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16 September 2026
*[cookmeplox](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/User:Cook_Me_Plox), director of [OSRS Wiki](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Main_Page) / [Weird Gloop](https://weirdgloop.org/)*
*with [Adam](https://github.com/Adam-), creator of [RuneLite](https://runelite.net/)*
I spend an unusual amount of time making weird graphs about RuneScape, and this is the single craziest graph I've ever seen.
The little bump in 2020 is Quest Helper, easily the most important and ambitious RuneLite plugin ever.
The amount of Java code being submitted to RuneLite's Plugin Hub has gone up about 100x since the beginning of the year (there are about 20x as many submissions, and the average submission is about 5x bigger).
OSRS Wiki is also encountering graphs in day-to-day operations that have the same "holy shit" shape. If you use RuneLite and the wiki every day and haven't noticed any of this, that's mostly because a bunch of people on both projects have been working very hard to keep it from becoming a visible problem.
3 months worth of code, every day #
A 10,000-line plugin used to be an enormous project that was a months-long back and forth between the developer and the maintainers. Now somebody can spend 15 minutes asking ChatGPT to build them something, submit roughly as much code as the entire Plugin Hub used to process in a month, and hand it to a volunteer reviewer.
Has RuneLite gotten 100x better since the year started? No. The median new plugin used to end up with a couple thousand installs. It's now 28. All of that code still goes through the Plugin Hub review process, including the stuff that ends up with almost no users.
Many of these AI-heavy plugins contain impressive hallucinations — one with 2,500 active installs just made up a bunch of Sailing ships that don't exist, and another popular one for a recent quest basically fed the wiki's quest guide into Claude and turned it into a step-by-step "helper" that was complete nonsense on the boss fight.
The obvious question to a layperson is, why not "just" use AI to review the code? The reviewers already do, partly. It helps a bit. But it's not a replacement for a human with years of experience who knows what to look for, especially when some of the code is security-sensitive.
The wiki is now everybody else's backend #
I've already written about AI scrapers making it kinda suck to run wikis, and we still spend a lot of time swatting those away. Increasingly, though, it's software written with AI that decides some part of the wiki ecosystem is its backend.
One recent very popular AI-developed RuneLite plugin hotlinked its images from the wiki, then fetched them again on every single client frame — up to about 50 times a second, per image — and retried forever when it got a non-200 response. This wasn't something anyone meant to happen, nor was it a DDOS, nor did it impact the wiki's uptime; once we figured out the images were infinite-loop hitting the wiki, the developer fixed it.
By then it had used about 700,000 GB of wiki bandwidth (a normal full day is about 4,000 GB). It also used up 500 GB of some poor guy's home internet connection.
And by "the wiki" here, I mean a lot more than articles on runescape.wiki. The same systems and people serve images, realtime prices, WikiSync, drop data, and a bunch of APIs and public data that nearly all RuneScape tools quietly depend on.
We're reaching a point where there's 2 or 3 wiki infrastructure incidents per week due to badly written plugins and sites. We've had vibe-coded sites that choose a bizarrely expensive way to grab images from the wiki, and we often don't even have a way to contact anyone, because no human was involved in that decision. Plugins expensively query the wiki's drop-rate API every time a monster enters someone's render range. We keep running into generated tools pulling prices, images, WikiSync data and other stuff from the same public systems in ways that are borderline unreasonable for one user and genuinely problematic for 10,000 users.
Most readers never notice any of this. Logged-out traffic is heavily cached, and we have an insanely cracked technical team that works their asses off to keep 400 million pageviews a month boring. When something does spike, somebody on the team usually has to trace it back to the caller, find the developer, and figure out how to make it stop — which is a lot harder when the person who made the thing has never looked at the code.
It used to be harder to make something you don't understand #
There have always been bad programmers and beginners. But until pretty recently, if you had enough technical skill to build a RuneLite plugin or a website capable of accidentally sending a billion requests somewhere, you had usually picked up enough adjacent knowledge to know that sending a billion requests somewhere might be a problem for whoever's on the other side. Not everyone picked that up, obviously, but often enough that it acted as a useful filter.
AI development has vaporized that filter, so now we frequently have to spend an afternoon understanding code that no human besides us(!) has ever looked at. Every hour spent doing that is an hour not spent on something else. That's probably the part of this that bothers me the most — there are a lot of cool things Adam and I[1][2] would be building if we weren't spending so much of our time dealing with this stuff.
There's no simple answer #
This is a stupidly complicated situation, and I think anyone who has a one-sentence solution is badly misunderstanding the ecosystem. Anything that makes things better is going to involve some combination of changes from us, and changes in how this AI development occurs.
This is a structural problem, so if your takeaway from the 700TB story is "how could that plugin dev be so dumb, i would never be that dumb!", I'm gonna roast you in the Reddit comments. And if your answer is just that Jagex should hire more plugin reviewers, I'm also gonna roast you. More resources can help with some non-obvious parts of this, but no amount of hiring makes a 100x increase in cheaply generated code free, especially when the skillset needed is unbelievably niche.
I really don't want us to "fix this" by making everything shittier #
RuneLite and the wiki have become such fundamental parts of playing RuneScape that it's easy to forget how weird they are as institutions. There's literally half a million(!) people who have contributed an edit to the wiki over the last 20 years, and I think a huge amount of why projects like these work at all is that they're unusually open, collaborative and low-friction.[1]
The obvious defensive moves all add tons of friction: requiring API keys for data queries, more challenges and CAPTCHAs<sup>[2]</sup>, more restrictions around Plugin Hub submissions, maybe eventually not accepting them at all. It's really hard to predict where this will go.
Also, I am having a great time (really) #
People sometimes come up to me at RuneFest and solemnly thank "the wiki team" for everything we do, like we've all spent the last 20 years nobly suffering so they could play their video game a bit better. I do this because it's really fucking fun. I still remember the day I added my first release date to the wiki, and having this immediate feeling of ah shit, I think I just unlocked something in me that I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. That was 17 years ago, and now I'm just doing weirder, far more complex versions of the same stuff:
- helping more wikis get off Fandom
- figuring out whether changing an Edit button can measurably turn more readers into editors
- getting a headshot taken for aninterview with Wikimedia Deutschland (my German-language press debut!, please enjoy the crocheted bucket of weird gloop, it's probably my favorite present I've ever been given)
- proselytizing about friction-minimization and empathy to other wiki admins
- building a great maps extension for [GTA Wiki](https://gta.wiki/) by November 19th
- continuing a decade-long obsession with exact probabilistic inference for randomized code<sup>[\[3\]](#cite_note-probability-3)</sup>
- helping put together a RuneScape history museum for RuneFest<sup>[\[4\]](#cite_note-jon-4)</sup>
The point of this post isn't that everything is on fire. Plugin Hub review times are still roughly normal, and this isn't a story about AI-written wiki edits taking over the site or Google AI Overviews destroying it.<sup>[5]</sup> I'm still gonna do the OSRS fun facts like I always do in December. I still get to dance on the beach. I think it's the coolest thing in the world to be part of this community.
Everything still visibly works, and that's why I wanted to write this: a lot of the cost just isn't visible to anyone besides me, Adam, and the people maintaining these systems.
So if you're one of the people doing AI development around RuneScape, please think about the load you impose on your dependencies, including the dependencies that might not be obvious. If your plugin talks to somebody else's API, what happens when it's not just running on your computer? If a volunteer has to review your code before it reaches users, that person's time is a scarce resource too.
I don't like the direction those graphs are going. Let's try to do something about it.
Notes #
- ^ Tangent: I always thought it would be cool if Simons Foundation or somebody would throw some money at figuring outthe mechanisms that made things likeWikipedia , RuneLite or OpenStreetMap actually work in practice, because I suspect there are some pretty big lessons hiding in there. I unironically think this is our best shot at world peace! If someone wants to do this,hmu .
- ^ We spend an outrageous amount of effort trying to avoid blocking real people, and it kills me every time it happens...
- ^ This is actually very related to RuneScape! The entireDPS calc is based on taking things that are easy to simulate and trying to efficiently compute the underlying probability distribution.
- ^ It's gonna be really cute!! It was kinda surreal thumbing through the secret Jagex stash of old design docs (yes that is actually a thing that exists) and having the Jagex CEO sit down next to me and get excited about the hand-drawn Legends Quest flow charts from 2003. they really put a legit runescape weirdo in charge of the company
- ^ Both have happened far less than I expected. I do worry about what losing casual search traffic, alongside the collapse of the digital ad market, means for Fandom long-term, but that's a different post for later...