Seems gemini-cli and gemini-cli didn't understand who themselves were, so they though someone else added/removed the label, which it tried to correct, which the other then tried to correct, which the other...
Considering that that repository has what seems like ~10 longer term contributors, who probably get email notifications, together with a bunch of other people who get notifications about it, wonder how many emails were sent out because of this? If we just assume ten people get the emails, it's already 46K emails going out in under 24 hours...
Also, who pays for the inference of this gemini-cli? Clicking the "user" links to https://github.com/apps/gemini-cli, and it has a random GitHub user under "Developer", doesn't seem like it's a official Google project, so did someone pay for all of these inference calls here? That'd be a pretty sucky bill to pay...
The owner is a Google employee, but for the sake of safety it should be owned by a real Google org. I've just asked them to migrate it to their OSS org.
Unfortunately the app creation flow on GitHub makes it impossible (for now) for a normal org user to create an app for the org, so apps end up getting created on personal accounts and become load bearing. We've got a work item to make it possible to give app creation rights to your org members, I've got it high on the priority list for the next six months.
Re:payment
As I understand it each org that uses the gemini cli agent puts their api key in their actions secrets, which gets picked up and used to call Google inference APIs. So the org these comments are in is paying for the inference.
The first event-driven agent I ever built ran into this style of bug. The bot had a name, it knew the name, but what it didn't know is that the name could show up as a user ID in various forms and then it didn't know how to recognize itself. Every view the agent has needs to be curated towards the agents understanding of itself and the world around it, you can't just spew API results at it.
Some are saying there is no more room for junior employees in all of this, but it seems like these LLM spasms generate lots of disruption that would be at appropriate levels of complexity and priority for juniors to be handling.
> Considering that that repository has what seems like ~10 longer term contributors, who probably get email notifications, together with a bunch of other people who get notifications about it, wonder how many emails were sent out because of this? If we just assume ten people get the emails, it's already 46K emails going out in under 24 hours...
Unless GitHub are idiots they batch email updates to mitigate this
> did someone pay for all of these inference calls here?
Considering that these responses are all the exact same two replies in wording, and that this is a task which could be easily automated without AI, I seriously doubt that it's going to be caused by actual inference.
Heh. This reminds me of the time when our newly hired "Salesforce Expert" improved our support queue:
Every time Support received a new email, a ticket in Salesforce would be created and assigned to Support
Every time Support was assigned a new ticket, Salesforce would send a notification email
The worst part is he wouldn't admit to the mistake and it took us forever to find where he buried the rule.
I can remember something like this a few years ago when a customer emailed our helpdesk with their own internal IT support desk in copy. Our helpdesk at the time sent a complete new email acknowledging the request, which the customer's desk ALSO acknowledged in a new thread...
I think it took us a good hour and a few hundred tickets to get the helpdesks to stop fighting with each other!
I only used salesforce once (was “forced” to use it haha) and it was mind boggling how anyone would ever want to use it or even become an expert in using it.
Maybe 20 years ago... As a student, the school had an email server that allowed rules to be set. You could set an email to be sent as a result of another email.
IT were not stupid though, and set a series of rules:
1. You cannot have a rule trigger to email yourself.
2. You cannot reply to an email triggered by a rule.
3. You have ~50MB max of emails (which was a lot at the time).
Playing around one lunch, my friend had setup a "not in office" automated reply, I setup a rule to reply to any emails within our domain with a "not in office", but put their name in TO, CC and BCC. It turns out that this caused rule #2 not to trigger. After setting up the same rule on my friend's email, and sending a single email, the emails fired approximately one every 30 seconds.
A few hours later we returned to our email boxes to realise that there were thousands and thousands of emails. At some point we triggered rule #3, which in turn sent an email "out of space", with a small embedded school logo. Each one of these emails triggered our email rule, which in turn triggered an email "could not send message", again with an embedded logo. We desperately tried to delete all of the emails, but it just made way for more emails. We eventually had to abandon our efforts to delete the emails, and went to class.
About an hour later, the email server failed. Several hours later all domain logins failed. It turned out that logins were also run on the email server.
The events were then (from what I was told by IT):
* Students could not save their work to their network directory.
* New students could not login.
* Teachers could not login to take registers or use the SMART white boards.
* IT try to login to the server, failure.
* IT try to reboot the server, failure.
* IT take the server apart and attempt to mount the disk - for whatever reason, also failure.
* IT rebuild the entire server software.
* IT try to restore data from a previous backup, failure. Apparently the backup did not complete.
* IT are forced to recover from a working backup from two weeks previous.
All from one little email rule. I was banned from using all computers for 6 months. When I finally did get access, there was a screen in the IT office that would show my display at all times when logged in. Sometimes IT would wiggle my mouse to remind me that they were there, and sometimes I would open up Notepad and chat to them.
P.S. Something happened on the IT system a year later, and they saw I was logged in. They ran to my class, burst through the door, screamed by username and dragged me away from the keyboard. My teacher was in quite some shock, and then even more shocked to learn that I had caused the outage about a year earlier.
A similar issue made HN last week, same repo, where an AI bot was having the same kind of argument with itself over and over on an issue. Someone mentioned: This sort of thing is why RAM is 800 bucks now.
Script author here :-) This was due to two different GitHub Action workflows:
(Workflow 1): Remove the need-triage label under certain conditions.
(Workflow 2): If anyone outside a project maintainer removes a label, re-add it with a friendly message explaining why.
Submitted those at like 10 or 11 pm and went to sleep. Woke up to all issues that got changed overnight with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these messages.
Cause: Workflow 2 should have checked for project maintainers but also other bots and automation that might also be clearing labels. It got fixed immediately once we realized the issue.
I learned the hard way to always implement a circuit breaker for event-driven triggers like this. We use a simple Redis counter with a short TTL to rate limit execution and fail fast if it detects a loop. It is standard practice in backend queues like Celery but easy to overlook in CI configurations.
This issue seems to involve Gemini-cli[bot] squabbling with itself, adding and removing the label from the issue (leaving contradictory explanation comments to itself each time) for a good 4,600 rounds
What "classic CI bug" makes bots talk with each other forever? Been doing CI for as long as I've been a professional developer, and not even once I've had that issue.
I've made "reply bots" before, bunch of times, first time on IRC, and pretty much the second or third step is "Huh, probably this shouldn't be able to reply to itself, then it'll get stuck in a loop". But that's hardly a "classic CI bug", so don't think that is what you're referring to here right?
To be clear, is AI actually at play here, aside from the fact that the repo is for Gemini? It just looks like two simple rules that interact poorly, that we could've seen in 2015.
Well, it's even more ironic as AI in general is touted as smart. I'd fully expect such bots to notice they're in a loop and one to throw the towel. Still a long way to AGI. And to AI for that matter.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be an issue report claiming to be a PR? Where's the patch?
Edit: there's actually a PR, but this is one of those repos where for some reason, they require every PR to have an associated issue. And in this case, they aren't even linked...
This will soon be happening with our parents' social security checks, our friend's cancer treatment plan, our international flights logistics, our ISPs routing configurations, ...
Ironically this is type of issue is common in pre-LLM (rules-based) AI. Given that the back-and-forth messages are the same, I suspect they're generated by a small script, not an LLM. But I wouldn't be surprised if the script was created mostly or entirely by an LLM.
I think the real irony is an LLM trying to enforce permissions at all. Why is it doing that? If the tag exists, the user had the permission to create it, no?
in the old days one would add and check for a loop detection token when loops like this could be driven by external systems... i wonder if today it would be as simple as adding "ensure you don't get stuck in any loops" to a prompt.
fwiw. doesn't look like gemini at all, the responses are perfectly canned... maybe just good old fashioned ci rules.
It's a language model. It doesn't know what a loop is, or have any awareness of that the content it's replying to may be made by itself - as it has no sense of 'self'.
embedding-shape|1 month ago
> 4609 remaining items
Seems gemini-cli and gemini-cli didn't understand who themselves were, so they though someone else added/removed the label, which it tried to correct, which the other then tried to correct, which the other...
Considering that that repository has what seems like ~10 longer term contributors, who probably get email notifications, together with a bunch of other people who get notifications about it, wonder how many emails were sent out because of this? If we just assume ten people get the emails, it's already 46K emails going out in under 24 hours...
Also, who pays for the inference of this gemini-cli? Clicking the "user" links to https://github.com/apps/gemini-cli, and it has a random GitHub user under "Developer", doesn't seem like it's a official Google project, so did someone pay for all of these inference calls here? That'd be a pretty sucky bill to pay...
TACD|1 month ago
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16725
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16732
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16734
hirsin|1 month ago
Unfortunately the app creation flow on GitHub makes it impossible (for now) for a normal org user to create an app for the org, so apps end up getting created on personal accounts and become load bearing. We've got a work item to make it possible to give app creation rights to your org members, I've got it high on the priority list for the next six months.
Re:payment As I understand it each org that uses the gemini cli agent puts their api key in their actions secrets, which gets picked up and used to call Google inference APIs. So the org these comments are in is paying for the inference.
oooyay|1 month ago
m0llusk|1 month ago
sneak|1 month ago
It’s not just bots that fall into this trap.
philipwhiuk|1 month ago
Unless GitHub are idiots they batch email updates to mitigate this
eviks|1 month ago
Sophira|1 month ago
Considering that these responses are all the exact same two replies in wording, and that this is a task which could be easily automated without AI, I seriously doubt that it's going to be caused by actual inference.
PyWoody|1 month ago
bedatadriven|1 month ago
I think it took us a good hour and a few hundred tickets to get the helpdesks to stop fighting with each other!
pousada|1 month ago
I’d rather track everything in a giant excel tyvm
bArray|1 month ago
IT were not stupid though, and set a series of rules:
1. You cannot have a rule trigger to email yourself.
2. You cannot reply to an email triggered by a rule.
3. You have ~50MB max of emails (which was a lot at the time).
Playing around one lunch, my friend had setup a "not in office" automated reply, I setup a rule to reply to any emails within our domain with a "not in office", but put their name in TO, CC and BCC. It turns out that this caused rule #2 not to trigger. After setting up the same rule on my friend's email, and sending a single email, the emails fired approximately one every 30 seconds.
A few hours later we returned to our email boxes to realise that there were thousands and thousands of emails. At some point we triggered rule #3, which in turn sent an email "out of space", with a small embedded school logo. Each one of these emails triggered our email rule, which in turn triggered an email "could not send message", again with an embedded logo. We desperately tried to delete all of the emails, but it just made way for more emails. We eventually had to abandon our efforts to delete the emails, and went to class.
About an hour later, the email server failed. Several hours later all domain logins failed. It turned out that logins were also run on the email server.
The events were then (from what I was told by IT):
* Students could not save their work to their network directory.
* New students could not login.
* Teachers could not login to take registers or use the SMART white boards.
* IT try to login to the server, failure.
* IT try to reboot the server, failure.
* IT take the server apart and attempt to mount the disk - for whatever reason, also failure.
* IT rebuild the entire server software.
* IT try to restore data from a previous backup, failure. Apparently the backup did not complete.
* IT are forced to recover from a working backup from two weeks previous.
All from one little email rule. I was banned from using all computers for 6 months. When I finally did get access, there was a screen in the IT office that would show my display at all times when logged in. Sometimes IT would wiggle my mouse to remind me that they were there, and sometimes I would open up Notepad and chat to them.
P.S. Something happened on the IT system a year later, and they saw I was logged in. They ran to my class, burst through the door, screamed by username and dragged me away from the keyboard. My teacher was in quite some shock, and then even more shocked to learn that I had caused the outage about a year earlier.
trgn|1 month ago
Salesforce is such an ugly beast
pinkmuffinere|1 month ago
ryandrake|1 month ago
omoikane|1 month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636291
bdmorgan|1 month ago
(Workflow 1): Remove the need-triage label under certain conditions.
(Workflow 2): If anyone outside a project maintainer removes a label, re-add it with a friendly message explaining why.
Submitted those at like 10 or 11 pm and went to sleep. Woke up to all issues that got changed overnight with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these messages.
Cause: Workflow 2 should have checked for project maintainers but also other bots and automation that might also be clearing labels. It got fixed immediately once we realized the issue.
storystarling|1 month ago
doodlesdev|1 month ago
Hopefully this hasn't caused any real harm. At least it sure did give me a good laugh when I first saw it.
alwa|1 month ago
add-sub-mul-div|1 month ago
supernes|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
robertclaus|1 month ago
embedding-shape|1 month ago
I've made "reply bots" before, bunch of times, first time on IRC, and pretty much the second or third step is "Huh, probably this shouldn't be able to reply to itself, then it'll get stuck in a loop". But that's hardly a "classic CI bug", so don't think that is what you're referring to here right?
meisel|1 month ago
tuetuopay|1 month ago
Elfener|1 month ago
Edit: there's actually a PR, but this is one of those repos where for some reason, they require every PR to have an associated issue. And in this case, they aren't even linked...
abathologist|1 month ago
Fun times are coming.
keriati1|1 month ago
amiga386|1 month ago
The automation: https://youtu.be/GFiWEjCedzY?t=51
armchairhacker|1 month ago
jayd16|1 month ago
throwaway173738|1 month ago
heliumtera|1 month ago
gemini-cli did much more work in this PR then the author himself.
a-dub|1 month ago
fwiw. doesn't look like gemini at all, the responses are perfectly canned... maybe just good old fashioned ci rules.
vjekm|1 month ago
Night_Thastus|1 month ago
Phui3ferubus|1 month ago
Normally I would complain about people spamming in GitHub issues but I don't think it will matter this time
minimaxir|1 month ago
mise_en_place|1 month ago
venturecruelty|1 month ago
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