I had a report for AI slop today. 1m LOC in 3 months. How do you even modify and distribute that? I do not think we had a rule against it.
IMHO if we allow, the community gets drowned out by AI vomit and it is harder to see handcrafted loved projects that are easy to modify and distribute.
My mind is to ban it to preserve open source.
Are folk in agreememt with this line? Would love to hear your thoughts.
imo this community should have a rule against posts promoting new primarily-written-with-an-LLM software projects. as an admin, i’ve deleted a few myself when there are reports of them and the mods aren’t resolving them.
banning all AI-assisted software is obviously no longer reasonable now that many large and old projects are using it (with varying levels of care…) but I don’t think we actually need a very firm definition of “slop” to be able to say some things clearly are slop and some AI-involved things clearly aren’t. When in doubt about if something is of sufficient quality that we should keep it here, the age of the project and the number of developers involved are useful secondary metrics.
@[email protected] created a new community which I think should be linked in the sidebar here as an alternate place for sharing these things. How about this for a rule (in the [email protected] sidebar)?
This is not a place to promote new single-developer heavily-AI-assisted projects. Another community exists for sharing AI-Assisted Libre Software: [email protected]
note that the word “slop” is intentionally absent from my proposed rule (and from name and description of the community) - the point is that this is a place for people to share their AI-created software, regardless of if it is 100% vibe coded or is actually high-quality “agentic engineering” - only time, review, and users will ultimately tell which category many of these new things fall into. But enough of it is slop that we shouldn’t have this community flooded with it, imo.
I don’t really want to become the judge of what is “heavily-AI-assisted”. I think if I were to write a rule I would focus more on self-promotion in general than trying to decide how AI assisted it was. For example something like this:
This community should not be primarily used for self-promotion. You should be contributing to the community before posting any of your own work and a small fraction of your submissions should be your own work.
As for slop or not I would generally rather rely on user votes to decide if it is “worth it” or not. But maybe that is unsustainable and we will need more of a rule. I do think that if you ask a robot to write you a project in 3 days then post it here it is probably not adding much value.
I’m open to discussion though.
Yeah I don’t think we need slop projects being posted here. I know a lot of people are using these tools even for personal projects nowadays but tbh I’m not really interested in exploring any project heavily written by AI.
I’m conflicted. I’m anti-AI due to distrust in capitalism and our pseudo-democratic plutocracies, the profit motive to replace the human workforce, the reckless criminal-incompetence of its implementation, and apparent stupidity of the average hairless primate in understanding that you can never trust a correlation engine… but it’s just a tool, and I’ve also found it incredibly useful in my limited and controlled usage; getting it to write small functions or blocks of code, then amending and composing them myself.
How do we determine what is “heavily written by ai”, and all the obvious slop factory bullshit, without banning strong projects who are just leveraging it for legitimate dev work; as a glorified autocomplete, test autofill, etc but still read and validate every line of code?
Like most people, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find trustworthy projects amongst the see of amateur slop, but I think banning it out-right would likely result in many false positives, and ultimately be counter-productive.
As much as I don’t want to depend on metrics, I think a better approach would be to define a bunch of heuristics based on historically-competent projects. Things like defining an upper limit based on LoC vs commit time and number of devs, project age, etc. Ultimately I feel the industry should do what cybersecurity should be doing; moving to some sort of cryptograhically-verified social trust model where engineers/professionals have to build trust in the real world, and take turns in “vouching” for projects and code releases.
the problem with “just a tool” is that using it will inherently change how you act.
Best concise way i can put it is that it’s like how better hardware has largely just resulted in software not really caring about efficiency any longer.It is just a tool, but human nature makes it a net negative. There are a lot of tools like that, and history shows that once the cat is out of the bag, humanity just has to live with the damage that tool causes. There’s literally nothing that can be done to stop it on a large scale, but small communities can always dictate what they will tolerate.
Sure, but should we then ban any open source that doesn’t run in 10MB or less of memory?
I’m fine with AI. I’m not fine with slop. Ban slop, not LLMs.
Fair enough, I don’t have said decades of experience
It would be advisable to define AI slop first. The term ranges from the Linux kernel to vibe coded stuff where the “dev” hasn’t even looked at the code these days.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
Both the Linux Foundation and the EFF have permissive policies towards AI generated code, even Linus Torvalds accepts it as a tool.
Some FOSS projects that have AI generated code in it:
- The Linux kernel
- Fedora
- Mesa 3D
- Jellyfin
- Firefox
- Chromium
- Homebrew
- OpenSSL
- FFmpeg
- Curl
Should we ban them all? If so, this community would be either dead soon OR it would be hypocritical.
Or because they started pre-AI it’s ok now? Shouldn’t we care more about disclosure, policies, licensing, code quality and maintainability?
Users should downvote crappy software and crappy devs, regardless of the tool it was written with.
Experienced developers using AI as a tool and properly understanding their code base are not slop.
AI slop is when someone with no software development experience prompts a piece of software into existence without any understanding of how that piece of software actually works. The project’s are usually heavily pushed by their creators in the initial couple of weeks of creation but are then quickly abandoned when the creator finally realizes neither they nor their AI can maintain the project. Essentially these kinds of projects flood the internet with low quality abandonware.
A newly created open source project coded using AI would be fine if the creators could prove that they understand how to maintain the project and keep it going beyond the initially promoted code and that kind of proof can only come with time.
The big problem is the sheer volume of low quality projects that get abandoned will cause the projects that actually have potential to become needles in haystacks.
