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.
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.Sure, but should we then ban any open source that doesn’t run in 10MB or less of memory?
Yeah, exactly.
As someone who has been working on a large open source project for literally years, while trying to support a family, the hardest thing is time to devote to this project (which, absent capitalism, is what I’d spend my life doing).
AI can allow me to instead increase the speed at which I’m delivering the project I’d already architected, designed, and laid out with my other devs. I don’t have the money to pay myself to work on it, much less other devs - and my bank doesn’t take repo stars as mortgage payments unfortunately.
I hate the AI industry - but that’s a problem with the economics, not the tool.
I’m happy to label that my project uses AI assistance, but bans just make me realize that wherever is banning it isn’t more concerned with shipping a solution instead of a crusade against LLMs.
“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”
I have hair, thank you very much, but seriously get out of my head. The hubris these days is unbelievable.
I’m fine with AI. I’m not fine with slop. Ban slop, not LLMs.

You are the same.
LLMs are slop.
- someone with zero experience using AI to blindly create something barely functional, feeding in errors until it gets a working version. No checking for vulnerabilities, testing, error catching, no thought on architecture or scalability.
- someone carefully using AI in a controlled manner to create open source software. They spend days making sure that is reliable, scalable, secure, and that the project is quality.
You believe these two are them same? That both are equal slop? Quite frankly, I don’t care if an AI made most of the code for an open source project as long as it is made well, and allows me to get away from awful proprietary alternatives. If the output of an AI is distinguishable from a quality programmer, idk how that is also slop.
There’s some nuance for sure, but personally I’m a lot less interested in heavily LLM-programmed projects
that’s completely fair - would labeling then be ideal for you?
label them as trash
By definition a quality programmer wouldn’t want to use an LLM. Just like a quality architect wouldn’t want to build a house by making monkeys throw bricks in a pile, with the excuse that he goes after them to fix it.
I’d actually say that the “quality” dev that vibe codes is worse, because it often comes with an ego that leads to them wanting to hide that they use AI, or to hide the fact that no, they don’t master their code nearly as much as if they wrote it by hand, and it leads to more crap.
I don’t know how many more studies proving that LLMs are crap we’ll need before the slop stops.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
I’m leaving until slopcode is banned.
Yes please. It’s dispiriting to regularly go through the cycle of seeing an interesting project pop up here, oh wait it’s vibe-coded crap, nevermind…
yes to a ban, these projects are worthless to most but their authors. and good for them, but they can keep their trash for themselves.
like 95% of new foss projects i see pop up are heavily ai-generated, and often in very unsubtle ways (line half the commits being “co-authored by” claude, that sort of thing)
it would be nice to have a community where we can share and discuss projects made by humans, so they don’t drown in the llm bile
Yes, please ban them. If not, soon this space will get overrun with those losers. This is what happened to r/fossdroid and r/opensource. 90% of posts there are from sloppers. It got really bad to the point regulars stopped participating, and now these subreddits are mostly just sloppers congratulating each others. Every post reads the exact fucking same, every project looks fucking similar, even comments. These people barely put effort anywhere.
This is a community for people to share and communicate, else we can all just talk to LLMs. Please don’t let that happen to this community.
At the very least, make posters require to have an AI tag on their posts and a separate day for them to showcase their “projects”.
Please don’t reply saying but Linux uses LLMs, or other whataboutisms. There is a significant difference between code quality from people submitting to Linux and a slopper who vibecoded a project thinking they’re helping.
Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.
I for one would really appreciate just one single FLOSS community that flat out banned any and all “AI” contributed code instead of following the approach of others. Somebody have the spine to stand out, plz.
I’m not a developer, but I wanna be able to keep up with open source news without having to navigate a slippery slop(e) into clanker dominated territory.
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.
One? I’ve received three. It seems you have to dumb down your responses, and add some intentional typos if you don’t want the mob after you lately.
Maybe we use AI to detect the bad AI, and then blame that AI when it doesn’t work?
Why any efforts to blame? No need to blame Ai. Just use an Ai that blames other failing Ai. Modern problems require modern solution.
Yes please. No AI at all. Assisted, human reviewed, none of it. Only fully human written code.
What is fully human written and how are you as a human(I assume) able to distinguish between what is laboriously typed and what is generated, here lets try this exercise and see if you can spot any difference Here is a code I have typed by hand
"smash": push rbp mov rbp, rsp call "smash" pop rbp retand here is machine generated code with the prompt, the slop machine used here is a compiler
GCC take this C code void smash(){smash();} and make it executableand here is the output"smash": push rbp mov rbp, rsp call "smash" nop pop rbp retspoiler
please dont take this seriously
Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having fewer but actually good quality posts.
AI slop is completely against this.
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.
Maybe someone should open a ticket with Lemmy devs to add a user side option for “show ai” next to “show nsfw”.
I don’t block nsfw, but I do block image posts. I’d love to be able to wholesale block all AI tagged posts too.
PieFed has an option for blocking AI-generated posts

how does piefed know if a post is AI? do they have some kind of algorithm which detects AI?
No, it relies on user tagging when creating a post, so sadly only works for posts made by PieFed users for now:

I think using an algorithm would be treacherous territory bc there would be guaranteed false positives.
define slop. it means different things to different people.
I thought it was “messy, generated code with little cohesion and only barely functional”, but really it’s the cohesion part.
messy, generated code with little cohesion and only barely functional
Okay, you’ve described my code. Now what about the AI?
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