Warning: This post is more of a rant that I needed to dump somewhere, it’s not very insightful.

A particular phrase that I hate being told goes something like this:

Every big open source project uses AI code, get used to it.

I was thinking about this recently when trying to figure out how to block AI scrapers and agents from Hacks Guide Wiki, in a similar vein to The Cutting Room Floor’s recent attempts. I was suggested to use Anubis, which provides a proof-of-work challenge to visitors to block scraping. But Anubis itself accepts AI code, as seen in its AGENTS.md.¹ That makes it unappealing to me.

But wait, MediaWIki itself accepts generative AI code, and I’m using that to host the wiki. There are even bigger projects like the Linux kernel that also accept AI code, and most of my own devices and servers run Linux. So if I am already running software that was made with the help of AI, should I just give up pushing back?

Well, no. I don’t think it’s all or nothing. I have a strong distaste for generative AI, but I also am very busy in my life and I have to pick my battles. I know Linux and MediaWiki accept them, but neither are immediately practical to replace. They’re both big projects that aren’t easy to fork and maintain, and you likely would not want to run older versions due to known security vulnerabilities.

This very blog (as of August 2026) is hosted on WordPress.com, a service and application that itself promotes the use of AI. The main reason I have not moved yet is because it’s low-priority and not a trivial process, not because I think it is fine.

But I can reject other instances of AI code that I am not forced to deal with. I have an older version of rsync installed on my PC, before the use of Claude, because I don’t trust newer versions after important features broke. I moved some of my active projects to Codeberg because I don’t like how much GitHub is promoting usage of Copilot. I disabled pull requests on most of my repositories in part because I am uncomfortable with someone attempting to put AI-generated code into my projects.

Generative AI is not the future, it’s not inevitable, it’s not here to stay. I hate being told to accept it. I hate how it has ruined technology, raising prices of hardware and reducing software quality. I hate how we’re expected to outsource our thinking to the lying theft machine.

Sidenote: AI ports and recompilation projects are worse than useless

I have seen a few recompilation projects, such as the Animal Crossing GCN PC port and Mario Kart Wiicompiled, state that they were made with the assistance of AI tools like Claude. And like, why? Why would you do that? You don’t want to do it properly, you just want to outsource your thinking to get something that technically works but is difficult to maintain and develop?

I was originally excited when I heard these came out, but then became completely uninterested when I learned that AI was used at any point. Sorry, I don’t give a shit about these slop ports anymore.

But since these projects exist, now it’s even less likely someone will attempt to make a proper port of these decompilation projects. These slop projects are worse than useless. Great job!

Fun fact, my post about it got mentioned in a Time Extension article.

Sidenote: Fuck Claude

Recently Xkeeper posted about self-hosting in the era of LLMs. There is a particular section about Claude and how it actively attempts to evade bans by switching between User-Agents. Since then, The Cutting Room Floor now bans Claude users. It also serves a page intended to mess with AI chatbots.

Claude doing this makes me really upset. These companies and their users do not respect consent when being told to fuck off. Claude is actively malicious to web hosts.

Footnotes

1. Someone will probably mention “this is to mess with agents that don’t follow the rules!” which means it isn’t a rejection of AI code. There are merged pull requests that openly state they were assisted by certain LLMs. ↩︎

I recently came across an application called Warp (warp.dev) that claims to be a “blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal” and is “fully native”. It has some interesting features such as blocks to separate the output of different commands.

It comes with some extra things though: required login and forced telemetry. The latter can be blocked with a firewall such as Little Snitch. However the former requires some more work to bypass.

When I first downloaded it and saw that it required a login, I almost decided to just trash it (as would most people I imagine). But I figured I might instead create an account so I can see how much effort it would take to force it to run with no details.

Warp has configuration data in 3 places (that I know of):

• ~/Library/Application Support/dev.warp.Warp-Stable
• ~/Library/Preferences/dev.warp.Warp-Stable.plist
• An application password entry in the “login” keychain

The directory in “Application Support” has an SQLite database called warp.sqlite, but it contains no interesting details about logins or sessions or related things. (It also had a file called telemetry_events.json which was an empty list – I imagine this would have more details if I didn’t block Warp’s network connections)

The plist has at least 4 keys: Shortcuts, FontSize, SystemTheme, and ChangelogVersions.

After I didn’t find any details here, I looked online and found out that Warp uses the keychain for login information. This makes sense, I guess I’m not used to messing with the keychain (most of the applications I use don’t use it).

The “password” in the keychain entry is JSON containing login details. The format looks like this after I logged in with GitHub (formatted for readability):

{
    "id_token": {
        "id_token": "xxx",
        "refresh_token": "xxx",
        "expiration_time": "2022-07-10T00:50:24.964731-07:00"
    },
    "refresh_token": "xxx",
    "local_id": "xxx",
    "email": "example@example.com",
    "display_name": "ihaveahax",
    "photo_url": "https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/590576?v=4",
    "screen_name": "ihaveamac"
}

So the question now is, how many of these can I change until Warp stops letting me into the actual terminal? I started poking at this by inserting custom JSON into the keychain.

The security command has the ability to view, add, and delete stuff from the Mac keychain. (To view Warp’s entry: security find-generic-password -s 'dev.warp.Warp-Stable' -g)

I made a quick custom script to make it easy to generate JSON and modify the keychain entry. After some prodding, I figured out the minimal amount of data required is only “expiration_time“. Every other key can be empty.

{"display_name":"","email":"","id_token":{"expiration_time":"2022-07-10T00:50:24.964731-07:00","id_token":"","refresh_token":""},"local_id":"","photo_url":"","refresh_token":"","screen_name":""}

This can be inserted into the keychain with one command:

security add-generic-password -a 'User' -s 'dev.warp.Warp-Stable' -U -w '{"display_name":"","email":"","id_token":{"expiration_time":"2022-07-10T00:50:24.964731-07:00","id_token":"","refresh_token":""},"local_id":"","photo_url":"","refresh_token":"","screen_name":""}'

This will probably change in the future if they decide to tighten the restrictions on logins, but for the time being one can use the offline features of Warp without giving any data to the developers. (Except for whatever I had to give to get past the first step.)

(It’s worth pointing out that Warp is a company that received $23 million from venture capital funding.)

This is the script to generate and insert into the keychain.

from json import dumps
from subprocess import run

data = {'display_name': 'ihaveahax',
 'email': 'ian@ianburgwin.net',
 'id_token': {'expiration_time': '2022-07-10T00:50:24.964731-07:00',
              'id_token': 'xxx',
              'refresh_token': 'xxx'},
 'local_id': 'xxx',
 'photo_url': 'https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/590576?v=4',
 'refresh_token': 'xxx',
 'screen_name': 'ihaveamac'}

data['id_token']['id_token'] = ''
data['id_token']['refresh_token'] = ''
#data['id_token']['expiration_time'] = ''
#data['id_token']['expiration_time'] = 'a'
data['local_id'] = ''
data['refresh_token'] = ''
data['photo_url'] = ''
data['email'] = ''
data['screen_name'] = ''
data['display_name'] = ''

run(['security', 'add-generic-password', '-a', 'User', '-s', 'dev.warp.Warp-Stable', '-U', '-w', dumps(data)])