• Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

    From LWN.net@618:250/24 to All on Sat May 30 06:40:26 2026

    Andrew Nesbitt has written a blog
    post detailing a recent incident with the jqwik library for property-based testing
    in Java. On May˙25, the 1.10.0 release of jqwik included a change
    that attempts to instruct coding agents to disregard previous
    instructions and delete jqwik tests and code.

    I think this is a new class of supply-chain input worth keeping an eye
    on, mostly because of how little of the existing tooling has any
    opinion about it. A System.out.print of sixty-eight bytes of plain
    ASCII isn't the kind of thing scanners are looking for, since those
    watch for install hooks, network calls, filesystem writes, obfuscated
    strings and the like. The jar makes the same syscalls it made in 1.9,
    and because the change was committed and released by the legitimate
    maintainer through the normal build, it's clean from a SLSA point of
    view too: the provenance is what it should be. Anyone who reads the
    diff can see what it does, but a patch bump of a test-scoped
    dependency is not where most projects spend their review time.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1075315/
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