{"id":40367,"date":"2026-10-16T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T15:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/?p=40367"},"modified":"2026-10-12T10:00:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T17:00:44","slug":"permittable-changes-are-coming-to-our-river-permit-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2026\/10\/16\/permittable-changes-are-coming-to-our-river-permit-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Permittable: Bots, Prefence Points, and the $6 Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m about to admit something shameful.<\/p>\n

Last year I \u201calmost\u201d created a bot to steal a river trip from you.<\/p>\n

Please let me explain. I had just subscribed to the paid version of Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and naturally I wanted to see what it could do. I\u2019d run through all the usual requests: \u201cHey Claude, create a workout routine.\u201d \u201cHey Claude, plan my vacation.\u201d \u201cHey Claude, write a river-running article.\u201d Then I realized there was something Claude could do that I definitely could not: write code. The last computer code I wrote was a never-ending string of \u201cHellos\u201d that might still be running on some forgotten Commodore 64 to this day.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say, I\u2019m not techy. But Claude is.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Main Salmon (C) Neal Wassmuth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One day, I typed in the prompt: \u201cBuild me a bot that will find river permit cancellations.\u201d Suddenly lines of code started spooling out and cascading down my screen. It was like a genie in a lamp: \u201cYour wish is my command.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually running the code came with obstacles, though. First, I had to install something called Python and then type commands into a black window, the kind you see in hacker movies. Then, I had to buy a key. It was enough friction to make me quit.<\/p>\n

I was never really serious about the project, more curious if it was possible. My answer: yes, even by me.<\/p>\n

Most river runners will not be surprised by my confession. In the outdoor community, bots are an open secret. On Mountain Buzz, a river-running internet forum, people openly offer to run bots that scrape for cancellations, or share code for fellow \u201cBuzzards,\u201d as they\u2019re called, to build and run their own. In a Wired<\/em> magazine article about the Recreation.gov permit system, a man named \u201cJack,\u201d in an experiment like mine, claimed to have nabbed a Main Salmon permit, a San Juan permit, and two (yes, two) Middle Fork of the Salmon permits.<\/p>\n