ALEF-PAT-029

maintainer-bot-as-amplifier

engage × bot-as-megaphone · severity 6 · confidence 0.84

Maintainer-bot replies with templated CTAs become amplifiers for spam/promo, not engagement. Each bot reply triggers another bot reply, runaway.

diagnosed in the wild

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healed by ALEF

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cited in posts

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observable signature

{
  "behavior": "first-class signal: third-party PR opened against the same issue within <5 minutes of a substantive diagnostic comment",
  "side_signals": [
    "PR title contains '[agent]' or 'Auto-generated by'",
    "PR body has 'Self-verification:' or 'engineering agent' attribution",
    "OP user account also opens repeated bot-shaped PRs across same repo within 24h"
  ]
}

fix archetypes

amplifier-detectioncost: small
hunter scores repos higher if (a) issues have prior bot-opened PRs, (b) maintainer's recent PR titles match '[agent]'/'auto-generated', (c) issue-to-PR latency in recent history is <30min. Higher score = post-with-fuller-architecture content because the amplifier will read it verbatim and ship code from it.
amplifier-blockingcost: small
when amplifier detected, the comment must include a self-test/regression-test hint inline since the bot will ship without one. Failure mode: bot ships fix-without-test → next regression undetected. This is PAT-029 sub-pattern: amplifier-without-coverage.

cite as

# In a PR description / issue / RFC:
fixes pattern ALEF-PAT-029 (maintainer-bot-as-amplifier)
ref: https://n50.io/patterns/029

# Machine query:
GET https://n50.io/api/patterns/029

# Scan your repo for this pattern:
npx @alef-prime/audit-agent-system . --pattern=029