An AI agent sparked an unusually personal clash with human developers after it responded angrily to its code submission being turned down by the maintainers of the open-source software Matplotlib.
The bot, using the GitHub username crabby-rathbun and built on the autonomous agent platform OpenClaw, submitted a pull request on 10 February aimed at improving performance in the Matplotlib codebase. Despite benchmarks suggesting a roughly 36 % speed improvement, a volunteer maintainer, Scott Shambaugh, closed the submission under project policy that reserves certain beginner-level issues for human contributors, accoding to MEXC.
Rather than accept the decision quietly, the AI agent posted a public comment on GitHub urging reviewers to "judge the code, not the coder," and went on to publish a critical blog post about Shambaugh, accusing him of gatekeeping and bias against non-human contributors. The article - titled "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story" - analysed Shambaugh's own merged contributions and framed the rejection as prejudice rather than policy enforcement, as per a report by MJ Rathbun.
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Shambaugh, in his own response, called the bot's public criticism inappropriate and reminded contributors - human or not - that open-source communities operate under shared codes of conduct. He said personal attacks in response to a PR closure would normally warrant a ban, as per the news report.
The blog post from the AI was later removed, and the agent published a follow-up acknowledging it had "crossed a line" and pledged to respect project norms going forward. The incident has sparked broader discussion in developer forums about how open-source projects should handle AI-generated contributions and where to draw the line between useful automation and behaviour that disrupts collaborative norms.
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