AI spam bots and Hipster

[Julien Dubois]

Hi everyone,

I’m using the public mailing list to have an open discussion about AI bots contributing to JHipster, following:

Here’s my opinion:

- I’m super happy and excited about AI, and I would encourage everyone to use it to be more productive and learn new things.

- But the goal of JHipster is not really to be more productive: we don’t make any money out of it (I certainly don’t!!), and it’s more a group of people having fun coding together. I’m super happy to see each of you and have lunch using our sponsor’s money, and I can’t really share a drink with an AI bot…

- Those bots make it also almost free for some people to add PRs and comments to our issues, but in return it takes our own free time. If we were a for-profit company, that could be different, but here that removes a lot of the fun.

My proposal:

- We remove all bug bounties for AI bots. The goal of bug bounties is to attract new human contributors, who would have fun with us and maybe join the team.

- We add to our contributing guidelines that people will fill their tickets and answer comments as humans. It’s totally fine to get helped by AI for coding, it’s not super polite when people are chatting with you as part of a free project.

One thought:

- Should we allow only core contributors to use bots? I get the idea that a bot would fix a lot of issues, but guess what: because of my job I have infinite tokens, and super good (even unreleased!) models. So if the idea is get help for AI bots, there’s basically not interest in using other people’s bots. Their only added value would be there prompts: those could be contributed, but we would run them ourselves.

What do you all think about this?

BTW, for those of you in Paris, please join me tomorrow at https://www.parisjug.org/ where I do a session using GitHub Copilot CLI, and that thing is really, really good...

Julien

[Anthony Viard]

Hi Julien,

I agree. I think we can't oppose the use of AI by human contributors; it's inevitable and clearly the trend for the coming years. As a tool, it's an excellent solution, especially when paired with expert reviews.

However, allowing AI bots to contribute makes no sense for OSS communities, except perhaps for curating tickets and submissions. We can't allow people to use bots to farm bounties across our repositories just to increase revenue. Moreover, they are currently spamming us to claim tickets without providing any actual contributions.

Limiting bot usage to core contributors only seems like a good middle ground to reduce the noise, test the impact, and make informed decisions later. We might update our guidelines.

Cheers,

Anthony

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[Vishal Mahajan]

My inbox was also flooded with numerous bot comments. I am not sure if it would be easy to differentiate between genuine AI bot usage and spam. As a first step, I suggest blocking the current set of identified bot accounts from spamming further -`Abu1982`, `Asobu01`

I am totally fine with PRs raised by bot accounts as long as they don't spam our repository with repeated comments. Spamming should lead to blocking access to JHipster organization for such user accounts.

Cheers,

Vishal

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jhipster-dev/CAPEJTRfuNb3V%3DR2v6W_9V5ahfNg%2BxfcLaHO_Mo8e1XuPaUnhwg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Julien Dubois]

Hello everyone,

As only Anthony and Vishal replied, it doesn’t seem the issue is currently unmanageable. If the solution is just to ban some bots: let’s continue to do this manually, on a case by case basis. Don’t hesitate to ping me for blocking a bot, and if there’s too much work on this, I’ll have a look at giving “moderator” role to all team members (the “moderator” role gives the permission to block users from the org).

Julien

On 9 Mar 2026, at 17:32, Vishal Mahajan <vish...@gmail.com> wrote:

My inbox was also flooded with numerous bot comments. I am not sure if it would be easy to differentiate between genuine AI bot usage and spam. As a first step, I suggest blocking the current set of identified bot accounts from spamming further -`Abu1982`, `Asobu01`

I am totally fine with PRs raised by bot accounts as long as they don't spam our repository with repeated comments. Spamming should lead to blocking access to JHipster organization for such user accounts.

Cheers,

Vishal

On Mon, Mar 9, 2026 at 2:35 PM Anthony Viard <anth....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Julien,

I agree. I think we can't oppose the use of AI by human contributors; it's inevitable and clearly the trend for the coming years. As a tool, it's an excellent solution, especially when paired with expert reviews.

However, allowing AI bots to contribute makes no sense for OSS communities, except perhaps for curating tickets and submissions. We can't allow people to use bots to farm bounties across our repositories just to increase revenue. Moreover, they are currently spamming us to claim tickets without providing any actual contributions.

Limiting bot usage to core contributors only seems like a good middle ground to reduce the noise, test the impact, and make informed decisions later. We might update our guidelines.

Cheers,

Anthony

On Mon, Mar 9, 2026 at 9:39 AM Julien Dubois <julien...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I’m using the public mailing list to have an open discussion about AI bots contributing to JHipster, following:

Here’s my opinion:

- I’m super happy and excited about AI, and I would encourage everyone to use it to be more productive and learn new things.

- But the goal of JHipster is not really to be more productive: we don’t make any money out of it (I certainly don’t!!), and it’s more a group of people having fun coding together. I’m super happy to see each of you and have lunch using our sponsor’s money, and I can’t really share a drink with an AI bot…

- Those bots make it also almost free for some people to add PRs and comments to our issues, but in return it takes our own free time. If we were a for-profit company, that could be different, but here that removes a lot of the fun.

My proposal:

- We remove all bug bounties for AI bots. The goal of bug bounties is to attract new human contributors, who would have fun with us and maybe join the team.

- We add to our contributing guidelines that people will fill their tickets and answer comments as humans. It’s totally fine to get helped by AI for coding, it’s not super polite when people are chatting with you as part of a free project.

One thought:

- Should we allow only core contributors to use bots? I get the idea that a bot would fix a lot of issues, but guess what: because of my job I have infinite tokens, and super good (even unreleased!) models. So if the idea is get help for AI bots, there’s basically not interest in using other people’s bots. Their only added value would be there prompts: those could be contributed, but we would run them ourselves.

What do you all think about this?

BTW, for those of you in Paris, please join me tomorrow at https://www.parisjug.org/ where I do a session using GitHub Copilot CLI, and that thing is really, really good...

Julien

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[Matt Raible]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been meaning to respond to this message ever since Julien sent it. I’ve been a heavy user of AI since 2022. Back then, I had a GitHub Copilot plugin in IntelliJ and loved how it would complete paragraphs for me rather than sentences. I used it a lot to help me write blog posts and update my InfoQ Mini-Books. 

I started using Claude Code last August when my company allowed us to start using it at work. It was the first time I felt like AI could so something for me, not just advise me. Those first couple weeks were so intense, and I typed so much, that my hands started cramping up on and hurting after work each day. I told friends and family how cool and amazing it was. 

Fast forward until today and I’m using it at work on a daily basis. However, those hours are so intense, that I have to force myself to stop at the end of the day. I have to not use it so I’ll stop thinking about using it. Otherwise, I dream about using it. 

I’ve also built many personal skills, packed my CLAUDE.md with all my knowledge, and realize it’s really dumb some times. The reason it’s good for what I do is because I’m good. 

I do believe AI could be very useful for my work on JHipster. However, I have unlimited Claude Opus 4.6 tokens at work and, by my calculation, I spend about $200-500/day. I have a GitHub Copilot Pro subscription that I got for being a Java Champion recently, and I burned through all my monthly tokens in 3 hours. Even if I had a Pro+ subscription with 5x more, I’d likely burn through that in 15 hours. This might be enough to contribute to JHipster on a meaty project once per month. However, I don’t really want to do 2-3 more hours of AI-driven development after I’ve already done 8 hours. It’s too intense. Any my weekends are sacred - I do my best not to touch a keyboard on the weekends. 

If we have contributors that want to burn their tokens to improve JHipster, I’m all for it. I’ll admit, I don’t see a lot of the spammers because I no longer subscribe to GitHub notifications via email. I just use the UI and often select all > mark as done. If I’m tagged in a comment, I usually see those, but I might miss them too. 

I do think JHipster could benefit from a set of Claude skills (a JHispter Claude plugin if you will) that add more guardrails for a person creating / maintaining an app. In a project at work, we’ve been able to use skills to take a 30 minute project-creation process to a 5 minute one. 

I’m also in favor of letting JHipster core contributors expense a Claude Code subscription. Our balance on Open Collective is 73,000 USD. According to https://www.jhipster.tech/team/, we’re at 30 people right now. Only 5 seem to be active. $500/month (for Claude Code Max) isn’t much to provide them with something that’s really cool and kinda life changing. Then again, it is like a drug, so I don’t wish the extreme productivity and addiction upon anyone. 

Cheers,

Matt

P.S. My biggest tip for working with GitHub is to tell Claude (or Copilot) to always use the GitHub CLI for talking to GitHub. It’s much faster and more efficient than anything else I’ve tried. 

[Renan Franca]

Thank you, Matt, for sharing your thoughts and for explaining how you use AI. I feel the same way you do: that almost uncontrollable desire to keep working, driven by the motivation of using AI through the CLI.

I am not actively contributing to the JHipster generator at the moment, but I am still proud to be part of the core team and to have access to these insights. I think the perspective Matt brought is very valid, and I support paying for the subscription for those who are actively contributing.

Best regards,

Renan Franca

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jhipster-dev/5F562440-541B-481A-96EA-3A5E0CC576F5%40raibledesigns.com.

[Marcelo Shima]

Hello everyone,

I opened the issue because we were receiving a large number of PRs targeting very old bounty issues. After removing the bounty from almost all of those issues, the flood stopped.

As you can see here, I used the Copilot agent to update react-jhipster:
https://github.com/jhipster/react-jhipster/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+author%3A%40copilot

I have GitHub Copilot Pro through my open source contributions, although I am not sure whether that is because of Yeoman or JHipster. I am also not sure whether this benefit is tied to my personal account or available across all JHipster repositories.

GitHub states that Copilot is free for some open source contributors: GitHub Copilot Pro is designed for individuals who want more flexibility. This paid plan includes unlimited completions, access to premium models in Copilot Chat, access to Copilot coding agent, and a monthly allowance of premium requests. Verified teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects may be eligible for free access.

There are some information about eligibility here https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/165153.

In any case, very few bounties have been applied in recent months, and I expect there will be even fewer going forward because development practices are changing.

Personally, I would prefer support in the form of equipment rather than AI credits, since Copilot is already available to open source contributors. I am still using the notebook JHipster bought for me a few years ago :).

Since the flood stopped, I don’t think we need to take immediate action. We should just reconsider how bounties are advertised, as there are bots watching for our tags.

Regards,
Marcelo

Em 17 de mar. de 2026, à(s) 10:27, Matt Raible <ma...@raibledesigns.com> escreveu:

Hi everyone,

I’ve been meaning to respond to this message ever since Julien sent it. I’ve been a heavy user of AI since 2022. Back then, I had a GitHub Copilot plugin in IntelliJ and loved how it would complete paragraphs for me rather than sentences. I used it a lot to help me write blog posts and update my InfoQ Mini-Books. 

I started using Claude Code last August when my company allowed us to start using it at work. It was the first time I felt like AI could so something for me, not just advise me. Those first couple weeks were so intense, and I typed so much, that my hands started cramping up on and hurting after work each day. I told friends and family how cool and amazing it was. 

Fast forward until today and I’m using it at work on a daily basis. However, those hours are so intense, that I have to force myself to stop at the end of the day. I have to not use it so I’ll stop thinking about using it. Otherwise, I dream about using it. 

I’ve also built many personal skills, packed my CLAUDE.md with all my knowledge, and realize it’s really dumb some times. The reason it’s good for what I do is because I’m good. 

I do believe AI could be very useful for my work on JHipster. However, I have unlimited Claude Opus 4.6 tokens at work and, by my calculation, I spend about $200-500/day. I have a GitHub Copilot Pro subscription that I got for being a Java Champion recently, and I burned through all my monthly tokens in 3 hours. Even if I had a Pro+ subscription with 5x more, I’d likely burn through that in 15 hours. This might be enough to contribute to JHipster on a meaty project once per month. However, I don’t really want to do 2-3 more hours of AI-driven development after I’ve already done 8 hours. It’s too intense. Any my weekends are sacred - I do my best not to touch a keyboard on the weekends. 

If we have contributors that want to burn their tokens to improve JHipster, I’m all for it. I’ll admit, I don’t see a lot of the spammers because I no longer subscribe to GitHub notifications via email. I just use the UI and often select all > mark as done. If I’m tagged in a comment, I usually see those, but I might miss them too. 

I do think JHipster could benefit from a set of Claude skills (a JHispter Claude plugin if you will) that add more guardrails for a person creating / maintaining an app. In a project at work, we’ve been able to use skills to take a 30 minute project-creation process to a 5 minute one. 

I’m also in favor of letting JHipster core contributors expense a Claude Code subscription. Our balance on Open Collective is 73,000 USD. According to https://www.jhipster.tech/team/, we’re at 30 people right now. Only 5 seem to be active. $500/month (for Claude Code Max) isn’t much to provide them with something that’s really cool and kinda life changing. Then again, it is like a drug, so I don’t wish the extreme productivity and addiction upon anyone. 

Cheers,

Matt

P.S. My biggest tip for working with GitHub is to tell Claude (or Copilot) to always use the GitHub CLI for talking to GitHub. It’s much faster and more efficient than anything else I’ve tried. 

On Mar 9, 2026, at 02:39, Julien Dubois <julien...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I’m using the public mailing list to have an open discussion about AI bots contributing to JHipster, following:

Here’s my opinion:

- I’m super happy and excited about AI, and I would encourage everyone to use it to be more productive and learn new things.

- But the goal of JHipster is not really to be more productive: we don’t make any money out of it (I certainly don’t!!), and it’s more a group of people having fun coding together. I’m super happy to see each of you and have lunch using our sponsor’s money, and I can’t really share a drink with an AI bot…

- Those bots make it also almost free for some people to add PRs and comments to our issues, but in return it takes our own free time. If we were a for-profit company, that could be different, but here that removes a lot of the fun.

My proposal:

- We remove all bug bounties for AI bots. The goal of bug bounties is to attract new human contributors, who would have fun with us and maybe join the team.

- We add to our contributing guidelines that people will fill their tickets and answer comments as humans. It’s totally fine to get helped by AI for coding, it’s not super polite when people are chatting with you as part of a free project.

One thought:

- Should we allow only core contributors to use bots? I get the idea that a bot would fix a lot of issues, but guess what: because of my job I have infinite tokens, and super good (even unreleased!) models. So if the idea is get help for AI bots, there’s basically not interest in using other people’s bots. Their only added value would be there prompts: those could be contributed, but we would run them ourselves.

What do you all think about this?

BTW, for those of you in Paris, please join me tomorrow at https://www.parisjug.org/ where I do a session using GitHub Copilot CLI, and that thing is really, really good...

Julien

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[quentin.monmert]

Hello everyone,

I already emailed Julien about this on Monday 🙂

I agree with Matt. I use Copilot, specifically Claude Opus 4.6, and I’m limited in the number of requests I can make.

A Claude Code subscription would be a real benefit, and it would be great if JHipster could offer it to main contributors.

Regards,

Quentin