The busiest week of my career

The week started out slow, I was ramping back up from a week of holidays.

On my Tuesday morning 10am meeting with my manager, Daniel, we brought back up the topic of project “Sell Callum”. The idea being that I often squirrel away solving the thorny problems slowing the team down, then carry on with my work without tooting my own horn. Basically I should increase my visibility.

Not 30 minutes later I inadvertently become patient zero for the biggest malware event in quite a while. A minute-by-minute timeline of what I was doing on my computer as this was happening if you want to follow along.

Whilst I was trying to sort out this mess, I got my manager back on a call

As noted in the linked transcript, partway through the call I re-activate the malware, giving me mere seconds to say my goodbyes to my manager before my laptop locks up again requiring another restart! Not my proudest moment, but I was taking it all in good spirits.

Once the threat was contained, we got to spreading the word asap. I got my personal AI to write the initial blog post as it already had all the details necessary to explain the situation. I don’t use twitter, so my manager sent out the initial tweet warning people, linking to my blog post.

The story then gets Quote Tweeted by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, who comments on the contents of my blog post. He claimed the malware’s bug was due to vibe-coding and mentions me by name, which gets picked up by everyone else from here on out.

Karpathy’s tweet then gets Quote tweeted by Elon Musk.

By the end of the day I get out a post-mortem, which goes into more details about how I got affected so quickly.

By end of Wednesday, I’ve written up my final piece on the malware, a minute-by-minute timeline showing the exact prompts I was using to get my local Claude Code session to identify the malware, clean it up, and write the advisory blog post. I was really happy with the framing, showing how AI for good was helping mitigate malware quite possibly AI-generated itself.

I end up posting this Thursday mid-afternoon to Hacker News, a site I’ve read daily for years. As my very first post, it makes it straight to the #1 spot. I was running around the office telling everyone I could find about my achievement, feeling on top of the world. On top of that, the post received comments from a bunch of awesome people I admire such as Simon Willison and William Woodruff.

I clocked off Thursday evening 11pm to wind down with some tech YouTube. The very first video on my feed is none other than The Primeagen talking about the malware, mentioning me by name throughout the video. I couldn’t escape this story even when I tried!

By Friday it had been picked up by sites such as TechCrunch, Inc.com, and even a mention on Simon Willison’s blog.

Not quite what we had in mind for project Sell Callum, but I’ll take it.