Discussion
The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode, and more
OfirMarom: Undercover mode is the most concerning part here tbh.
anonymoushn: why
simianwords: > 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: I think it means OSS projects should start unilaterally banning submissions from people working for Anthropic.
ripbozo: 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: 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.
peacebeard: 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: > 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."
AnimalMuppet: 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.
alex000kim: 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: I don’t know what you mean. It just informs to not use internal code names.
robflynn: 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: > 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
giancarlostoro: I agree with you, I think people are overthinking this.
pixl97: >Claude Code also uses Axios for HTTP.Interesting based on the other news that is out.
greenavocado: What version?
Stagnant: 1.13.6, so should not be affected by the malware
rolymath: You didn't even use it yet.
simianwords: ?
motbus3: 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
causal: 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.
CharlieDigital: 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.
mzajc: 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: 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?
simianwords: Guys I’m somewhat suspicious of all the leaks from Anthropic and think it may be intentional. Remember the leaked blog about Mythos?
Analemma_: 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.
amarant: 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
andoando: I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI
ryandrake: 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.
petcat: 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: 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.
JambalayaJimbo: 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.
treexs: well yeah since they tell claude code the business decisions and it creates the comments
perching_aix: Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common.
AnimalMuppet: 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.
ossa-ma: 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.
injecting fake tools to poison
Reason077: > "Anti-distillation: injecting fake tools to poison copycats"Plot twist: Chinese competitors end up developing real, useful versions of Claude's fake tools.
