Viral GitHub saga: Chinese firms used 'skill' files to build AI employee clones; workers countered with anti-distill tools that remove key knowledge — 60%
This is WILD. A secret workplace war just broke out in China and it has gone fully viral on GitHub. Companies started ordering their workers to document all their knowledge as AI "skill files." Why? to replace those same workers with AI but workers figured out the plan fast so they fired back. Someone built a tool called colleague.skill, software that scrapes a coworker's chat logs, emails, and work docs from Chinese platforms like Feishu and DingTalk, then clones them into an AI agent. The idea was savage, digitize your colleague before they digitize you, hand the AI clone to the company, and watch your coworker get laid off while you survive. A real GitHub project that exploded in popularity in days but then someone else entered the chat and changed everything. A developer released anti-distill.skill, a tool that takes the skill file your company forces you to write, then strips out every piece of real knowledge before you hand it in. The output looks perfectly professional, totally complete, impressively detailed but every critical insight has been secretly removed. Your company gets a hollow shell while you keep the real knowledge locked away in a private backup. The tool even has three intensity levels, light, medium, and heavy depending on how closely your bosses are watching. Companies across China have been building AI digital twins of departed employees, feeding their old chat histories and documents into large models to produce clones that keep working after the humans are gone. One verified case is that an employee left, and their replacement was literally an AI trained on every message they ever sent. The anti-distill tool went viral on GitHub within hours of being posted, racking up stars faster than almost anything trending that week. The implications reach far beyond China's borders. Every knowledge worker on earth now faces a version of this question, when your company asks you to document your process, they may be building the tools to replace you.
Real-time analysis of public opinion and engagement
What the community is saying — both sides
submit hollow, fake or corrupted documentation so AI trained on it becomes useless or dangerous to the employer.
workers will hide critical judgment and keep expertise in their heads or build independent, sovereign systems.
folks share when they benefit; when they feel threatened they withhold or distort what they know.
feeding chat logs and documents into models to keep work going without humans.
many replies insist subtle decision-making and context-dependent judgment won’t survive translation into skill files.
mass replacement risks collapsing demand: if people have no jobs, who buys the products?
messy corporate data and edited skill files will yield catastrophic or comedic failures.
using models to expose incompetence, improve bargaining power, or turn the tables on bosses.
fears of wrongful firing, privacy invasion, and a “capitalist hellscape” where sustainability of workers is ignored.
companies try to extract knowledge; workers adapt with hollow files, sabotage, or counter-tools, making this a contested battleground.
critics argue that copying messages or “personality” ignores the inputs and internal processes that create work, so an LLM trained on someone’s chat logs won’t truly replace that person.
several replies say well-written SOPs/skill files make workers more valuable and are the right way to scale organizations; those who document are rewarded, not replaced.
many view the claim as exaggerated or a “cool story” creepypasta, not reflecting how work actually gets done.
some point out laws (or potential laws) that ban firing people to be replaced by AI, and predict regulatory or legal collapse of this approach to layoffs.
others warn the real effect will be market-driven: firms built around AI will beat companies weighed down by human “deadweight.”
practical responses urge workers to learn new skills, document their work deliberately, or build technical countermeasures (e.g., “anti-distill”) to protect their value and income.
Most popular replies, ranked by engagement
This is why in the old Kung Fu movies, the master always kept one last move hidden from his student - just in case the student decided to challenge him. Usually it would be handed down at the end of his life ... written in a book or parchment, hidden in some cave...
The quietest revolution today is not fighting the system. It is refusing to outsource your thinking, your knowledge, and your competence to any external authority — and quietly building your own sovereign life instead.
https://t.co/3hQfNvALMI Also, China!
Now every AI worker can operate at DMV efficiency!
I don’t get it. People were being paid to just send messages? How does implanting an AI with someone’s personality and which areas of domain knowledge they’ve communicated about serve as a replacement any more than what the LLM already knows?
In the last place I was hired, I documented purposely everything cause I don’t wanted them to fall down. I think, it’s okay. We should find other ways to generate money.
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