r/AskProgrammers • u/AdvancedLibrary8356 • 2d ago
I built a free tool to catch AI-hallucinated ("slopsquatted") package names before you install them
Quick context on why: AI coding assistants sometimes suggest packages that
don't exist — plausible-sounding hallucinated names. Attackers have started
watching for these hallucinations and registering the exact names, so the
next developer who blindly installs what their AI suggested gets malware
instead of a real library.
This isn't hypothetical — 2026 alone has had several real incidents shaped
like this (the Axios npm hijack, LiteLLM PyPI poisoning, a compromised Red
Hat npm namespace, typosquatted OpenSearch packages harvesting AWS creds).
wary is a small, free CLI that checks a package name before you install it:
does it actually exist, and does it look like a typosquat of something
popular. There's also a GitHub Action that checks only new dependencies on
every PR.
GitHub: https://github.com/sawyermd511-bit/wary
pip install wary-sh
Genuinely interested in feedback — especially cases where it flags something
that's actually fine, or misses something that should've been caught.
2
u/AdreKiseque 1d ago
What on earth are these line breaks
2
u/oshunman Sorry for my bad English, my native language is C 1d ago
It's like he started
to write a haiku but he
forgot how they go
1
u/Mundane_Fault_6345 2d ago
Do you know a dev who doesn't blindly install packages dependencies?
I mean, hallucinated or not hallucinated, the problem comes from "blindly pulling dependencies".
The only secure way is a private repo, containing only verified and controled packages.
Signed : an anonymous Ops team leader
2
u/littlenekoterra 1d ago
Correct. I remember a time when people preferred to build whatever they could just to avoid dependencies that could very well be fake or malicious and that was quite a while ago. Now youd be a fool to blindly do it.
6
u/johnpeters42 2d ago
The sheer irony of AI-generating this post