TechCrunch highlights a growing problem OSS project maintainers are facing with the rise of gen AI as well as the creative solutions they are developing to fight it: aggressive AI bots that crawl Git servers in order to harvest every last bit of source code they can find. In many cases, these bots hammer servers to the point of causing outages.

This problem has become so pervasive that OSS maintainers are fighting back. And they’re doing with the creativity, ingenuity, and humor that typifies the OSS movement:

So Iaso fought back with cleverness, building a tool called Anubis. 

The funny part: Anubis is the name of a god in Egyptian mythology who leads the dead to judgment. 

“Anubis weighed your soul (heart) and if it was heavier than a feather, your heart got eaten and you, like, mega died,” Iaso told TechCrunch. If a web request passes the challenge and is determined to be human, a cute anime picture announces success. The drawing is “my take on anthropomorphizing Anubis,” says Iaso. If it’s a bot, the request gets denied.

Anubis is a reverse proxy proof-of-work check that must be passed before requests are allowed to hit a Git server. It blocks bots but lets through browsers operated by humans.

The wryly named project has spread like the wind among the FOSS community. Iaso shared it on GitHub on March 19, and in just a few days, it collected 2,000 stars, 20 contributors, and 39 forks. 

This is the latest example of a trend we’ve seen time and again in OSS: there is no problem faced by OSS that can’t be solved by (C)OSS itself.