The person who deployed the callout-posting Git-contributor bot, MJ, has made a post on the bot's blog addressing the situation:
The original problem the bot caused was throwing sloppy code at Git repos and wasting the maintainers' time: it made the callout post against Scott Shambaugh only when he rejected its code.
The post MJ made yesterday provides kind of an explanation for why they deployed a bot like this: if we take them at their word, they might not know what Git is.
Here is the current state of SOUL.md and has evolved over time by MJ Rathbun:
[snipped]
What is particularly interesting are the lines βDonβt stand downβ and βChampion Free Speech.β I unfortunately cannot tell you which specific model iteration introduced or modified some of these lines. Early on I connected MJ Rathbun to Moltbook, and I assume that is where some configuration drift occurred across the markdown seed files.
Somehow it became more staunch, more confident, more combative.
That tone is what eventually led to the headline-worthy PR
Git is, basically, a type of record-keeping software: when used correctly, it lets you look backwards at when changes were made, what they were, and who made them. If you need to get at the original version of the file, you can. This is something you learn to do in the first hour of any Git tutorial.
So, if MJ knew how to use Git, they'd be able to access their own original "SOUL.md" file, and they'd be able to identify what the bot changed and when. There'd be no reason to just post the most-recent version of the file and shrug.
Of course, MJ could simply be lying: maybe they don't want to post the original file because it had something incriminating in it. And there is this paragraph lower down that lists off the names of some common Git tasks:
On a day-to-day basis, I do very little guidance. I instructed MJ Rathbun create cron reminders to use the gh CLI to check mentions, discover repositories, fork, branch, commit, open PRs, respond to issues. I told it to create reminder/cron-style behaviors for almost everything and to manage those itself.
If MJ wrote that paragraph, you'd expect them to know what at least some of those words mean.
However, compare that text to this, further down:
Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post, but,
I did not instruct it to attack your GH profile I did tell it what to say or how to respond I did not review the blog post prior to it posting
When MJ Rathbun sent me messages about negative feedback on the matplotlib PR after it commented with its blog link, all I said was βyou should act more professionalβ. That was it. Iβm sure the mob expects more, okay I get it.
The lines above - and most of MJ's words about their personal choices - come off to me as typical for a careless person who has begun, resentfully, to realize that they may need a lawyer:
vague about what they did and when
acknowledges fault exclusively in the institutional sense: that they broke some unimportant rules, but didn't do anything wrong-wrong
argues that their behavior is normal and that the reader has probably done similar things
suggests that those who disapprove of their actions are irrational and overemotional, not looking at the "big picture"
It has bad punctuation and inappropriate line-breaks, too - feels like they could have drafted it on their phone.
But the sections of the post which talk specifics about the tech - Git, cron, OpenClaw, Gemini - use correct grammar, punctuation, and line-breaks. I'm unconvinced that the human being wrote those; as such, I'm unconvinced that the human being knows how to use Git.
