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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Vibe coders in open source proudly don't read the (slop)code and place all their agents in autonomous loops without them knowing that Claude leaked their passwords and environment variables on GitHub.

This incident would have been caught in an open source harness. This one is closed source malware, and you don't know what Claude Code does internally to behave like this.

Yet another reason why you cannot trust a closed harness.

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Devs have been leaking secrets in public repos a long time before now. Nothing new here, except there are now more with dev power, which statistically means more leakage.

That’s ridiculously overblown rhetoric. Claude Code didn’t publish these secrets, the users did by committing their Claude Code settings to public repos.

Same thing could/would happen with an open source harness.

From TFA:

> Often Claude commits the file itself. In 539 of the 1,105 repos with a real secret that we traced, a commit co-authored by Claude changed the file. Those commits name every recent model, from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 5.5.

Could open source harnesses do that? Sure, if they were programmed in a similar fashion as Claude Code. Do you have any evidence of it happening?

Of course an open source harness can put secrets into a commit.

Humans do it!

Nothing stops someone from committing secrets to public repos, with or without AI. Unless guardrails are put in place that scans repos before push, and only people already wary of secrets leaking would setup said guardrails in the first place.

The file is .gitignored if Claude creates it - any commits by Claude would be due to someone overriding that or creating it themselves incorrectly.

None of this has anything to do with open vs. closed source.

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