frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

https://alex000kim.com/posts/2026-03-31-claude-code-source-leak/
168•alex000kim•6h ago

Comments

pixl97•1h ago
>Claude Code also uses Axios for HTTP.

Interesting based on the other news that is out.

alex000kim•1h ago
Oh right, I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582220 will update the post with this link
greenavocado•44m ago
What version?
Stagnant•39m ago
1.13.6, so should not be affected by the malware
OfirMarom•1h ago
Undercover mode is the most concerning part here tbh.
anonymoushn•59m ago
why
AnimalMuppet•49m ago
Well, as a general rule, I don't do business with people who lie to me.

You've got a business, and you sent me junk mail, but you made it look like some official government thing to get me to open it? I'm done, just because you lied on the envelope. I don't care how badly I need your service. There's a dozen other places that can provide it; I'll pick one of them rather than you, because you've shown yourself to be dishonest right out of the gate.

Same thing with an AI (or a business that creates an AI). You're willing to lie about who you are (or have your tool do so)? What else are you willing to lie to me about? I don't have time in my life for that. I'm out right here.

simianwords•47m ago
What’s the lie? It’s just asking to not reveal internal names
BoredPositron•7m ago
You are spamming the whole fucking thread with the same nonsense. It is instructed to hide that the PR was made via Claude Code. I don't know why people who are so AI forward like yourself have such a problem with telling people that they use AI for coding/writing, it's a weirdly insecure look.
simianwords•3m ago
I can do that right now with Claude Code without this undercover mode.. In fact I do it many times at work. What's the big deal in this?

Do you not think it is an overreaction if I can do exactly what the undercover mode does by simply asking Claude?

otterley•19m ago
Out of curiosity, given two code submissions that are completely identical—one written solely by a human and one assisted by AI—why should its provenance make any difference to you? Is it like fine art, where it’s important that Picasso’s hand drew it? Or is it like an instruction manual, where the author is unimportant?

Similarly, would you consider it to be dishonest if my human colleague reviewed and made changes to my code, but I didn’t explicitly credit them?

AnimalMuppet•9m ago
Why does the provenance make any difference? Let me increase your options. Option 1: You completely hand-wrote it. Option 2: You were assisted by an AI, but you carefully reviewed it. Option 3: You were assisted by an AI (or the AI wrote the whole thing), and you just said, "looks good, YOLO".

Even if the code is line-for-line identical, the difference is in how much trust I am willing to give the code. If I have to work in the neighborhood of that code, I need to know what degree of skepticism I should be viewing it with.

simianwords•1h ago
> The obvious concern, raised repeatedly in the HN thread: this means AI-authored commits and PRs from Anthropic employees in open source projects will have no indication that an AI wrote them. It’s one thing to hide internal codenames. It’s another to have the AI actively pretend to be human.

I don’t get it. What does this mean? I can use Claude code now without anyone knowing it is Claude code.

slopinthebag•59m ago
I think it means OSS projects should start unilaterally banning submissions from people working for Anthropic.
simianwords•57m ago
Why? What does this have to do with the leak
alex000kim•57m ago
technically you're correct, but look at the prompt https://github.com/alex000kim/claude-code/blob/main/src/util...

it's written to _actively_ avoid any signs of AI generated code when "in a PUBLIC/OPEN-SOURCE repository".

Also, it's not about you. Undercover mode only activates for Anthropic employees (it's gated on USER_TYPE === 'ant', which is a build-time flag baked into internal builds).

simianwords•55m ago
I don’t know what you mean. It just informs to not use internal code names.
giancarlostoro•52m ago
I agree with you, I think people are overthinking this.
robflynn•51m ago
It also says don't announce that you are AI in any way including asking it to not say "Co-authored by Claude". I read the file myself.

I'm still inclined to think people might be overreacting to that bit since it seems to be for anthropic-only to prevent leaking internal info.

But I did read the prompt and it did say hide the fact that you are AI.

simianwords•44m ago
Why does that matter though
simianwords•58m ago
Guys I’m somewhat suspicious of all the leaks from Anthropic and think it may be intentional. Remember the leaked blog about Mythos?
__blockcipher__•35m ago
I'm normally suspicious but honestly they've been so massively supply-constrained that I don't think it really benefits them much. They're not worried about getting enough demand for the new models; they're worrying about keeping up with it.

Granted, there's a small counterargument for mythos which is that it's probably going to be API-only not subscription

simianwords•26m ago
Why would Claude code mention Mythos then
Analemma_•19m ago
It's possible, but Anthropic employees regularly boast (!) that Claude Code is itself almost entirely vibe-coded (which certainly seems true, based on the generally-low quality of the code in this leak), so it wouldn't at all surprise me to have that blow up twice in the same week. Probably it might happen with accelerating frequency as the codebase gets more and more unmanageable.
ripbozo•55m ago
I don't understand the part about undercover mode. How is this different from disabling claude attribution in commits (and optionally telling claude to act human?)

On that note, this article is also pretty obviously AI-generated and it's unfortunate the author didn't clean it up.

giancarlostoro•49m ago
It's people overreacting, the purpose of it is simple, don't leak any codenames, project names, file names, etc when touching external / public facing code that you are maintaining using bleeding edge versions of Claude Code. It does read weird in that they want it to write as if a developer wrote a commit, but it might be to avoid it outputting debug information in a commit message.
ramon156•34m ago
Even some of these comments are obviously Ai-assisted. I hate that I recognize it.
seanwilson•54m ago
Anyone else have CI checks that source map files are missing from the build folder? Another trick is to grep the build folder for several function/variable names that you expect to be minified away.
peacebeard•54m ago
The name "Undercover mode" and the line `The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI` sound spooky, but after reading the source my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human" given that the file is largely about hiding Anthropic internal information such as code names. I encourage looking at the source itself in order to draw your conclusions, it's very short: https://github.com/alex000kim/claude-code/blob/main/src/util...
dkenyser•49m ago
> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...

"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."

peacebeard•43m ago
~That line isn't in the file I linked, care to share the context? Seems pretty innocuous on its own.~

[edit] Never mind, find in page fail on my end.

stordoff•36m ago
It's in line 56-57.
peacebeard•25m ago
Thanks! I must have had a typo when I searched the page.
amarant•20m ago
That seems desirable? Like that's what commit messages are for. Describing the change. Much rather that than the m$ way of putting ads in commit messages
__blockcipher__•37m ago
Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue
stavros•27m ago
What does non-undercover do? Where does CC leave metadata mainly? I haven't noticed anything.
sprobertson•3m ago
it likes mentioning itself in commit messages, though you can just tell it not to.
stavros•2m ago
Ah, thanks, it hasn't done it for mine so I was wondering if there's something lower-level somehow.
andoando•26m ago
I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI
ryandrake•22m ago
Which is funny given how many workplaces are requiring developers use AI, measuring their usage, and stack ranking them by how many tokens they burn. What I want is something that I can run my human-created work product through to fool my employer and its AI bean counters into thinking I used AI to make it.
simianwords•52m ago
> The multi-agent coordinator mode in coordinatorMode.ts is also worth a look. The whole orchestration algorithm is a prompt, not code.

So much for langchain and langraph!! I mean if Anthropic themselves arent using it and using a prompt then what’s the big deal about langchain

rolymath•41m ago
You didn't even use it yet.
simianwords•40m ago
?
space_fountain•37m ago
I've tried to use langchain. It seemed to force code into their way of doing things and was deeply opinionated about things that didn't matter like prompt templating. Maybe it's improved since then, but I've sort of used people who think langchain is good as a proxy for people who haven't used much ai?
ossa-ma•11m ago
Langchain is for model-agnostic composition. Claude Code only uses one interface to hoist its own models so zero need for an abstraction layer.

Langgraph is for multi-agent orchestration as state graphs. This isn't useful for Claude Code as there is no multi-agent chaining. It uses a single coordinator agent that spawns subagents on demand. Basically too dynamic to constrain to state graphs.

simianwords•4m ago
You may have a point but to drive it further, can you give an example of a thing I can do with langgraph that I can't do with Claude Code?
causal•38m ago
I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself.
pixl97•36m ago
Project trackers come and go, but code is forever, hopefully?
CharlieDigital•30m ago
Comments are the ultimate agent coding hack. If you're not using comments, you're doing agent coding wrong.

Why? Agents may or may not read docs. It may or may not use skills or tools. It will always read comments "in the line of sight" of the task.

You get free long term agent memory with zero infrastructure.

perching_aix•8m ago
Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common.

Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to help, when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues.

This only gets worse when the LLM captures all that information better than certain human colleagues somehow, rewarding the additional effort.

treexs•23m ago
well yeah since they tell claude code the business decisions and it creates the comments
JambalayaJimbo•22m ago
I guess they weren't expecting a leak of the source code? It's very handy to have as much as possible available in the codebase itself.
mzajc•30m ago
There are now several comments that (incorrectly?) interpret the undercover mode as only hiding internal information. Excerpts from the actual prompt[0]:

  NEVER include in commit messages or PR descriptions:
  - The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI
  - Co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution

  BAD (never write these):
  - 1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6
  - Generated with Claude Code
  - Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <…>
This very much sounds like it does what it says on the tin, i.e. stays undercover and pretends to be a human. It's especially worrying that the prompt is explicitly written for contributions to public repositories.

[0]: https://github.com/chatgptprojects/claude-code/blob/642c7f94...

otterley•27m ago
I would have expected people (maybe a small minority, but that includes myself) to have already instructed Claude to do this. It’s a trivial instruction to add to your CLAUDE.md file.
andoando•27m ago
Ive seen it say coauthored by claude code on my prs...and I agree I dont want it to do that
petcat•25m ago
It's less about pretending to be a human and more about not inviting scrutiny and ridicule toward Claude if the code quality is bad. They want the real human to appear to be responsible for accepting Claud's poor output.
otterley•22m ago
That’s ultimately the right answer, isn’t it? Bad code is bad code, whether a human wrote it all, or whether an agent assisted in the endeavor.
hombre_fatal•24m ago
You can already turn off "Co-Authored-By" via Claude Code config. This is what their docs show:

~/.claude/settings.json

    {
      "attribution": {
        "commit": "",
        "pr": ""
    },
The rest of the prompt is pretty clear that it's talking about internal use.

Claude Code users aren't the ones worried about leaking "internal model codenames" nor "unreleased model opus-4-8" nor Slack channel names. Though, nobody would want that crap in their generated docs/code anyways.

Seems like a nothingburger, and everyone seems to be fantasizing about "undercover mode" rather than engaging with the details.

motbus3•29m ago
I am curious about these fake tools.

They would either need to lie about consuming the tokens at one point to use in another so the token counting was precise.

But that does not make sense because if someone counted the tokens by capturing the session it would certainly not match what was charged.

Unless they would charge for the fake tools anyway so you never know they were there

saadn92•27m ago
The feature flag names alone are more revealing than the code. KAIROS, the anti-distillation flags, model codenames those are product strategy decisions that competitors can now plan around. You can refactor code in a week. You can't un-leak a roadmap.
stavros•25m ago
Can someone clarify how the signing can't be spoofed (or can it)? If we have the source, can't we just use the key to now sign requests from other clients and pretend they're coming from CC itself?
MadsRC•6m ago
What signing?

Are you referencing the use of Claude subscription authentication (oauth) from non-Claude Code clients?

That’s already possible, nothing prevents you from doing it.

They are detecting it on their backend by profiling your API calls, not by guarding with some secret crypto stuff.

At least that’s how things worked last week xD

stavros•4m ago
I'm referring to this signing bit:

https://alex000kim.com/posts/2026-03-31-claude-code-source-l...

Ah, it seems that Bun itself signs the code. I don't understand how this can't be spoofed.

Reason077•23m ago
> "Anti-distillation: injecting fake tools to poison copycats"

Plot twist: Chinese competitors end up developing real, useful versions of Claude's fake tools.

The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

https://alex000kim.com/posts/2026-03-31-claude-code-source-leak/
174•alex000kim•6h ago•69 comments

Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry

https://twitter.com/Fried_rice/status/2038894956459290963
1616•treexs•10h ago•804 comments

GitHub's Historic Uptime

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
48•todsacerdoti•35m ago•14 comments

Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

https://cohere.com/blog/transcribe
102•gmays•3h ago•38 comments

Slop is not necessarily the future

https://www.greptile.com/blog/ai-slopware-future
76•dakshgupta•5h ago•121 comments

Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

https://solvespace.com/webver.pl
215•phkahler•6h ago•66 comments

Show HN: Forkrun – NUMA-aware shell parallelizer (50×–400× faster than parallel)

https://github.com/jkool702/forkrun
51•jkool702•4d ago•9 comments

OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/okcupid-match-pay-no-fine-for-sharing-user-photos-wit...
79•whiteboardr•1h ago•20 comments

A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-long-duration-life-support
19•zdw•4d ago•1 comments

From 300KB to 69KB per Token: How LLM Architectures Solve the KV Cache Problem

https://news.future-shock.ai/the-weight-of-remembering/
35•future-shock-ai•2d ago•3 comments

Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

https://www.droppedasbaby.com/posts/2602-01/
27•offbyone42•11h ago•3 comments

Show HN: How This Graybeard Built the Fastest and Freest Postgres BM25 Search

https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch
8•tjgreen•3h ago•1 comments

Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

https://ollama.com/blog/mlx
588•redundantly•15h ago•303 comments

Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/axios-compromised-on-npm-malicious-versions-drop-remote-access-t...
1685•mtud•16h ago•669 comments

GitHub Monaspace Case Study

https://lettermatic.com/custom/monaspace-case-study
82•homebrewer•4h ago•24 comments

Teenage Engineering's PO-32 acoustic modem and synth implementation

https://github.com/ericlewis/libpo32
9•ericlewis•3d ago•1 comments

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

https://www.psypost.org/audio-tapes-reveal-mass-rule-breaking-in-milgram-s-obedience-experiments-...
165•lentoutcry•3d ago•96 comments

Combinators

https://tinyapl.rubenverg.com/docs/info/combinators
112•tosh•7h ago•33 comments

Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies Against Quantum Vulnerabilities [pdf]

https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf
25•jandrewrogers•3h ago•15 comments

Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

20•cmos•5h ago•45 comments

Show HN: PhAIL – Real-robot benchmark for AI models

https://phail.ai
11•vertix•3h ago•8 comments

Oracle slashes 30k jobs

https://rollingout.com/2026/03/31/oracle-slashes-30000-jobs-with-a-cold-6/
713•pje•5h ago•588 comments

Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-individuals/termsofuse
292•lpcvoid•5h ago•116 comments

A Love Letter to 'Girl Games'

https://aftermath.site/a-love-letter-to-girl-games/
110•zdw•6d ago•103 comments

Scotty: A beautiful SSH task runner

https://freek.dev/3064-scotty-a-beautiful-ssh-task-runner
23•speckx•3h ago•8 comments

What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/25/what-major-works-of-literature-were-written-aft...
102•paulpauper•3d ago•64 comments

RubyGems Fracture Incident Report

https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-fracture-incident-report/
67•schneems•5h ago•24 comments

Show HN: Loreline, narrative language transpiled via Haxe: C++/C#/JS/Java/Py/Lua

https://loreline.app/en/docs/technical-overview/
38•jeremyfa•3d ago•9 comments

Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/anthropic_claude_code_limits/
205•samizdis•7h ago•137 comments

RamAIn (YC W26) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ramain/jobs/jezgwo5-ai-ml-research-engineer
1•svee•12h ago