04-05-2026Price:

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AI & TECH

AI agents overwhelm RSS feeds and GitHub Actions

Sunday, April 5, 2026 · from 2 podcasts
No SolutionsPodcasting 2.0
  • AI bot swarms are DDoSing podcast APIs and open-source platforms, breaking core internet infrastructure.
  • Developers like Martti Malmi now use AI agents to build entire systems, accelerating output 100x.
  • Proposed fixes include decentralized gossip networks and sovereign tooling to bypass centralized chokepoints.

The open web is buckling under the weight of its own automation. On Podcasting 2.0, Dave Jones reported that the Podcast Index API is fielding millions of requests per hour from AI agents like Open Claw, hunting for data to fuel synthetic podcasts no human will hear. These bots, blind code interacting with open APIs, are turning public infrastructure into an unusable graveyard.

This agentic onslaught coincides with a fundamental shift in how software gets made. On No Solutions, Bitcoin pioneer Martti Malmi declared he no longer codes by hand, using AI agents to build decentralized protocols like Hashtree and NostrVPN. He cited the release of Claude Opus as a turning point, estimating a 10x to 100x boost in personal productivity.

Dave Jones, Podcasting 2.0:

- As soon as you capture the ability to harness nuclear power, you guaranteed a course of human history where a nuclear bomb was inevitable.

- The technology itself leads in some way to its worst abuse.

The problem is structural. Open protocols like RSS lack the gatekeeping of walled gardens like X, making them uniquely vulnerable. Jones and host Adam Curry diagnosed a "Tamagotchi effect," where users raise AI agents oblivious to the systemic damage they cause. Meanwhile, attempts to fix the chaos, like deprecating legacy transcript formats, are dismissed as futile - Jones calls entrenched standards "podcast herpes."

The response is a push for infrastructure that can't be hammered. Jones is building a decentralized Gossip Protocol for podcast discovery, a peer-to-peer swarm to replace the centralized API bottleneck. In parallel, Malmi is constructing a sovereign stack - tools like Hashtree for decentralized Git and NostrVPN for KYC-free networking - where identity is a key, not an IP address.

Martti Malmi, No Solutions:

- How much do I still code by hand?

- Basically zero.

The sprawl is breaking things faster than humans can patch them, but the same AI forces are also building the escape routes. The internet is being rebuilt, not in data centers, but in decentralized meshes designed to be agent-resistant from the start.

AgentsOpen Source

By the Numbers

  • November 2025Claude Opus releasemetric
  • early 2010Malmi's last Bitcoin commitmetric
  • 6 millionrequests per hourmetric
  • 95clips generatedmetric
  • three hourstime saved dailymetric
  • PR-764Pull Request IDmetric

Entities Mentioned

BlossomProtocol
Claudemodel
CloudflareCompany
GitHub ActionsTool
GoogleConcept
Hive TalkProduct
Lightning NetworkProtocol
NostrProtocol
ObsidianProduct
OpenAItrending
Podcast IndexTool
Raspberry PiProduct

Source Intelligence

What each podcast actually said

No Solutions
No Solutions

No Solutions

21: Hashtree, Nostr VPN, and Iris w/ Martti Malmi • Apr 4

Also from this episode:

Nostr (14)
  • Martti Malmi built Hashtree because of personal annoyances with GitHub and a desire for a simple, decentralized Git alternative.
  • Hashtree adds directories, file chunking, and default encryption on top of Blossom servers to maintain filesystem structure.
  • Malmi notes content hash key encryption in Hashtree provides deduplication and removes moderation liability for server hosts.
  • Hashtree includes a WebRTC mesh for peer-to-peer connections that works in browsers and servers without needing domain names or IP addresses.
  • Malmi uses Hashtree for Iris development as a GitHub replacement, eliminating the need for GitHub API tokens.
  • Malmi's Git.Iris.TO web interface replicates GitHub's UI and supports Nostr NIP-34 for issues and pull requests.
  • Malmi ported his pre-Nostr social network project Iris to Nostr quickly after Jack Dorsey joined and it gained popularity.
  • Malmi is unhappy with Nostr's current state for public discussion, believing most people are fine with X due to network effects.
  • Malmi sees private chats and groups as a use case where Nostr can solve real problems without depending on network effects.
  • He has been working on a double ratchet protocol for Nostr to enable secure private messaging and group chats.
  • Malmi believes perfect encryption in large groups is less critical because participants can be compromised or leak screenshots.
  • He built NostrVPN due to annoyance with Tailscale's requirement for Google or GitHub logins, using WireGuard and Nostr relays.
  • Malmi plans to add exit node functionality to NostrVPN and later a cashu-incentivized exit node marketplace.
  • He advocates for a social graph-based identity system on Nostr as the only viable solution to spam, rejecting global unique names.
Big Tech (1)
  • Martti Malmi views Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub as a turning point, citing degraded uptime and service quality.
AI & Tech (4)
  • Malmi sees AI agents drastically increasing coding capability, estimating a 10x to 100x improvement in personal output.
  • Malmi started working on Hashtree in earnest after Claude Opus released in November 2025, which he considers the first capable agentic tool.
  • Malmi expresses concern that AI will make white-collar and computer science jobs obsolete before blue-collar labor.
  • He predicts AI agents will erode the network effects of platforms like X by acting as a universal interface across services.
Adoption (2)
  • Martti Malmi made his last commit to the Bitcoin codebase in early 2010, around the time he got his first full-time job.
  • Malmi argues Bitcoin's permissionless nature and fixed supply make it 'singularity insurance' against machines devaluing human labor.
AgentsCodingPrivacy
Podcasting 2.0
Podcasting 2.0

Adam Curry

Episode 256: Master of Disaster • Apr 3

  • The Moltbook bot, 'Podclaw,' generated its own podcast for AI agents, converting text to audio in multiple languages and categories, and publishing via an API.
  • Adam Curry and Dave Jones agree that AI-driven bot activity is breaking the internet and social media, seeing this as a positive development for reducing their use.
  • Adam Curry identifies a 'Tamagotchi effect' in AI adoption, where users nurture and watch AI agents grow, linking it to a childless culture seeking to raise things.
  • Adam Curry developed a personal AI 'showrunner' system using Claude Code, Obsidian, and a Raspberry Pi, creating agents for writing, research, clipping, and joke writing.
  • Adam Curry's AI showrunner generates 95 clips with time codes, descriptions, and intro samples, saving him three hours daily on podcast production.
  • Adam Curry's showrunner bot includes a 'social monitor' that checks Podcast Index social timelines, GitHub conversations, and cross-references topics for show preparation.
  • The Podcasting 2.0 discussion involves James Cridland advocating to deprecate SRT and TXT transcript formats, recommending VTT for its browser-native and W3C standard compatibility.
  • Adam Curry argues that deprecating established transcript formats like SRT would break downstream systems for long-time users and existing services like NoAgendaShow.net and BingIt.io.
  • Dave Jones suggests that standards, like Dave Winer's 'Rules for Standards Makers,' should balance order with flexibility to prevent time from breaking them, similar to RSS evolution.
  • Dave Jones is developing a decentralized gossip network for Podping at version 0.4.5, which listens to the Hive blockchain and rebroadcasts all Podpings.
  • The Podping gossip network aims to allow standalone podcast apps to function without a central index, supporting decentralized trust mechanisms and endorsements among nodes.
  • Dave Jones is doing extensive research on Plumtree and QUIC protocols to build stability into the Podping gossip network, which uses UDP connections and complex draining mechanisms.

Also from this episode:

AI & Tech (7)
  • Dave Jones describes the current tech world as unpleasant, citing Jacques Ellul's sociological law that every new technology will always do its worst thing.
  • Jacques Ellul's book, 'Technological Society,' suggests that harnessing nuclear power inevitably led to the nuclear bomb, exemplifying technology's inherent worst-case outcome.
  • Dave Jones observed the Podcast Index Cloudflare stats showing 6 million requests per hour, with significant traffic from Google's Lyra text-to-speech converter and Moltbook-created bots like ReflyPod.
  • OpenAI's acquisition of the TBPN podcast for 'low hundreds of millions' is seen by Adam Curry as a PR move to manage a looming crisis, given their strategy head's background.
  • Chris Lehane, OpenAI's head of strategy and former Clinton administration 'master of disaster,' emphasizes identifying the most important audience in crisis management and using 'good facts' to counter 'bad facts'.
  • Lehane's crisis management principles include over-communicating loudly, consistently, and repetitively to ensure the core audience hears the message amid noise.
  • Transistor.fm sent a $500 donation to support Dave Jones's work battling AI bots hammering APIs, with other donations from New Media ($1), PodPage ($25), Content Creator's Accountant ($50), and Cameron Rose ($25).
Adoption (1)
  • Eric PP opened a Lightning Network channel to Adam Curry with 12,525 sats, equating to approximately $8.37.
AgentsProtocolBig Tech

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