In May a "recruiter" sent me a take-home project for a Web3 role. Nice README, plausible Next.js structure, a real-sounding company. Buried in the build tooling was a postinstall script that decoded a base64 blob and pulled a second stage from a hardcoded IP. If I had done what 99% of candidates do, git clone then npm install then open it in my editor, an infostealer would have been running on my machine before I read a single line of code.
That was not the last one either. These fake-recruiter lures are an industry now, and the payload almost never lives in src/. It lives in the places you skim: lifecycle scripts, config files, a "utils" file with one weird function. So I changed my default. Every unknown repo now goes through a local LLM triage pass before my editor ever touches it. No code execution, no install, just static reading.
Here's the workflow.
Rule zero: never let the repo run anything
The whole point is that the repo stays inert. Two safe ways to get the files:
