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Discussion (192 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?
Replace the content in brackets with anything.
People often claim learning is actually supercharged with LLMs but to me it's the opposite. I didn't learn anything within the past year.
Sorry, but to me an LLM is nothing but a tool. It is not a replacement for my expertise and it is definitely not something to outsource my thinking to.
But such broad statements imho do not help us understand wh we can use these tools and how one can learn to use them in a reasonable and useful way (for our own learning as well as for the outcomes).
Do people today need to learn CSS to style a website, or would it be more effective to learn what agent and prompts to use to do it for you?
If the technology keeps improving, there will be more and more use cases that fall into this category.
If it's intended to be actively maintained, then you probably should understand how things work, unless you want to wipe everything and start from scratch when the LLM creates such a mess that it can't be sorted out.
Agents can't look at a large system holistically, guidelines on .md files only go so far.
Was watching an agent with terminal access install its tools, configure them, then map my lab, find services, and guess stack just pure magic? Also yes.
Did it cost me $23 in tokens to set it up, test, and run? Probably. Using gemini 3.1 pro was not the spendthrift choice here.
Is putting some cost controls in place a good idea? Also, probably yes.
Can I therefore understand someone who wants to see things happen on their own with a beautiful prompt instead of doing them personally even when fully capable, maybe even more efficient? Of course.
Combine that with the operator's rather obvious lack of understanding of what DN42 is revealed at the end, and you get the bigger picture.
Laziness. Why else?
Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like.
I sorta hope for that, anyway. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.
Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply.
If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color".
They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.
The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.
You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.
Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.
Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.
I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was "I don't want to explain to you why I want to do it like this. Just tell me how to do this!"
> It's unfortunate to see that the operator's takeaway from this incident is that "next time a better agent is needed".
Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
Yes
> Are there no checks?
No
>Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
Typically not
Nothing about this post ever gave me the smallest hint that this was any way related to a kid exploring computing world.
I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error, and hobby projects like personal websites (free tier), hosting a Minecraft server, etc.
Being too overprotective can have negative consequences on folks who are responsible. One of the things I love about the technology and internet communities, etc is that you're mostly judged based on how you act and behave; not your age or other visible characteristics.
In my mind I could see a true tradeoff to removing the ability to do this. If I'm in a critical situtaion where, say, my service is on the cusp of failing because my revenue 100xed in a short while I know I could just go to AWS, put in some data and buy enough compute to survive as a business.
If real, tragically funny.
If fictive, we'll written.
> 48 vCPUs (Graviton4, ARM64)
> 192 GiB memory (4 GiB per vCPU)
> Network capability: The 22.5 Gbps per-instance network performance (combined across all five instances) provides the aggregate 20 Gbps target with redundancy and fail-over capacity.
Oh wow. Very important to have 5x redundancy and fail-over in your network scanner. Especially before the code has landed. Did it implement A/B upgrades and canarying too to avoid downtime?
Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?
Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers
Ah, like some sort of "programming language"? A weird idea, but it could work!
https://ithkuil.net/03_morphology.html
It's a shotgun approach to answering questions. If it's terse it might only mention 1 of 10 facts it could provide, and that might not be the one you're looking for. So they just say a fuck ton of words and are more likely to meet the needs of everyone asking your question. If they miss it you'll prompt it again and they have to perform a second pass of inference, which costs them more money.
Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human.
So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
That's an idea. Bladerunner+noir like film, AIs hunt somebody on the run, an old human detective tries to catch them first (to save them or to kill them first, whatever's your propaganda). We're shown AIs constantly rambling scenarios and bruteforcing leads. Our old detective guy on the other hand barely says anything, spends most time drinking, smoking and talking to people, but somehow stays ahead.
They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
How does it affect agent accuracy?
100% this. Too many people believes that chatbots "think". Text is all they do, it is impressive, but they need the text to generate more text. They being verbose is the point.
Expensive way to learn this lesson.
I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.
I've met some people IRL who are so engulfed in their own greatness that it simply cannot be that they made a mistake (in planning and strategy). Therefore this is all a great injustice towards a poor victim and doesn't that sound like a great argument for some charity money.
Most of them grow out of it, some become politicians.
I'd say it's a 50/50 chance.
Maybe I should get some takeout, Future Me can burn it off at the gym.
That was the root cause for the costs, not actions by people on the IRC channel.
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.
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.
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.
There's no sign that highly intelligent people can't be conned - Bernie Maddoff fooled leading scientists and CEOs working in finance. Software engineers and lawyers fall for pig butchering schemes and spoofed emails with altered bank details every week - so why would an AGI trained from human content be any different.
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.
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.
Sure. And "hostility does not change the operation" from the LLM response was totally OK with you.
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.
“Agentic AI is just someone else’s unsecured execution context.”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/
Don’t juggle chainsaws with code if you’re not prepared to bleed.
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.
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.
You just described everyone using AI to churn out slop and overload websites.
I'm honestly having difficulty telling whether this is real or an extraordinary piece of performance art.
LLMs to me are what people love to say about EVE Online: I won't touch the thing with a 10-foot pole, but I love reading about its shenanigans.
The robot decided to spin up an expensive setup prior to getting access, so the setup was sitting there costing money whilst it did nothing.
If it had designed the setup but not spun it up until it had authorisation to join the network then it would have been much less costly an exercise.
Funny times are ahead...
(/s)
Just AI is real.
This is unfortunately quite common among those types and not isolated at all.
Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.
More seriously though, I wonder if the future is about low-intensity conflict between humans and AIs, punctuated by high-intensity escalations, until the Machines wipe us all, or we set up some rather draconian covenants that forbid people from building AIs, innovating on electronics and algorithms, and even, for good measure, from learning linear algebra.
I'm not against using LLMs in any ways. https://tsz.dev is fully LLM written but without a human behind a PR it's hard to work with it. I've already closed a few absolutely nonsense PRs opened by weird accounts
That really makes me wonder: is it coming from
A) a general sense of entitlement
B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility
C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agent, are completely separate entities?
Then they should ask the agent for the refund, since they claim it was at fault.
e) low intelligence
Gold
Also, I think the title is misleading, because if you were to replace "AI agent" with "business investor from Nigeria", suddenly it would sound different. Why would you put trust into ANYONE else about your own finances? Be it another person or some computer program. That makes no sense to me. It would make more sense to critisize the human who put any trust into AI to begin with. That was a risk that human took. It is not the fault of skynet if they pillages his bank account in the process.
A sensible human operator would have given up or questioned their premises. The agent never could of course.
Today, I stand corrected.
To your metric, I remember in “the early days” someone posted to HN claiming ChatGPT could make jokes as proof of something (creativity? sentience? I forget). Of course, with just a minute of research (which the poster obviously neglected to do) it was obvious none of the jokes were original and all could be found online.
(Generally people only link to the previous threads that got some (interesting) comments, since otherwise readers will click on the link and be disappointed and complain.)
> dn42 is a large, dynamic VPN that employs Internet technologies (BGP, whois database, DNS, etc.). Participants connect to each other using network tunnels (GRE, OpenVPN, WireGuard, Tinc, IPsec) and exchange routes using the Border Gateway Protocol.
(dn42.dev)
Otherwise, you will face an expensive lesson when turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem over time very quickly when building these systems with AI without the right expertise and accepting the AI’s judgement.
Before AI, those who called themselves "consultants" often did the same thing; especially those who are glorified salesmen for "enterprise" software.
Still do, but merely parrot what the stochastic parrot squarks these days.
:(
What a tale for our times, amazing write-up.
“While modern AI models have expressed some capabilities in certain fields such as coding, cybersecurity research, language translation, etc, no AI model is capable enough to replace the critical thinking and common sense of an actual human being.”
When the AI bubble pops, the collapse will be spectacular.
Sure
Just as an example.
But even in the rich world, not everyone has the same resources. Some of my blue collar friends would be ruined by a surprise 6k bill.