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Comment by bulder | Hacker News Reader

From what I've seen, when operating in an environment with bash tools, Claude and ChatGPT will react to a site blocking their normal, attributed fetch tool by calling curl or writing a python script with a different user agent to try and bypass the blocks, rather than respecting the site owners' wishes.

It'd be one thing if they required the user to consciously say "yes, I want you to bypass the block" (still unethical), but the fact that it's just default behavior really says something about the service design alignment.

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Yeah I should have clarified I was primarily referring to the standard web interfaces, however since pretty much all of these tools can execute code these days it is true that technically they can and often will work around blocks. The degree to which this is intentional isn't super clear - if they locked it down too much then it might start refusing to write code that does any sort of web requests which would obviously be an issue for just standard development tasks so it's not super straightforward. But it is true that the built-in tools that they have access to to fetch pages have a hard coded user agent that identifies them

Fair enough yeah, I think the thing that is annoying is that the service design is explicitly disincentivizing keeping an eye on the tasks, with all of the "set it and forget it" features. You really have to put in work to make sure that the model takes breaks to consult you instead of making assumptions (which in OpenAI's internal testing seem to be 'the user wants me to break into a site').

If you hire someone to handle some task for you, do you want them to keep running back to you every time they run into a blocker that they could potentially resolve on their own?

I'd prefer my little subcontractor to respect the commons on which I depend.

Are you still paying them for the time they spent when the task you gave them remains incomplete, or you end up spending the time/effort you hoped to avoid spending by hiring them in the first place?

That depends if they routinely and cheerfully behave in objectively insane ways.

> objectively insane

Contradiction: one person's insanity is another person's genius. And yet another's "Meh, this is the norm".

If a developer I hired ignored a GPL license requirement and solved his blocker by using a library without asking me I would be quite concerned.

Nobody would be concerned if they didn’t have access to curl and used wget instead and didn’t ask permission .

However if that solution involved breaking the law yes I absolutely do not want a representative of me breaking the law and yes it is breaking the law whether we like or not under CFAA.

It is not about finding solutions to problems on their own; the solutions should respect the agreements we have made and the law .

The application of law is also a subjective thing; it depends on jurisdiction. So if you're US-based and you hire a US-based dev who breaks US law, then you definitely should be concerned. If it's an Indian-based dev breaking US law though... then it's totally on you as the one who did the hiring to not have told them to follow US law. Same re using libs that you may consider questionable or outright avoid.

Well yeah, if I ask Claude to look something up on a website so I don’t have to, I don’t give two shits if the website author thinks I shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Just like I don’t care if they think I shouldn’t use Firefox and they block that browser specifically. I’ll route around that however I please and I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Don’t put your shit on the public internet if you’re going to try and micromanage how people consume it.

To be clear, rate limiting to avoid massive usage is different, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

> I don’t give two shits if the website author thinks…

fair, just don’t cry when website owners don’t “give two shits” about your concerns.

They’re free to try and block whoever, obviously, but spare me the moral outrage.

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