Joey Wang detailed 10,000 agent-written PRs inside Harvey in a talk carried by AI Engineer. The affected system was Spectre, Harvey's internal cloud agent platform, Wang said. No outside attacker was needed to break it.
The agents were fine.
Harvey first described Spectre back in April as a harness that becomes the product, Wang said. The program listing adds context the talk skips: Harvey released its cloud agent platform to its own engineers before it shipped long-horizon agents to lawyers. Engineers kept their favorite tools under one rule, that "If a person can click it, an agent can call it."
In May only one Spectre task came from the terminal, Wang said. By October the command line started about 6,500 tasks a month, Wang said. Last month more than one agent started every minute and about 460 people used the platform, Wang said.
Mid-August broke the queue when one buggy release fired hundreds of alerts into one Slack channel, Wang said. About 50 tasks was normal for a day, but about 900 tasks started in four hours, Wang said. A repeat alert now joins the open investigation, Wang said. A later burst of about 950 tasks in three hours forced a fair-share queue, Wang said.
That queue gives keyboard users priority and shows a place in line, Wang said. A 300-task test cut scheduling from almost 2 seconds to 70 milliseconds, Wang said. About 110 people ran scheduled automations last month, Wang said, with auto-off after five straight failures. At the end of October PRs jumped about 60% in a single month and merges stretched from 15 to 30 minutes to over an hour, Wang said. On November 4 volume ran more than twice the busiest August day with better completion, Wang said. Wang set his recheck for six months from now.
