“They found me. I don’t know how, but they found me.”
— Dr. Emmett Brown

Funx Hex Downloads Graph

I haven’t promoted Funx. Haven’t posted about it. Haven’t tweeted.

I popped the library onto Hex so early beta readers of my book could pull it down and kick the tires a bit.

It had only been up for a couple of weeks, so I expected just a few downloads here and there.

I checked in to see if it was closing in on 80 downloads.

Zoinks! 1,327 downloads. In a single day.

I pinged a couple of friends. “What am I missing?”
We started the sweep:

  • Twitter? Quiet.
  • LinkedIn? No mentions.
  • GitHub? No star jump, no trending activity.
  • Hacker News? Nope.
  • Any recent release? No changes.
  • Commit history? Nothing special.

We even asked ChatGPT, where it confidently speculated and confidently told us nothing.

The only thing we found was a passing mention on devrants.blog from a few days earlier. Not exactly the kind of thing that would drive that sort of traffic.

What happened? Did it get scraped or picked up somewhere unexpected?
Some automated pipeline? Was it the bots?

I had one theory.

I’ve been tinkering with a tool that uses Claude under the hood. A couple of friends were trying it over a few days. But it links directly to the Funx GitHub, not the Hex package. Maybe Claude wandered off and downloaded a Hex library on its own? But 1,300 times?

I doubt it. But I can’t rule it out.

At this point, I have a mystery with no leads and a sense that something moved behind the scenes.

If you saw something, let me know.

Otherwise, there is no mask, no reveal, just a ghost spike on Hex and the sound of nothing explaining itself.