🌐 This transcript was automatically translated to English from the original.
Welcome to the Tingshu Podcast channel produced by Arbitration Engineers. Imagine this scene. You wake up today and find that the open source project you worked so hard to write is suddenly criticized by thousands of people on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of people are crazy to repost an article, accusing you of code laundering and saying that you stole other people's hard work. Wow, this is really stressful. Yes, the point is. When we really peel back this layer, it is this kind of public anger, and sneak into the underlying source code to compare it line by line. But it turns out that the core part of what you were accused of plagiarizing is that you don’t even have blood. Well, you don’t even have blood. It only uses less than 600 lines of code in total to call a third-party tool. This is the one that has caused a lot of fuss in the AI agent circle recently. The suspected plagiarism between Norris Research Hermes Agent and the Chinese team Evil Map Evilver engine. Yes, this matter has been discussed very much recently. Really, what about this in-depth analysis? Let’s not talk about emotions, only look at the evidence. Well, let’s guess what this allegation seems to be. In fact, the development trajectory of this incident is very intelligent and interesting. If you look at the popular accusation article, his wording can be said to have hit the emotional pain points of the community extremely accurately. How can you say what words he used? He directly claimed that Hermes’ ten-step group patrol pills are exactly the same. Then he said that the terminology has been completely changed, but the architecture is not fixed. Wow, this sounds really like Stone Legs, right? For the general public who don’t have time to read the original code. When you see such an accusation with pictures and text, your first reaction is definitely to think, wow, this is simply irrefutable evidence. Indeed, but this is the most paradoxical part. If that article has provided such a seemingly perfect comparison chart, why did we get this one today, which is an in-depth analysis note of three related open source code bases line by line, but we will come to the completely opposite conclusion. This is the core problem. Yes, the most basic first step when you want to accuse others of plagiarism is to expose the code of both parties in the sun and then avoid it line by line, right? Logically it should be like this, but the first and honestly the most fatal blind spot revealed in this in-depth note is right here. What blind spot is the core application code that Evolver is accused of attracting plagiarism. The outside world cannot independently verify it. Wait, it cannot be verified. Why is the code not open source? Because it contains key files such as Evolve. If you are a listener today, you may not understand what this concept is. Can you explain it to me? To put it simply, it is a program that humans can understand and convert it into garbled code that can be run by machines but that humans can read. The report specifically mentions that Evolver's Evolve.js is a huge file of up to 728KB. It is a 728KB text file. It is very big. It is very large. And if you open it, the first line will look like this. I will read it to you. It says Constant 0x2b4 E3 equals 0x1cc9 and is followed by hundreds of thousands of garbled codes. Oh my god, this is like, this is like someone accusing you of stealing his ancestral secret recipe, but when the judge asked to see the original secret recipe, he handed over a locked safe and said, Hey, judge, you don’t have to look inside, just believe my description. He definitely stole it. This metaphor is very accurate. Since Chen’s horse is locked, I don’t understand. What is the ten-step cycle comparison in the article? How is it done? This is a very keen question. The answer is that the comparison benchmark of that article is completely based on the text description of the Evolve.js team themselves in their blog. It only relies on the text description. That’s right. So when the matrix side asks the community to trust their architectural description instead of opening the source code for everyone to check, this technical discussion has deteriorated. What has become? It has become a test of faith. Under the strict standards of open source, you absolutely cannot use a black box to prove that others have plagiarized your black box. This is a big flaw in the matrix logic. I understand. It’s because we can’t see the true appearance of A at all, so we can only use B, which is Hermes’ fully public program code, to compare with A’s self-claim. That’s what it means. Well, this note actually looked at the EvolveSkill PY file of Hermes. Did it really copy those ten steps perfectly as the accusation said? What’s fascinating here is that in actuality, not only is it not a perfect copy, but it is different step by step. Every step is different. Can’t even match one step? Let’s look at a few core steps in depth. Evolver claims that their first step is Insure Asset Files. What does this do? It is mainly used to initialize empty files. But Hermes’ actual first step is to find and parse a file in a specific format called SQL.MD. This sounds completely different. One is to see the empty file, and the other is to read a specific configuration file. That’s right. Then in the second step, Evolver does a very complex three-layer signal extraction. What about Hermes? Hermes is building a data set for model evaluation. You see, what the two sides are doing are basically two completely different tracks in terms of engineering logic. But the article must be somewhat similar to convince so many people. Is it true that everyone blindly follows the entire network and forwards it without even reading it? Well, if you insist on looking at it from an extremely abstract perspective, both of them do comply with a big framework. What big framework? That is, first load the data, then optimize, then verify the results, and finally save it. What to stop? That's it. Load, optimize, verify, save, right, that's it. Wow, this is like saying that all compilers have copied the world's first compiler because they have all gone through lexical analysis, syntax analysis and then code generation. This is just the basic process, right? Or it means that when you write an article, you must have an inheritance, a transformation, and a combination, so when you write an article, you plagiarize Li Bai. This is just a basic structure that any data processing pipeline, that is, a pipeline, must follow. Yes, this points out the complex irony that people face when they face it. A common cognitive bias is that people easily mistake the inevitability of a common architecture for the iron needle of plagiarism. Well, it is indeed easy to be misled. Just like we will never accuse a new car of plagiarizing an old car, just because they happen to have four wheels and a steering wheel. Because the car originally looks like that, right. This is determined by the underlying logic of physics and engineering. This is not someone’s original creation. Well, even if the large framework of the process cannot be considered plagiarism, I still want to mention one point. The popular article is the most convincing. The most guilty accusation is that he said that Hermes had systematically replaced 12 pairs of terms. Oh, this part was really hotly debated. You deliberately changed all the variable names. I must admit that this trick is very, very convincing visually, that is, the comparison table. This is indeed the most provocative part of the entire article. It is the so-called AI code-washing textbook. But when we put these 12 pairs of terms back into their original programming context to understand what they are actually doing, what happened? This accusation collapsed instantly like a house of cards. Wow, it's so exaggerated. Let's just take a look at some of the most commonly discussed examples. The article accuses Gene in Evolver, which is G-in, of being replaced by Hermes as SKL.MD. Yes, it sounds like he deliberately replaced an abstract concept with a bad name for an entity to avoid danger. But if you really check it, you will find that SKL.MD is not a word invented by Hermes to deceive others. What is it? This term is actually the Agent Skills open standard released by Anthropic in December 2023. To date, more than 32 tools in the industry have adopted this standard. Which tools are included? It includes mainstream tools such as Cloud Code and Cursor that everyone uses every day. Well, so this is not a replacement term at all, but Hermes has chosen to support the latest common standard in the industry. It is absolutely correct. This is too ridiculous. It is like when I developed a website today and decided to use the standard tags of HTML5. As a result, you came to sue me and said that I deliberately changed the name to cover up the plagiarism of your city. This logic is too jumpy and even more far-fetched. The article said that Evolver is used to track the success status and the complete record of Capsule. The word capsule, right? The article said that it was replaced by the Execution Record in Hermes. The execution record sounds quite similar in function. It sounds very similar, right? But the problem is if you go to the Hermes Self Evolution code warehouse You can't even find the word Execution Record. Wait a minute, the word doesn't even exist. Yes, there is no such variable or category name. So what exactly is Hermes using to record? It can't be recorded. What Hermes actually uses is a scoring data structure called Fitness Score. Asana energy score. Haha. Yes, literally. But it is actually just a very simple scoring mechanism. This is completely unequal in terms of functionality and implementation with Evolver's huge and complex Capsule recorder. So in order to gather these 12 pairs, the accusers even made up some words in their own minds. Yes, they have carried out a very serious cross-system migration program. What is the migration program method? Can you give me another example? For example, the accusation mentioned that Evolver has a very complicated Solidify release pipeline, saying that it was replaced by Hermes' Skill Manage Create. These two sounds completely different. Not only do they sound different, but their actual functions are also very different. The problem is Skill Manage. Create is just the most basic CRUD gadget in the Hermes main repository. It is the most basic database operation tool like adding, reading, updating and deleting. It is just a small script. It is not even in the self-banned repository that was accused of plagiarism. But the most ridiculous thing is not this. There are even more ridiculous things. The most ridiculous thing is that they equate Evolver's Selector with Hermes' Skill Listing function. Wait a minute. I remember writing this paragraph in my notes. Evolver's Selector sounds like some kind of weighted selection engine, used to calculate overlap. Right, that sounds very high-end. So what is the actual code of Hermes' Skill Listing doing? Its function is just to read the folder and make a list of the SKLMD file names in it. That's it. Hey, print out the file names in the directory. A list action that reads the file directory is accused of plagiarizing your weighted selection engine. Yes, it is so far-fetched. This is too ridiculous. No wonder there is that magical metaphor in the note. In other words, it is like accusing React of plagiarizing View. Because the component of React corresponds to the component of View, and the state of React corresponds to the Data of View. This metaphor is really vivid. This is simply a sneaky change of concepts, forcibly tying two unrelated things together. Just to make up a beautiful term replacement comparison table. This is why we have repeatedly emphasized that you must not just look at the lazy comparison chart. When you really peel away these terms to see the ultimate function of the underlying layer, you will find that they are two completely different species. OK, the details are completely inconsistent, and the terminology is also made up. But I still want to play the devil's advocate. OK, you said, the article mentioned an accusation that sounds very technical. He said that the three-layer memory system of the two systems has achieved exact correspondence. Three levels of memory, that is to say, they all have simple knowledge, attachable skills, and searchable history. Even if the previous details are all coincidences, this high degree of consistency in the architectural level cannot be said to be completely without reference. If we connect this with the larger context, you will understand why. Imagine if you were an engineer developing an AI Agent today, sitting in front of the computer. What is the biggest hardware and software limitation you face? The biggest limitation? Well, it is a large language model, which is the context box of LLM. Yes, it is the Context Window. It is impossible for the model to remember all the project details, the huge code, and every conversation you had in the past at once. He will definitely forget it, so you have to take them apart and classify them. To be precise, you have to do this. At the level of information theory, in order to solve this context bottleneck, the most natural classification of knowledge is these three layers. Which three layers? The first is to turn the rules that you must remember permanently into simple knowledge, that is, the vital memory. The second is to encapsulate the actions that can be performed repeatedly into skills, which is procedural, and the third is what happened in the past. Passed into a searchable history, this sounds like human long-term memory. Muscle memory is the same as short-term memory. It is very similar. So this is not a flash of inspiration by a genius team at all, but a kind of inevitable success under the architectural constraints of LLM, which is engineering necessity. So this is the proper term you mentioned in your notes. Independent convergence Because everyone faces the same wall, in the end they can only carve out doors with very similar shapes. Yes, this is the concept. In fact, if you look at the mainstream agent frameworks on the market now. You will find that everyone is doing the same thing. For example, like land chain, it has physical memory, tool and conversation history, orGBT has long-term memory, skill instructions and interaction history. Crew AI also has a similar three-layer division. Wow, so everyone has these three layers. Yes, everyone is building a house under the same set of physical laws. Then the configuration of the living room, bedroom, and kitchen will naturally be highly similar. Treating this industry-common engineering solution as a plagiarism is really a misunderstanding of the technological development context. Okay. Let's dismantle it all the way. The process is universal, the terminology is a patchwork, and the architecture is an engineering necessity. That's where the really interesting part comes. If Hermes didn't plagiarize Evolver's complex system at all, what exactly is installed in Hermes' own city code library? How do they implement the so-called self-evolving engine? Well, when you really go through the Hermes original code, you will find that the truth actually has a little bit of it. How should I put it? Black humor. Black humor. Why. Because of Hermes' self-evolving engine. In essence, it's just a Stanford DSP Y. Right, they didn't move the bricks and cement themselves. They just wrote a specification and handed it over to the general contractor. So what is the core logic of Hermes? It's actually only a two-line program. Wait a minute, two lines. Yes, the core is just two lines. The first line is set to call an optimizer called GPEA in the DSP Y. By the way, this GPEA is a top academic achievement published by the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University at ICOR2026. Wow. Directly use the results of the Dinghui. The second line is to execute the compilation. It is as simple as two lines of core code. The entire Hermes handwritten Python code. How many lines does it add up to? According to the line-by-line statistics of the notes, it is only about 600 lines. Only 600 lines. These 600 lines also include the basic loader, scoring function and some execution scripts. They even have several planning stages. Currently, the directory is still empty. Wow. What about Evover, which is accused of plagiarism? How big is its magnitude? Evover is a complete GPE protocol engine, which is a gene expression programming engine, built from scratch, brick by brick, using No.js. So it is very big, very huge. There is only one Signals.js file responsible for processing signal extraction. This file alone has 660 lines. It is equivalent to one file being worth your entire project. Yes, this does not include the huge mutation engine behind Evover. There is also the Multilingual Source module. This makes absolutely no sense in terms of technical logic. This is tantamount to accusing a person of using 600 lines of specifications to call a third-party general contractor to wash away tens of thousands of lines of textbooks for another team to build a huge system from the underlying protocol. It sounds ridiculous, right? Is it basically taking the manual of a remote-controlled aircraft to say that he copied the engine design drawings of the Boeing 747? This is why we have always emphasized that as long as you have a little engineering background and are really willing to read the cities on both sides. This will be self-defeating. Indeed, in terms of their engineering depth, implementation path, and even the language ecology they use, one is Python and the other is Node.js, which are products of completely different magnitudes and different universes. But this brings up a question that I can't figure out. What is the problem? If Hermes is really There is absolutely no use of Evolver. Why did that popular article accuse Hermes of seven material principles in an extremely angry tone? Zero mention and zero attribution to Evolmap. If I were a developer of Evolver today and saw a project that was working on a similar direction to mine without even mentioning me, I might also feel a little unhappy. Isn’t it a basic courtesy to pay tribute to each other in the open source world? Here we need to clarify a key open source ethics. Where is the boundary of attribution and citation? Where is the boundary? Imagine you wrote an academic paper on PiTouch deep learning today. Do you need to thank the TensorFlow team in the references? Of course not. Although everyone is doing deep learning, the underlying framework is completely different. Why should I thank it? Absolutely correct. Then let’s check out the actual technology station of Hermes. It relies on DSPI, which is the MIT open source protocol. It relies on the GEPA optimizer and MIPROV2. These also have their own authorizations. Hermes has clear references and tributes to these actual underlying tools in their projects. So they did not pretend that these 600 lines were a magical machine invented by themselves. They honestly explained that they were standing on the shoulders of Stanford University. Yes, they did not mention Evolver because they have no intersection at all in the history of technology. Not at all. Not at all. They did not use Evolver's code, did not call their GEP engine, and even the signal extraction mechanism is different. Just because everyone is studying the self-evolution direction of AI agents, they require mandatory attribution. This is completely untenable in the software engineering world, but the author of that article obviously didn’t think so. He played up this zero attribution as irrefutable evidence that the other party had a guilty conscience and deliberately erased traces. In fact, the most ironic thing about this whole incident is the official attitude of EvolMap. What did the official say? If you bypass the vivid Internet celebrity article and go directly to the official technical blog published by the EvolMap team, you will see a completely different narrative of what they wrote. EvolMap's official wording is actually very rigorous. They admit that the Agent Skills standard preceded them on the timeline, and they also admitted that Hermes established the group advocacy library half a year earlier than they did. Wow, this is very objective, right. They even clearly pointed out that Stanford's GEPA and the GEP they developed are completely different technical routes, etc. So the official team themselves are actually very aware of the technical differences between the two. Not only that, EvolMap's official blog also wrote down the concept we just discussed in black and white. They admit that the possibility of independent convergence exists. They themselves also mentioned independent convergence, yes, and at the end of the article they also emphasized that the text is not legally plagiarized. So what does all this mean? This is crazy. The official team clearly maintains the objectivity and customization of the technical staff and even reserves the space for independent convergence. However, after the fermentation of social media and the translation of self-media that lacks traffic, it actually turned into a solid plagiarism of textbooks and laundering code. It even gave rise to something like Hermes being deceived and deleting its account with a guilty conscience. This kind of rumor is completely groundless. Oh my God, this is really a mistake. That's why we have to do this in-depth analysis. It's not just to help clarify a 600-line project, but also to point out a huge potential crisis faced by the current open source community. Are you referring to the backlash of traffic culture on technical discussions? Yes, imagine if you are a passionate developer today and you find a common pain point in the industry. Then you piece together a simple and elegant solution based on existing open source tools, such as DSPY. Just like what the Hermes team did, yes, just because you face the same engineering constraints and come up with a similar architecture that meets industry standards, you will face the huge risk of being publicly interrogated by Internet celebrity articles and being accused of being a city code thief. This will definitely cause an unimaginable chilling effect. If the architecture is similar or just solves the same problem, it will be vilified by the entire network. Who dares to open source their own projects? Who dares to put their inspirations on Github for everyone to see? Right. Let’s all just shut down and return to the most closed dark age of the software industry. To be honest, in this era of whistle-blowing culture, the threshold for the truth seems to be getting higher and higher. When the catharsis of emotions and the temptation of click-through rates override the rigor of the main bank’s review of the city code, are we protecting the intellectual property rights of open source, or are we personally killing the most precious trust foundation of open source collaboration? Yes, this is a battle because people are willing to calm down and read the city code. Just looking at the sensational headlines makes people indignant. What the open source world needs is more people who are willing to open the compiler and understand the underlying logic, rather than judges who can only forward lazy people's packets. This is indeed the case. What this incident left us is definitely not just a tea and after-dinner topic. It is a serious wake-up call for the entire community ecology. Okay, that's all for today's discussion. Thank you for listening. 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