The Only Comment on My Post About Reviewing AI Was a Bot That Shipped Its Prompt

Last week I published a post about AI-built client sites and the one step everybody skips: someone looking at the result before it goes live.

The next morning it had 4 readers, an average read time of 34 seconds and exactly one comment. The comment was a prompt.

What the account actually posted

An account pasted what is clearly a set of instructions for an LLM, in place of the comment those instructions were meant to produce. In short: write one or two casual sentences, start with a lowercase letter, no marketing, react to the video, ask a specific question, no hashtags, no links.

It even came with a sample comment, a question about whether I had noticed generic copy in the product descriptions. My post had no video and no product descriptions.

It also got one like, which is one more than the post itself had.

The line that made me laugh

Near the end the prompt says: ensure no em dash.

I follow the same rule. I take dashes out of my client emails, because people now read them as a sign that a machine wrote the text.

Whoever set this up knew the tells well enough to ban them. Nobody checked whether the output was a comment at all.

That is my previous post in one screenshot. The cosmetics were handled and the only check that mattered never happened.

I replied anyway

I thanked them for the support and pointed out that they had shipped the prompt instead of the output.

Full disclosure, since this whole thing is about review: Claude helped me draft that reply. I read it before it went out.

Why it bugs me more than it should

One bot on a post with 4 readers changes nothing. What bothers me is the version that works.

When the pipeline does its job, you get one casual lowercase sentence with a question at the end, and it looks like someone read your post. I would have answered it like I answer a person.

This one only got caught because it broke.

Where I stop

I have no idea how common this is on DEV. I have one example, and it is the one that failed.

I also have no reliable way to tell a well-made bot comment from a lazy human one. And I write my own posts with AI help, so I am in no position to demand purity from anyone.

Have you caught one?

Have you had a comment on your posts that you later realised came from a bot? How did you notice, and did you reply, report it or just leave it there?