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.
Since speaking directly to the proposed change didn’t do much, here’s an alternative to “banning ai slop”:
Ban the thing that’s happening. If there are too many “low effort” posts, ban low effort posting. If there are too many posts about non open source packages, ban posting about non open source software. If you really don’t want people self promoting with open source (a thing they’ve been doing for decades!) then ban self promotion.
The problem with all the things I just suggested is that they require serious consideration on the part of a moderator. “Is this post too low effort?”, “is this person promoting themselves in a way the community doesnt want?” and “is this post even about open source?” Are questions that require moderator effort. “Was the repo signed by Claude?” Takes no effort to answer.
Of course kicking kids out of the sandbox for not playing right kind of defeats the purpose of a sandbox and placing unnecessarily high barriers to entry on the commons defeats the purpose of a commons but what the hell do I know…
Greg is vibe coding a tool that he needs. Greg does not share it or monetize it since Greg knows this tool is likely unmaintainable shit and buggy asf. Be like Greg.
We allow it on our large subreddits on reddit. What we do is use a bot to filter repos that are less than 3 months old.
People who vibe code slop just want to share their thing and then abandon it. A limit like that or even 6 months will kill majority of this sort of low effort crap. Most of these people just let Claude or whatever sign the repo as well, another easy way to catch slop.
Developers that develop and only use AI as a tool build great products still as they review all their code.
A blanket ban is just going to make people be more sneaky.
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.
Vibe coded code whose “author” understands the language and actively challenges the agent for his decisions in the interest of long term window is OK. Vibe coded coded that are one-off without any future prospects should be 100% banned.
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.
I strongly disagree with this. The reality is that using LLMs to build things is becoming increasingly more common. And just because something is built using LLMs doesn’t automatically make it slop or useless. There are plenty of genuinely useful open source projects built with these tools, and just because you’re personally opposed to that is not a reason to ban them outright.
This is why we have the voting system on Lemmy as well. If people post slop whether it’s human or LLM assisted, then it can get downvoted naturally. I also see zero evidence of this community drowning in any sort of slop.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
Yes, ban AI usage and the slop it gives
Completely vibe coded - yes
AI assisted - no
The problem is, at what point becomes it just Ai assisted. And who decides and how to proof this. These uncertainties are part of the problem for rules like these. Not only is it difficult to decide and time consuming, it also creates friction in the community. Note, I am not against having this rule. It’s just, it is such a depressing situation.
I would support such a ban so long as there is some process to prevent it becoming a witch hunt.
I have personally already received one false accusation of using AI in this community and I wouldn’t want to continue posting projects here if it becomes an atmosphere of suspicion.
Yes to ban 👍
If you adopt a hardline anti ai stance you will just have to reverse it or become an unused backwater.
E: tagging is also stupid because a tag is self imposed and doesn’t discriminate between a person who is careful or otherwise.
+1 for the option self hosted went with - AI use must be labeled. It allows those of us that don’t want to see it to easily filter it out.
I saw that million lines of code in 3 months but also when I saw the post title I really just had a feeling that’s what it was to begin with. On one hand it’s kinda cool that just about anyone can make a program that does what they want, but on the other side of it I understand LLM generated code and bot submitted pulls are literally killing beloved FLOSS projects. This greatly saddens me. A good friend of mine quit contributing to projects she used to enjoy helping develop because rather than read her code, an LLM the lead dev fed it through claimed her code was AI generated. It’s fucked and causing brain rot of the worst kind.
But I also want to acknowledge that in the hands of a professional developer/coder LLMs are a valuable tool. But a person needs to be able to read and understand and verify the generated code… All this to say is that I think we need a sane and nuanced approach. Let’s not start a witch hunt, let’s just put labels on boxes and let the community decide what it wants to view or filter out.
define slop. it means different things to different people.
