and then some lunkhead set important things like “kill friendlies” as “-100” instead of “-10,000,000,” or whatever.

As you say the article is quite barebones so they might be missing the important details but the way it says "so then we trained it 'hey don't kill the operator', you lose points for that" implies they didn't even start at -100, they just left it at 0.

At which point I have to question which fucking monkey made this project?