YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Claude code writes adds a `User-Agent` request header like `my-session-slug/1 <my.name@example.com>` when searching the web and requesting data. This violates the privacy of paying customers and has resulted in me getting dozens of scam and phishing emails per day from properties I have never personally visited. This policy is asinine: it does nothing but harm me, the customer, while providing immense value for scrapers and scammers.

This is why I prefer to use the chatbots on a website, instead of Claude Code.

I've never used Claude Code or Cursor. All the code I got written this year was without them.

I did use Microsoft Copilot a bit when it came out, though. I prefer to see exactly what's being sent, and sorta control the KV cache. These days, these chatbots have great environments where they can install headless browsers, php, your entire thing, run end-to-end tests, and then give you a .patch or .zip file to merge over your code, or even push to github.

Oh man.

That is just so disgusting. So happy I switched away from Anthropic.

For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI.

> I checked your installed Codex CLI 0.159.0, using your existing configuration.

> Its reported User-Agent contains the client/version, OS/architecture, and terminal—no email address.

Astra wasn't able to check OpenAI’s "hosted search service" though, whatever that is.

This, along with all the other sabotages, is why I run a local abliterated Qwen.

This explains the amount of spam emails I am receiving in the work email since I switched to Claude. I used to work with copilot which was fine. Now I am getting really a lot of spam emails almost on a daily basis. Absolutely crazy. And they are even personalised with my name and surname, not just "dear customer"...

Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).

Don't forget Claude wasn't even gzipping request/responses until recently. This company is pure vibes rediscovering lessons everyone else already learned. How on earth does this sort of thing get thought up? Do they just use the same http client for internal API calls as they do for public web fetches?

This is insane, and if the org I work for bans Claude as a result I will not be the least surprised. Goodbye Claude Code.

I use a unique email address for each site I sign up for, and thus Claude/Claude Code doesn't have my 'main' email. And yet after months of use?

Not a single spam to that unique email.

So if this is happening, it doesn't see to be causing even 1 spam email to that address.