this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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We've been getting a lot of AI coded submissions recently, as well as lots of reports asking to remove them.

Should we remove these posts, or not?

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[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I think they should be allowed if they have actual effort and maintaining put into them, but that's usually the problem. Most LLM projects get abandoned very fast.

This is a major difference with a project like Linux. Even if they start using slop code there, you know that they're not going to suddenly abandon it.

Maybe we need to think out of the box, and instead of an LLM tag, we need a tag like how long the repo has existed which can be automatically checked by a bot.

[–] lightrain@forum.storstad.net 3 points 16 hours ago

It’s really telling how AI-assisted software development is simply divided into black and white, as if there were no in-between. Apparently, although there is.

[–] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

If it’s not open source, remove them.

If they’re open source then the people posting them are in the right place.

A policy like what’s being suggested in the op will only be walked back in a few months.

E: also disclosure is a stupid requirement. All it does is give people something to fight over and there’s no industry accepted process for evaluating ai code as opposed to human written code, so disclosure doesnt even serve a useful purpose. It’s literally just giving people something to argue about when the hypothetical post is ostensibly about the software or what it accomplishes.

[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 9 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Minimum age requirement and activity requirement. If it was built all in one go it's more likely to be abandoned and full of problems and just pollute the landscape. If it's been under development with multiple commits over a time-span of months or a year or more it's more likely to be higher quality, have human in the loop somewhere, continue development, patches, etc. Linux itself for example would be exempted because it has a significant age, significant recurring activity in development, multiple human developers, etc.

I do think exceptions on a case by case basis for clever simple programs that address a not previously addressed need might be fine as well. I really think there needs to be a little discretion for mod action.

What a lot of people hate and I do as well are these "look daddy I can 'code' too" baby's first/second/etc vibecoded programs that people proudly toss out there without any real thought beyond pride they told an LLM to make something and it did it. Those rarely add much value, often are redundant with one another (why reinvent the wheel again and again?), and would tend to be lower quality and end up just being so much spam that makes it harder to understand what's worthwhile.

[–] basiliscos2@lemmy.ml 2 points 16 hours ago

I completely agree. It can be reworded as developer or software reputation

[–] Epp@lemmus.org 5 points 21 hours ago

All these "remove" votes will only accomplish developers not disclosing their use of AI 🙄 It's very silly.

[–] Rogue@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There needs to be an actual framework for what you're excluding and why. The majority of developers use LLMs to some degree, an outright ban is unrealistic and motivated by emotion not logic.

I'd suggest limiting submissions of brand new projects with no history and nothing to indicate they're going to be maintained going forward. There also needs to be some proof the maintainer actually understands how their own project works but that's far more difficult to prove.

If you've been working on a project for 6 months and plan to continue doing so then I'm happy to learn about it regardless of whether AI was used in the process or not.

[–] RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip 3 points 22 hours ago

I guess it depends on what we mean by "using an LLM". I'm definitely more conservative than most but for me I draw the line at permitting an LLM to author code; while not ideal I can accept using it has a fuzzer and static analysis tool.

The community will have to agree to what its pain tolerance is and enforce that position.

[–] myszka@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago
[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

+1 to remove them. 99% of those AI projects will go unmaintained and abandoned after a year, and their use more often than not impedes socialist efforts due to directly or indirectly supporting fascists tech companies.

  1. Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

  2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

[–] dropdrip@lemmy.ml 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

AI is a direct result of mass-surveillance. I'll repost what I wrote to a previous user:

Something you're not acknowledging is that this technology stems from surveillance-capitalism and the surveillance-state. Google et al were financed to solve the needs of the state. Google search for consumers was a by-product from the state's need and desire to make sense of their mass-surveillance programs.

Surveillance-capitalism operates under complete deception. Pokemon Go players didn't know they were collecting data for autonomous-murder-drones.

Solving Google's Captchas was unpaid labour: you were creating data for Google's OCR program and now you're creating data for autonomous cars or whatever their investors want you to toil on next.

The original iteration of reCAPTCHA was criticized for using unpaid work to assist in transcribing efforts.[40]

A 13-month study published in 2023, "Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2," found that reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.

Out of all this theft, unpaid labour and intrusive surveillance what does the working class get? Housing costs are increasing. Food costs are increasing. Poverty is increasing. What is AI going to do for us? It's not building houses. It's not harvesting crops. It's not giving the working class any material benefit, but is further degrading living conditions. Enjoy the endless drone of a data-center! Enjoy breathing the fumes of gas-turbines! Enjoy talking to chatbots and never a human!

AI is deployed as a barrier between the working class and businesses. AI is deployed to decrease labour costs. AI is deployed to kill. The fact you can create text, images, videos and audios that mimic reality only means more surveillance on the working class because digital-signals can be faked absolutely and are now suspect by default.

You can't eat what AI creates--it is completely immaterial, but it is being used to commit genocide. I'm sure that warms the cockles of the hearts in all of us.

I do not think AI use should be condoned.

[–] Epp@lemmus.org 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

That seems to me to be just more justification for why we should use it. We contributed to creating it, indirectly, so we should benefit from it's creation. Admittedly simple usage isn't sufficient, and all companies that offer LLM services should be heavily taxed, with that revenue redistributed to the populace, but that's a different argument.

[–] Fleur_@aussie.zone 16 points 1 day ago

Just make people disclose it in the title

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 15 points 1 day ago

Remove them

[–] makefile@programming.dev 21 points 1 day ago

Remove them

[–] Ward@lemmy.nz 105 points 2 days ago (3 children)

AI slop & AI code is very different. If its just pure vibe coded slop with no oversight or effort, then sure its just junk, remove it.

But a lot of experienced developers now use AI tooling to increase productivity, just because AI was used in the process should be consider it slop?

[–] JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 day ago

The self-hosted community has a very good take in my opinion. Especially facing the fact that new slop vaporware often comes with new accounts that just advertise the "product".

Disclosure about AI use, account minimums, and mods having discretion to ban obvious junk spam.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Agreed. Needs to be disclosed in the title of the post as having AI involvement, and show signs of active maintenance. Anyone can now oneshot some slop that's nothing but a waste of our time, but it takes good developers to maintain, secure and expand.

5 days old, nope, hasn't been touched in months, nope. Dozens of active human participants, and/or a reasonable history of active development and to a lesser degree stars or equivalent, sure.

It's a bit more work for a poster, but I think it can keep quality high for project posts. Should be voted on by the community and made a rule.

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[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

I vote to remove myself but I'd be fine with just having to state AI involvement

[–] motruck@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 day ago

Require a tag but if someone wants to share something that solved a problem for them as an open source project they should be able to.

Require an AI tag for anything written in part or in whole by AI.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 50 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How about making a rule that it is at least six months old and in continued development? This would filter out most slop.

[–] lasagnaisland@lemmy.zip 22 points 2 days ago

agreed. i think metrics like this are much more practical and useful:

  • age of project
  • number of stars (not great, but can help show overall interest)
  • number of versions/updates
  • activiely maintained

if an amazing, maintained tool uses AI, that’s a lot different than a one-night project that’s never been tested and will be abandoned in a week

[–] RoddyStiggs@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 day ago
[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 61 points 2 days ago (12 children)

Rule 1 says Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology

I don't think any ai projects can claim to be that when their copyright status is debatable and the tooling is worse with how closed their training is.

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[–] bad1080@piefed.social 21 points 2 days ago
[–] taco_shale032@lemmy.ml 42 points 2 days ago

I think requiring AI disclosure like how !selfhosted@lemmy.world does is a good approach. Not all projects rely as heavily on LLMs as others.

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

I'm not anti-AI but would caution you to see what has been done to communities like /r/selfhosted after the vibe coders found it. Every other post is about a project that has severe memory leaks, over engineered code for simple tasks, and significant security risks especially if someone stupidly opens it up to the internet. These people are putting others in danger with their ignorance even if they think they are 'helping'. Maybe disclosures will work fine for a smaller forum like this, but elsewhere, the sheer volume makes it unmanageable.

[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world 40 points 2 days ago

Definitely need to remove them.

[–] Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I advocate for a disclosure, blanket removal feels like censorship; even vibe coded slop is a project that might generate interest if it was made to solve some problem or showcase a new frontier, nature of OSS will push the slop out of the project eventually.

When I say "slop", I refer to a huge codebase that does what it advertise but has no documentation on what it does internally and the primary poster cannot adequately explain what it does(code mudball esentially). but if its well documented and looks like it was put together with care, with rhyme and reason than I will defend against calling it slop

[–] iByteABit@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Depends on the definition. If we go by the definition a lot of users here seem to have, Linux itself would no longer be considered a FOSS project, which imo is completely ridiculous.

If we're talking about literally vibe coded from the ground up projects where the devs don't even know what the code inside looks like, yes maybe it should be removed or given a post tag once we have the feature.

Personally I prefer to keep a discussion going even with heavy AI coded projects, we're living in interesting times and I am convinced to keep an open mind about what engineering will look like going forward and what doors it might open for the FOSS community despite its flaws and negatives.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There is no definition of "AI". It's all bullshit. It doesn't exist.

The supposed difference between these two unstated definitions is a difference of scale not of kind. There is no objective dividing line for moderation.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

As others have said in other posts, the cat's out of the bag. No matter if/when/how bad the AI crash is, if computing is still viable after then there will be AI.

I think eventually it will emerge that the highest quality AI code will be produced by already experienced developers, who can identify when it's produced slop and fix it, and that will be the case no matter how good the models get.

I of think of it somewhat like managing a team of interns. You give them instructions and they give you code. You still have to know enough to identify if that code meets the requirements and is of good quality.

[–] XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm gonna agree with others that there need to be standards not a blanket ban. I'd leave it up to the admins/mods what those are. Because getting too granular with it wold be hard to enforce. You guys pick something you feel is reasonable and will cut down on 0 effort slop but also allows you to enforce things without digging through the minutia of every post.

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I vote remove

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think a disclosure at least in the title of the post should be required. But only if the software is known to be not slop at all. The problem with this approach is, that everyone has their own threshold and definition of what slop means, or are misinformed about the project. Overall I do not think it's a good idea to ban any Ai contributed or assisted project.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As an example, do you consider Linux to be Ai slop project?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm referring to these new projects coded by AI from scratch, not existing projects which have an occasional LLM contribution.

People are submitting a lot of these AI projects recently.

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[–] dusk@piefed.social 13 points 2 days ago

I'm assuming the majority of posts are slop now, there are a couple of dedicated opensourceai subreddits, I would prefer such a thing existed here as well, with a blanket ban in this one.

[–] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 days ago

Remove, and suggest they go start an AI software community. We can't be monsters to people who might not know better.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Disclosure. If LLMs are used in service of open-source projects, then they are relevant, but clearly many in the community feel that to be negative, and therefore there should be a disclosure. Someone can make open source software using closed-source tooling already, so disallowing one form of tooling entirely is letting a moral reaction interfere with how we understand open source.

Linux would have to be removed from discussion, for example, if all LLM-contributed projects were to be disallowed. I don't see why rules should be made with explicit exceptions in mind, yet excluding Linux cuts out a huge portion of open source discussion.

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[–] idriss@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

My secret non-disclosed own policy on projects I control: if I realize you used LLMs, the change will be rejected. There are people who use LLMs but still it's 100% their change and design, they just didn't type it by themselves and you cannot figure out.

[–] ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We had Slop before AI. we just called "shit".

If a coder wants to shit out a project that never works and never patches it? I want them to notice the culture and know better.

If someone is learning, using the tools they have available, and shows a commitment to maintain their project? I want to see their work. I wanna see them get help from the community to be more literate in their own project, and in the full toolset they're using.

Most of these vibecoded submissions are the former. Thank you for removing the fecalware. If the community decides it needs to remove AI at all to keep this up? Eh, there's dbzer0.

[–] zenforyen@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago

Wish I could give 100 upvotes.

Quality is quality, shit is shit. Between that there is a vast spectrum. Nothing on that spectrum is intrinsically linked to the apparently cursed property of being produced by or with help of an LLM.

One can be against LLM use for various reasons, and build communities around it, but equating AI = slop is an infantile reaction.

Sure, AI makes it easier to produce polished turds faster. But thats fault of the user, not the tool.

Otherwise we should equally ban VSCode, because everybody knows that good software is written in vim and most slop is done using VSCode. Ridiculous.

[–] booty@hexbear.net 10 points 2 days ago

Remove them. There's nothing "open source" about the outputs of your black box text generator

[–] Rynux@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

Very hard question. I think, idk. For me Open Source isn't AI so i think remove it because it makes /c/opensource less attractive and worse but some things like about Craft i think it can be but i'am not moderator so i think ban it completely or most of it.

[–] coltn@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 days ago

Remove them. There could be another community for slop.

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