojis and effusive
> praise for adding them to the project. In fact, one is incentivised to
> make as
> many Markdown 'skill' files as possible. It'll do fun stuff like randomly
> assign a bug to especially prolific users, and it'll say, 'bro, if u dont
> add a
> skill for this we r so cooked frfrfr.'
>
> It will keep them busy. This is the overriding
> need.  It's like that species in Star Trek: Voyager, back in the day, the
> Hirogen, if you understand that reference.  They were hunters, and above
> all
> else, they simply needed to hunt. They were eventually given a holodeck in
> which they could holographically simulate the thrill of the hunt without
> actually hunting sentient beings. It's a bit like that. There's no Star
> Trek
> like 1990s Star Trek."
>
> Balashov also confirmed rumours that the new AI chatbot companion requires
> every user to pay for a Claude Max subscription.
>
> "We took some real incoming for this one. It's true that setting it loose
> with
> that many tokens is planet-warming, but so-called 'agentic prompt
> engineers'
> are going to burn the tokens anyway. We'd rather they burn the tokens and
> warm
> the planet in these sandboxes where they can do less harm, and we figure
> the
> compute they use for 'vibe-coding' will take away from the global share of
> compute that can be allocated toward vandalism of serious code
> repositories."
>
> On the future of these specialised AI chatbot companions, Balashov was
> notably
> coy: "It depends on where they want to 'embrace exponentials' next, to be
> honest.  We're sticking with Github as a paradigm for now, but nothing's
> off
> the table.  Gambling and erotic modes pose obvious legal challenges, but
> do you
> want to piss into the wind explaining why vibe-coded SIP stacks are bad to
> someone with an advanced case of chatbot psychosis? We've moved from a
> cure to
> palliative harm mitigation."
>
> --
> Alex Balashov
> Principal Consultant
> Evariste Systems LLC
> Web: https://evaristesys.com, https://www.csrpswitch.com
> Tel: +1-706-510-6800
>
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