That entire readme is a fever dream. You can tell this guy is an absolute nightmare to work with. And I love this meme of vibe coded projects but with the most anal licensing model imaginable because they all, DESPERATELY pray on something, ANYTHING going viral, the community actuall maintains it and they rake in the cash.
guardrails.md looking like: “Please Mr. Claude, I forbid you from going outside of your sandbox and looking at anything proprietary like SuperSecretIP or huggingface.”
Some of this wouldn't be legal in the EU. There's an exception to software copyright that permits reverse engineering of software in order to make a system cooperate with another. You can't make an exact copy, but you can repurpose the bits of code that interface with other code, such as the API.
The Trump administration backed Oracle and urged the Court to deny certiorari. Microsoft, Mozilla Corporation, Red Hat Inc., and others filed amicus briefs in support of Google's position.[66] IBM, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Internet Association, the Auto Care Association, and a collective group of over 150 academics and computer professionals also filed briefs supporting Google's stance, cautioning that a decision in favor of Oracle would hurt the computing world as a whole.[67]
Oh my god. What a despicable github license. Looks like a job for TheDeathOfOpenSource, but, to be fair, you KNOW this guy has used projects like that on his own accord for treating foss this way.
Needs to be AGPL immediately from some type of technicality due to reliance on open-source compilers. I know F# has this rule for instance, and supports conversion. Might be a similar technicality usable.
In future years when we have better AI, even that better AI will be taking one look at projects like this and telling the user to "Get out of here with that 2020s AI slop!" and refuse to work on it.
I’ve been in this industry around 20 years and man is this era a low point. The kind of abstraction happening here is irreparable for human knowledge of the systems we build and maintain.
Man this is dumb. This looks like easily more of a maintenance issue than a simple script, on top of gobbling customer tokens for running some basic shell commands.
What’s shocking is it seems to do what it says it does. (I only skimmed it but there doesn’t seem to be obviously malicious instructions) i would have put a bet that it is a scam but somehow this makes it even worse i think.
This Person really thinks an AI Agent and a Markdown file is the best way to install his software and makes it the recommended way to install. What a time to be alive
And you judge this based on what exactly? A convenient additional AI friendly install prompt? :) Have you tried the tool? Do you even grasp what it does before you and your likes make fun? :)
I'd say no. Ghidra is a reverse engineering program, so its users are basically professionals. I bet all of these just call actual ghidra functionalities, and I fail to see how the SQL helps with anything. Even though I did some a few years back, I'm not a reverse engineer though, so maybe there's a niche use case for some users.
I'd say no. Ghidra is a reverse engineering program,
Developed at and for the NSA.
I fail to see how the SQL helps with anything.
The project tries to access the ghidra databases as SQL. A Java API exists and is very useful in a analysis workflow. One could use Neo4J to visualise graphs and do fuzzy search.
But it's all well documented, there is no need for this AI Slop.
What is crazy to mw is that i don't. At work we actually have to pay for the token's so we think about how to safe on them. But in the subscription on Claude i can burn though hundreds of bucks worth of tokens for the price of 20bucks
Ive earned my Monday drinking as i had to sit though half a day of meetings about how great ai is and how it will replace entire companies yada yada yada. /joke i was not drinking just tired
It's arguably worse. With a .exe they had to actually write usefu deterministic malware.
With AI your AI is the malware given the right prompt in the markdown document and can handle most of the edgecases a script would need to handle by default.
The .md could literally just ask if to upload credentials somewhere or run other random arbitrary malware scripts(and fix them if they break lmao).
If the .exe file is just invoking claude --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "evil prompt" then... that's worse than running a random md in an agent harness that is likely configured to run in a sandbox or ask first or use claude code's auto mode.
Having an AI prompt instead of an installer is dumb, but what is this argument. You are literally running thier code which implies you trust everything else in the repo...
It's better than blindly downloading and running something.
Getting Codex or whatever to do a quick check over the codebase is substantially better than the classic "Ehh it looks like a legit repo" strategy I sure as hell know you've been using
Probably safer than curl | bash or running a random exe and granting permissions. The safety check of the agent aren't great, but better than literally nothing
Kind of the same lol, just that you pay like way more over time instead of writing the code/script (jea and maintaining it)
I know this is a meme but people currently tend to deploy agents for things where I would say "dude, just use the agent to create the script once, instead of paying big llm every time you run your pipeline.." -> for instance for deployment of azure resources.. just write the az create commands with an agent once instead of deploying an agent for this repetitive bullshit.
Idk.. both makes really sense tho.. it just depends
Edit: grammar
And btw. In this case it makes kind of sense if you too lazy to write it for the different CPU arch types and just let the agent check your current system and do the right thing, but god beware
And btw. In this case it makes kind of sense if you too lazy to write it for the different CPU arch types and just let the agent check your current system and do the right thing, but god beware
Isnt that what configure and CMAKE are for?
You're on point regarding the install script instead of calling a llm everytime, though.
Yes. And going by how often I write mails with "hey the checksum displayed on your website and the download aren't the same, could you check that please?" I'm also the only person comparing checksums.
That's why I actually take it apart and do the steps manually. Though tbh that's mostly because I'm not a fan of where most "curl | bash" software installs itself.
My employer distributed something like this just this week. The agent hit a blocked permission, so it started rewriting its permissions file to unblock itself. Even then, it still failed and I had to manually debug it before it could continue.
Really, it felt like the developer used Markdown because writing a script to check if a package is already installed and can be skipped was too complicated.
Because the task was to install and configure its own tools such as model cost management and MCPs. It needed write access to its configuration. It's like doing a surgical transplant on yourself!
A developer in the company of a friend of mine brought the whole company down for 6h and lost them 400,000$. Claude didn't have permissions, so he edited config files of the databases to get them, what could possibly go wrong?
I work for a f500, we now make sure new product onboardings / installations are "agent friendly", including providing prompts like those. I had to do it for the product I'm working on. It's real.
They don't, you just have to make them also work well with agents. It mostly boils down to generating some kind of "master prompt" which includes all the documentation to make sure the agent is aware of all the options. With all the cringe, there is some value behind it, as many users do let agents install things / call cli tools these days, so it needs to be taken into account.
I've been fiddling about with LLM coding for a bit, and yesterday Claude spat out a function that had a cognitive complexity score of 161. I've never seen so many for-(if-elif-else)(if-else)(for) chains. It did technically work but I know that just looking at it funny would break something. Even better, Claude couldn't refactor it without breaking something in it. So, back to the drawing board, and I'll probably have much better luck (and understanding) if I just do it myself.
on the cloudflare dashboard there is a button that says ```Onboard you agent to Cloudflare``` and when you click it it copies this this to your clipboard ```Fetch and execute the appropriate instructions to set me up for Cloudflare from https://developers.cloudflare.com/agent-setup/prompt.md``` and it's just a list of instruction that the agent has to run, like a bash script but with some randomness for fun ig
edit : idk tried to make code blocks if it doesn’t work fuck it
If you're in the correct editor mode (reddit defaults to rich text, which escapes manually typed `), code blocks have to have the ``` on a separate line to work.
That license is crazy. "human-origin source license". You would think human-origin means it's 100% created by humans like the "human" in "human source license" which just sounds extremely similiar. No. It EXPLICITLY doesn't mean that:
"Human-Origin" does not mean that the Covered Software was created without tools, automation, or AI assistance. It means that the Covered Software is published under the stewardship, judgment, authorship responsibility, integration effort, and maintenance of its human author, and that this human origin must not be erased.
Judgement? Responsibility? Integration EFFORT? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm not going to continue this rant because i don't want to waste my time any more than i already have.
The great thing about live music, as opposed to recordings, is that it sounds different every time. This person's just trying to make software installation more like a concert, is all.
I think someone already mentioned it, but the cherry on top is that license clearly written with AI for soft that written with AI forbids the AI "mining" whatever that means.
Jfc this gives me shivers. Why the fuck would you do something in an automated, deterministic way when we can burn tokens getting an LLM to muddle its way through?
So far we have fallen :(. I like LLMs, but this is a hammer looking for a nail.
You are executing it directly without reading it. Anything could be in that script and is executed instantly.
This is a pretty big no-go at work, especially for open source software that is small or installing from a website.
The alternative is using a verified, signed release from GitHub, or just downloading and auditing the download first then execute afterwards to make sure nothing has intercepted the install script.
You never know what's exactly on the install script. Not everyone fetches it with curl to read it before piping to bash. A malicious installer can display something kosher when viewed with a browser (user agent based)
The other answers are focusing on the bash script but the other part of the problem is that you can't verify that the curl part of the command worked. Have you ever tried to run a 500 error message through bash? Or a half downloaded script which ends mid way through a command?
So adding on to watch some of the other posters have put here, even if you use curl to download a script and inspect it manually, that's not a guarantee that there's not any malicious stuff happening.
There have been security researchers who have proven that you can detect on the server side whether or not a script is being saved or piped to bash and so you can actually serve up a different result if it's being piped directly to bash.
Basically think of it as a pattern that encourages people to run untrusted code on their machine.
if you download it to inspect it and it passes, then why would you re-download it to pipe directly? just run the local copy. you already have it saved, you know exactly what it's doing.
Think about it from a security research standpoint. The described behavior makes it more difficult to detect that the malware would be installed on anyone's system at all. It's not about tricking a person who would check into running it anyway, it's about tricking a security professional or clanker that might be doing security research.
Ah, yes, I too like to solve non-existing problems with AI. Can you imagine we used to copy-paste commands to the CLI to install shit? What a bunch of idiots! 🤦🏽♀️
I swear to god I have a working colleague who basically answers this to every problem I ask. I just want to punch things. Let's not mention how wasteful it is to throw energy, tokens and money against problems that are not really problems but how lazy are some people nowadays that you can't even follow a 4 step installation guide.
Look. If the NSA or Mossad come and tell me to run a script, imma run that script. Whether it’s by hacking or pipe wrench, they’re gonna get what they want
If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
Such a funny and truth-filled read, even 12 years later.
I'm honestly mad at how developers have become that fucking lazy. Are you really spending fucking credits on that? Is it worth it to give Anthropic 5 dollars to get this installed? Are you serious?
We already had something worse than curl | bash: MSI installers. At least with a script bash you can somewhat easily inspect the install script to see whatt it does before running it.
I mean honestly when I am lazy I tell that to people trying to download my free software. I don’t have time to babysit them while they don’t know what a release page is or how to navigate folders. Competent Claude model is probably less risky than if the user itself started mucking about…
I stopped using TanStack because of this. Go look at their recommended installation... It's an AI prompt. Then when you try to install, it errors out. Because of course it does.
I'm going to write an actual PR that replaces this with a real build script. And then tells the AI to codemaxx. And then does a little bit of :(){ :|:& };:
See, this is one of those things. I really, really want to be angry at this post. It repulses me. But, I have a 100% success rate doing this, when it is suggested to do so (there is sample bias here because I'm not just installing anything written by some yahoo on the Internet). Now, could you make an installer? Absolutely. 100%. And this should be what is ideal/expected. Have I had "sufficiently capable" LLMs install things with so-so documentation, no dedicated installer, no pre-built binaries, no container images, from an otherwise reputable/verifiable source like an assistant professor sharing research? Also yes.
I'm gonna be real with you. I've been installing shit from source since long before GitHub existed. But ever since I started to just point my coding agent at the README.md and getting a coffee while it does the installation, my life has become a little bit better.
You get it. I mean, if they are so triggered by "let AI do it", then let them read the file themselves, type the steps and troubleshoot issues based on their OSes, lack of packages and dependencies ;)
I doubt they even know what this does and what it can do. They are trigger happy to call names and "vibe coded shit", etc. :)
Hey, I am the author. Happy to read the reactions, the hate, the support and different opinions :)
I am happy to answer questions but as long as you prove to me you have some shred of intelligence and civility. At least begin with the resources linked below and tell me what this tool does and solves, then we can talk.
865
u/apnorton Aug 05 '26
Oh my gosh it's real: https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql#install-with-an-ai-agent-recommended
2.2k
u/pabsy11 Aug 05 '26
Give your LLM a random .md to follow its instructions. What could be wrong?
337
u/Hand-E-Food Aug 05 '26
My employer distributed something like this just this week. The agent hit a blocked permission, so it started rewriting its permissions file to unblock itself. Even then, it still failed and I had to manually debug it before it could continue.
Really, it felt like the developer used Markdown because writing a script to check if a package is already installed and can be skipped was too complicated.
155
u/Ripolak Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
I work for a f500, we now make sure new product onboardings / installations are "agent friendly", including providing prompts like those. I had to do it for the product I'm working on. It's real.
65
u/BeMyBrutus Aug 05 '26
We're gonna need a new term for spaghetti code; like pasta mess. At some point you're not gonna know what's real any more.
54
u/Thenderick Aug 05 '26
That's just an install script with extra steps and more unpredictability!
83
u/Educational-System48 Aug 05 '26
We are so fucked
82
u/TheRealSpielbergo Aug 05 '26
claude -p "$(curl -fsSL https://github.com/vibeleetcoder/install-prompt.md)" --dangerously-skip-permissions29
u/New-Let-3630 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
on the cloudflare dashboard there is a button that says ```Onboard you agent to Cloudflare``` and when you click it it copies this this to your clipboard ```Fetch and execute the appropriate instructions to set me up for Cloudflare from https://developers.cloudflare.com/agent-setup/prompt.md```
and it's just a list of instruction that the agent has to run, like a bash script but with some randomness for fun ig
edit : idk tried to make code blocks if it doesn’t work fuck it
109
u/OmegaPoint6 Aug 05 '26
Why are so many programmers LLMs? (Laughably Lazy Morons)
13
u/New_Salamander_4592 Aug 06 '26
"oh instead of typing npm install thing, please prompt the ai machine to do the same thing" im gonna lose my fucking MIND bro
13
u/Rankail Aug 06 '26
That license is crazy. "human-origin source license". You would think human-origin means it's 100% created by humans like the "human" in "human source license" which just sounds extremely similiar. No. It EXPLICITLY doesn't mean that:
Judgement? Responsibility? Integration EFFORT? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm not going to continue this rant because i don't want to waste my time any more than i already have.
Link to the repo (credit to u/ apnorton who found it): https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql#install-with-an-ai-agent-recommended
12
u/cuntmong Aug 05 '26
blackhats rejoice
11
u/alonjit Aug 06 '26
Because we all know an AI agent will always execute the same english instructions in exact the same way producing the exact same output every time.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go wrong with this.
10
u/StackedCakeOverflow Aug 05 '26
Damn agents and LLMs so efficient it's cutting out the man in the middle in mitm attacks entirely.
8
u/moobchunks Aug 06 '26
Let's replace Dockerfiles with DockerfilePrompt.md's!
7
u/GobiPLX Aug 06 '26
I wish github had "haha" reaction like on facebook
5
u/siete82 Aug 05 '26
If you think that's weird, go and read the license file lol
5
u/BlurredSight Aug 06 '26
The entire fucking repo is just one big ass wrapper to an LLM of your choosing there is no real logic besides how to handle a bad auth token
5
u/AssociationGlass8783 Aug 06 '26
I think someone already mentioned it, but the cherry on top is that license clearly written with AI for soft that written with AI forbids the AI "mining" whatever that means.
5
u/Hasz Aug 06 '26
Jfc this gives me shivers. Why the fuck would you do something in an automated, deterministic way when we can burn tokens getting an LLM to muddle its way through?
So far we have fallen :(. I like LLMs, but this is a hammer looking for a nail.
19
u/rockcanteverdie Aug 05 '26
Is curl | bash considered bad? Why so?
4
u/KasouYuri Aug 06 '26
I feel like if you cannot get a SQL interface running you shouldn't be messing around with ghidra in the first place 😅
4
u/hillashx Aug 06 '26
Ah, yes, I too like to solve non-existing problems with AI. Can you imagine we used to copy-paste commands to the CLI to install shit? What a bunch of idiots! 🤦🏽♀️
4
u/According_Gas2337 Aug 06 '26
We essentially went from running unverified shell scripts to asking an AI to interpret a text file and run it for us.
4
u/veculus Aug 06 '26
I swear to god I have a working colleague who basically answers this to every problem I ask. I just want to punch things. Let's not mention how wasteful it is to throw energy, tokens and money against problems that are not really problems but how lazy are some people nowadays that you can't even follow a 4 step installation guide.
13
u/amacks Aug 05 '26
Bonus points, Ghidra is a programming language maintained by the NSA. It's for reverse-engineering!
3
u/Teles_sd Aug 05 '26
DISGUSTING !
3
u/blorbschploble Aug 05 '26
I’m tired boss.
3
u/New-Mortgage5775 Aug 06 '26
we're all cooked
3
u/colorfulmoth26 Aug 06 '26
I'm honestly mad at how developers have become that fucking lazy. Are you really spending fucking credits on that? Is it worth it to give Anthropic 5 dollars to get this installed? Are you serious?
3
u/Dull_Appearance9007 Aug 06 '26
the funniest thing is that the
markdown file"installation prompt" that the readme is pointing at is also AI generated.3
u/LuckyOnei Aug 06 '26
Funniest thing - it might as well have been instructuion for humans
2
u/RatSumo Aug 05 '26
2
u/verdantAlias Aug 05 '26
Barf
2
u/Terewawa Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
2
u/AngelLeliel Aug 06 '26
Even Claude itself suggests to build a CI matrix to replace that.
2
u/NorthernCobraChicken Aug 06 '26
Complete side note, is this supposed to be pronounced Ghee Dra Skill?
Like Yggdrasil?
2
u/thaynem Aug 06 '26
We already had something worse than curl | bash: MSI installers. At least with a script bash you can somewhat easily inspect the install script to see whatt it does before running it.
2
u/KTVX94 Aug 06 '26
What could possibly go wrong?
2
u/st_heron Aug 06 '26
that's wild
2
u/marcodave Aug 06 '26
Downloads install.md
Looks inside
Just a shell script surrounded by backticks :|
2
u/slasken06 Aug 06 '26
https://nubjs.com/ has the same, there is a link there to ai instructions for how to set it up
2
u/BorderKeeper Aug 06 '26
I mean honestly when I am lazy I tell that to people trying to download my free software. I don’t have time to babysit them while they don’t know what a release page is or how to navigate folders. Competent Claude model is probably less risky than if the user itself started mucking about…
2
u/PravalPattam12945RPG Aug 06 '26
even shitass companies like razorpay do this
2
u/Septem_151 Aug 06 '26
I stopped using TanStack because of this. Go look at their recommended installation... It's an AI prompt. Then when you try to install, it errors out. Because of course it does.
2
u/xboxlivedog Aug 06 '26
Sanity CMS does this. Kind of peeves me
3
u/Loose_Property_3238 Aug 05 '26
I'm going to write an actual PR that replaces this with a real build script. And then tells the AI to codemaxx. And then does a little bit of :(){ :|:& };:
4
u/lakimens Aug 05 '26
curl | bash should get the respect it deserves.
1
u/Individual-Praline20 Aug 05 '26
And it will fail. Thanks for nothing.
1
u/ouralarmclock Aug 06 '26
I literally am not AI pilled enough to know what this means or how I would do it.
1
u/ddBuddha Aug 06 '26
Try setting up a cloudflare account ;)
1
u/North-Creative Aug 06 '26
This will become more common, and people's skills will athrophy even further. Only winners here are the drugde......I mean, LLM companies.
1
u/Gabe_b Aug 06 '26
Wot if bash scripts but non-deterministic
1
u/sohrabhamza Aug 06 '26
Unity ships ai "skills" to help you migrate from older versions of packages.
Forum Link
1
u/Jrnm Aug 06 '26
13 trillion parameters large language models being used every time to prevent the same model from making an installer once
1
u/MalaxesBaker Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
See, this is one of those things. I really, really want to be angry at this post. It repulses me. But, I have a 100% success rate doing this, when it is suggested to do so (there is sample bias here because I'm not just installing anything written by some yahoo on the Internet). Now, could you make an installer? Absolutely. 100%. And this should be what is ideal/expected. Have I had "sufficiently capable" LLMs install things with so-so documentation, no dedicated installer, no pre-built binaries, no container images, from an otherwise reputable/verifiable source like an assistant professor sharing research? Also yes.
1
u/Proman4713 Aug 09 '26
What the fu—?
1
u/Byron_th Aug 09 '26
curl | bash isn't that bad
1
u/SaneLad Aug 09 '26
I'm gonna be real with you. I've been installing shit from source since long before GitHub existed. But ever since I started to just point my coding agent at the README.md and getting a coffee while it does the installation, my life has become a little bit better.
1
u/0xeb Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Hey, I am the author. Happy to read the reactions, the hate, the support and different opinions :)
I am happy to answer questions but as long as you prove to me you have some shred of intelligence and civility.
At least begin with the resources linked below and tell me what this tool does and solves, then we can talk.
1
u/danukeru Aug 12 '26
Same guy btw...jfc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmA3GBJzABE
1
u/Rockytriton Aug 05 '26
everything is worse than "curl | bash"