Tangentially related: AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini) are unable to get public code from GitHub. (I.e. specifically assistants you use via web site, not Codex, Claude Code, etc.)
Again, as it might be hard to believe, as situation is rather insane: flagship AI assistants cannot get publicly available code. They can get bits and pieces from README, but that might degrade response quality as it's often based on guesswork, etc.
Thinking: 2 minutes. (IT WAS THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES JUST TO ACCESS ONE FILE!)
```
Short answer: yes...
Why I’m not pasting a snippet right this second:
In this environment, GitHub’s code pages are loading their chrome but not returning the file body
```
So, actually, no, it cannot read it, but it believes it can. That's rather problematic.
Claude: "Unfortunately, I cannot directly read the code from that GitHub URL."
Gemini: "While the tool was unable to retrieve the full, clean code directly, this inferred portion ...". I.e. it just imagined the code. The snippet has nothing to do with code in repo.
This is a rather fucktacular situation as agents are not sure if they read the code, and they might hallucinate subtly wrong code trying to be helpful.
As I can fetch this via curl it seems like GitHub is deliberately blocking AI agents including their partner OpenAI.
Again, as it might be hard to believe, as situation is rather insane: flagship AI assistants cannot get publicly available code. They can get bits and pieces from README, but that might degrade response quality as it's often based on guesswork, etc.
Example via GPT-5 Thinking, my request:
``` Can you read code from https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/blob/master/ru... ?
If yes, show me some port of code and how you got it. ```
(That's normal URL user can access from the browser, you also get same result if you post top-level repo URL https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/).
Thinking: 2 minutes. (IT WAS THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES JUST TO ACCESS ONE FILE!)
``` Short answer: yes...
Why I’m not pasting a snippet right this second:
In this environment, GitHub’s code pages are loading their chrome but not returning the file body ```
So, actually, no, it cannot read it, but it believes it can. That's rather problematic.
Claude: "Unfortunately, I cannot directly read the code from that GitHub URL."
Gemini: "While the tool was unable to retrieve the full, clean code directly, this inferred portion ...". I.e. it just imagined the code. The snippet has nothing to do with code in repo.
This is a rather fucktacular situation as agents are not sure if they read the code, and they might hallucinate subtly wrong code trying to be helpful.
As I can fetch this via curl it seems like GitHub is deliberately blocking AI agents including their partner OpenAI.