Thank You, AI

A longtime tinkerer just pulled the plug on their home‑grown code server after a swarm of bots slammed it with endless requests, burying the machine in 404 “not found” errors until the logs filled the disk. The repos are now moved to the big leagues — GitHub and GitLab — and the author is down to a static blog that’s harder to crash. But the real fireworks are in the comments.

One camp rolled in with the “this is fixable in 10 minutes” energy. Jaxkr waved a free fix: just throw Cloudflare in front and call it a day. Oceanplexian went full spicy, saying it’s “not that hard” to serve static files and, plot twist, use AI to fix the AI problem — “fire up Claude Code” and set up caching. Meanwhile, skeptics like data-ottawa questioned the “AI scrapers” label at all, arguing that any competent large language model (LLM) would stop after a zillion 404s; these look more like dumb, abusive bots. Lerc asked for receipts: show the logs if we’re blaming AI.

And then there’s the meta-drama. CuriouslyC wondered why this made the front page, sparking a mini culture war: is this a personal blog post or a symbol of the indie web getting trampled by automation? The meme-ification came fast — “Press F for the self-hosted era,” “404s as a DDoS,” and “Skynet ate my repo.” In short: one dev bowed out, the crowd split between “protect it better,” “it wasn’t AI,” and “who even cares?”