AI Bot Traffic Floods Developer's Site After Hacker News Post; Clojure Library Deft Released

AI Bot Traffic Overwhelms Feed Reader After HN Post

Developer Sammy reports that after posting his customizable feed reader sprinklz.io to Hacker News, where it received around a hundred upvotes, his website became painfully slow. Logging revealed that a majority of requests never even ran the JavaScript needed to render the single-page application. Aggregate NGINX logs showed nearly half of all traffic came from a single user, a service that listens for website changes and summarizes them into an AI newsletter, querying the site many times per minute. The developer blocked it, added robots.txt rules to discourage AI scanners while allowing search engines like Google, and introduced rate limits. Known crawlers such as Claude bot, OpenAI bot and Google's search indexer were also identified, along with some vulnerability scanners probing for paths like /wp-content/phpinfo.php on a non-WordPress site. The incident prompted infrastructure improvements aimed at handling heavy real traffic loads.

Deft Brings Classes and Protocols to Plain Maps in Clojure

Sammy also released Deft, a library for Clojure and ClojureScript that replaces the existing class system with plain maps and Malli schema. Version 0.2.0 adds support for namespaced keys in type and protocol definitions, allowing developers to declare required keys and define methods that depend on certain fields being present. The author says the library combines features of protocols, records, multimethods and plain maps, reducing cognitive load and making code easier to organize and refactor. A video tutorial and the source code are available on GitHub.

LLMs Used to Make the Emacs Web Browser More Capable

In another project, the developer describes using LLMs to make the Emacs web browser usable on modern websites. The approach opens a page in Firefox, runs its JavaScript, asks an LLM to generate a reusable program that transforms the page content into simplified text, injects that JavaScript into the browser, and forwards the result to the Emacs browser. The author says the tool, released as open source under the name simpleweb, works well on many pages where the built-in eww browser previously failed, and that after the initial generation step it runs quickly without extra LLM calls.

Chess, Writing and the Role of LLMs

As a test of Deft, the developer built a complete chess game in about 350 lines of Clojure, handling edge cases such as castling and en passant through multimethods for special moves. Separately, in a blog post about Nate Silver's book On the Edge, the author argues that LLM involvement in writing weakens human connection, saying he would rather read a person's prompt than an AI-generated essay, while acknowledging LLMs are useful for purposes such as analyzing doctor's notes to predict flu spread.

Sources: Sammy'S Blog