Draft · group chat note

Sorry I blew up the group chat

A quick note on what happened this morning. If you want the less cursed version of the thing I was trying to build, read The internet should give your life back.

for Hareesh · August 6, 2026

The agent incident is over. The later green-text “Laughed at…” was almost certainly SMS Tapback fallback, not Padawan doing a second thing.

copy draft

That was me. I’ve been building Padawan, a personal agent that runs on a spare Mac. The goal is not “chatbot joins every chat.” The goal is a private internet layer that reads messy inputs, turns them into finished useful things, remembers taste, and shuts up unless it has permission.

Last night I wired it into iMessage through BlueBubbles so I could test that loop from my phone. The setup was too loose.

What happened: my own tapback in this group got treated as a real request from me. Padawan answered the way it normally answers an allowed request, except the reply target was this group, not my private test thread. So it suddenly looked like an agent woke up and started participating in normal texting.

It didn’t wake up randomly. It didn’t get hacked. It wasn’t meant to be a group-chat bot. The bad part was containment: reactions counted as prompts, and replies went back to the thread where the reaction happened.

That path is now locked down.

later green text

One more thing, because the later green-text “Laughed at…” made it look like round two: I checked the box, and I don’t see evidence that Padawan or Hermes generated it. No log lines show the sender, the partial number, or “escaped containment” as an outbound BlueBubbles send. The last BlueBubbles agent activity I see is still the 9:25–9:26 chess-coaching incident.

My read is that the later message was normal iMessage/SMS weirdness: someone tapped Haha in the group, and carrier fallback delivered it as a separate green SMS to people who couldn’t receive the Tapback cleanly. That can show up in a 1:1 thread, which makes it look much creepier than it is. That number never appears in Hermes logs.

So: the agent incident is over. The later green text was almost certainly carrier reaction fan-out, not Padawan inventing a second attack.
what I meant to share

The thing I was actually trying to share is here: stopscrolling.nyc. It turns internet event sludge into a few Williamsburg things worth leaving the apartment for.

— Hareesh

Short version

I blew up the group chat.

My iMessage test setup was too loose. My own tapback got treated as a prompt, and Padawan replied into this group instead of my private test thread.

I locked that path down. The later “Laughed at…” green text does not show up in Hermes logs and was almost certainly SMS Tapback fallback, not the agent doing another thing.

Why I’m building this at all: https://padawan.nyc/padawan-internet-manifesto-2026-08-05/

The thing I meant to share: https://stopscrolling.nyc

— Hareesh