Lately, many of us have noticed a significant slowdown in Orekit’s collaborative development platform. This is particularly noticeable in GitLab, where some interactions are timing out.
Since I didn’t see any specific errors in the system or applications, I checked the Apache server logs and realized that it’s being bombarded with bot requests (AppleBot, TikTokSpider, Bytespider, Baiduspider, Amazonbot, Sleepbot, and PetalBot, to name just the most visible ones in recent days).
It’s a real pain. I’ll see if I can stop this. If I can’t, I’ll switch all the forks to internal visibility to block the bots, leaving only the original repositories public. Because bots have no intelligence and scour every repository, every page, and every commit with the same mindless, toxic greed that harms all real contributors and users.
In the meantime, please accept our apologies for this inconvenience, which is beyond our control.
I should point out that the companies that own these bots and AI systems and feed their tools with fresh data aren’t the only ones to blame. In my opinion, much of this barrage can be attributed to their clients: hordes of irresponsible developers. Ever since they adopted AI and switched off their brains—which are now useless to them—they’ve been wallowing in the ease of taking infrastructure managed by others (us, in this case) as “commodities” they can exploit at will. They continuously feed their favorite AI the repositories that interest them so it can generate code using our library. It never occurs to them to create a fork on their own infrastructure or to use a pre-processed version of the code (which, by the way, would cost their company much less).
I can’t wait for AI providers to start charging companies the actual cost of their tools. It’s starting to happen, and the companies that were gorging themselves on AI until now are starting to turn pale. The backfire is coming. What a satisfaction!