From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
> Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review
That is the problem in these subreddits.
Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.
In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.
For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
> For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.
Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I've never wanted to deal with running an open-source community (I'm way too introverted and focused on coding, not chatting), but now that AI is here, I will be releasing something awesome. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the community though. Possibly it will be so awesome that others create the community in my absence, and that solves the problem.
Just like r/math banning the huge math release by OpenAI. Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless. I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
I have sympathy for the users of these subs. I imagine you’d want to come to /r/opensource to discuss the code. The whys, the hows. When the answer every time is “because that’s what Claude chose” it’s not going to make for interesting discussions.
>Being realistic, a lot of decisions pre-AI work out to "Because that was what was on top of Google search".
That's not the same. Whenever you do a google search, it only gives out what to do. The decision making ultimately ends up towards you.
In AI case however, its like replacing the person who used to make decisions about what to copy and implement. It makes you a proxy towards the AI's decision making.
At least that is how I interpreted it.
Realistically, people do a lot of Googling "parse Json in Python" and going with whatever pops out, like "import json" probably. But there's other options out there.
With a LLM, you're almost certainly also going to get the standard json module if you just ask for a JSON parser.
But nobody says you have to stop there. For instance if I say I want "the fastest JSON module", it goes for orgjson instead.
And if I wasn't happy with that, I could ask it to just write a benchmark using every module available and actually measure what's optimal for my hardware and my data file.
Choices don't go anywhere, and a smart user can take advantage to evaluate possibilities for whatever factors might matter -- speed, size, number of dependencies, etc. I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
>I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
Honestly I agree with this take. The problem is that, under the context of the people banned for using LLMs, no one makes decisions like this.
For instance, say I want to do some data analytics on a pretty large csv file. Of course before AI I would need to think of 1.How to open the CSV file 2. What is the specific data I want to extract 3. How to extract the data 4. How do I change the data into a specific format (say a list, a set etc ..) 5. How do I sort it. 6. How do I visualize it .... and so on. Those kinds of steps on how to write the code forces you to research the libraries and methods and decide what is required. (for instance using pandas in python)
Using AI for that task however, I wouldn't have done any decision for how to extract the data in question. Maybe the AI's decision was marginally better than mine (Writing a csv parser from scratch is faster for that specific data for example). Maybe in the case of data analytics, there is no point in the code cause in the end what is desired more is the visualization. But dumping the code into communities where people were interested in how you came to that decision falls short cause you didn't do it in actuality. I think that is the current issue at hand.
Yeah, but what's more likely to happen is that when you look inside the code you see thousands of lines of code of a handrolled parser and when you ask "why would you write your own rather than use some existing one here?" you only get silence in return.
I don't really generate big chunks of code, but in general I found AI outputs to be quite sensible. It knows what the main modules are and uses them, I've not seen any as egregious as making a JSON parser from scratch without a need.
Maybe not a JSON parser in particular, but I've already seen a fair share of MRs that contained many thousands of lines that no human would have ever written without stopping to ask "do I really need to do it?". LLMs aren't bothered.
Were you actually a member of /r/opensource before this announcement?
> I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
How can this be true when the problem they’re dealing with is an explosion in the number of submissions? Even with some of these policies, the number of software projects being submitted to these subreddits is so much higher than a few years ago.
Reddit has never been about AI, so shunning it hasn't made it useless. Reddit's purpose was to allow communication between people, not to talk about AI.
I don't think it's that simple. I don't agree with them banning anything AI related. However, I used to frequent several programming related subereddits that overtime became unbearable because every other post is someone posting an obviously vibe coded horrible slop project. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve on a forum like Reddit.
> X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
Reddit struggles with AI submissions, there were like 20 AI oss projects per day in /r/Rust at some point. Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
The Rust moderators were overreacting. Most of their front page was not slop. Now their front page is blog posts and language details. It used to be a place where you could talk about the language's actual impact.
> Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
Most of them aren't slop. They're actually quite useful, but I guess the anti-AI cult wants to silence all AI-aided projects in an attempt to point out how "there's no new software being written by AI".
It might be good to define “slop”. My definition is roughly, “was created with little to no human thoughtfulness in its architecture and doesn’t have the faintest hope of being maintained in the long term”. Using that criteria, easily 95%+ of AI-coded projects I’ve encountered are slop.
For me the key thing is that a program that cannot be maintained and improved over time without introducing numerous regressions may as well have not existed, because even those that were useful at one point in time quickly cease to be so due to bugs cropping up from the project being a quivering, duct taped together mass of misery or because it stopped getting updates when the project owner found themselves painted into a corner and broke with an OS update.
Note that I am not a hardline anti-LLM type. I have my reservations, but do make use of them. I do however see a massive difference in quality between knowledgeable devs using them to augment their own abilities and non-devs or newbie devs just telling Claude to bake the whole pie.
Are we talking about r/rust in particular? Here are the following projects I've seen that were called "100% AI slop" and "code dumps", all projects were written in pure 100% rust:
- ffmpeg port
- a novel web browser engine
- multiple kernels/os projects
- POSIX shell
- a from scratch crypto implementation library of all commonly (and uncommonly) used crypto primitives
What do you find interesting about ffmpeg and git ports? Why do you need to know about them?
Porting them is trivial, but maintaining them is not, especially a better version.
It's not rocket science. Everyone can prompt "rewrite it in Rust" and abandon the project in a few months. There is no novelty.
If there is something novel in the port, people usually write an article about that or at least mention it in the README.
If you like nonhuman content and nonhuman takes on nonhuman content just chat with an LLM. If reddit is only useful as a secondary source o lf LLM consensus I think you could vibe code your own reality and let the rest of us who like talking to humans about human content out of your loop
It's ironic that Reddit started as a place to share links, and then every community banned sharing links.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
It's because you otherwise get loads of self promotion spam by people only interested in promoting what they have to sell, who don't otherwise participate in, or care about, the community.
If you want to find people's vibe coded projects, you have no shortage of places to do that. You have almost the entire rest of the Internet, have fun. For myself, I don't have any interest in someone's project that they couldn't actually be bothered to make and just handed it off to a clanker. So I'm glad there are communities banning those.
Sorry folks, gatekeeping is coming back. In a world where AI can produce infinite software and infinite "content" there have to be stricter rules to participate in a community.
We essentially need a human interface for llm-based projects
Some simple rules that would work better:
- Projects should have someone that understands the overall project at a systems level
- If you link to a github, or code project, it can't be ai-written, it has to be a clear README, maybe with some code examples. But, it can call the other project that has AI generated stuff.
Even though I'm starting to hand-code more in my project, I think AI can still be useful for example for finding security vulnerabilities. Although I think too many are vibe-coding projects for no one...
I think AI and open source go hand in hand. Open source can make AI so powerful and in return AI can bring to open source so many projects that were likely not possible before or are now considered "low value" because AI could replicate it so it makes more sense just to open source the project.
After pondering this for a while, I actually agree with this from the principle of community and socials. I have been in 4-5 open source communities where I met a lot of friends, but since LLMs the communities are flooded with slop PRs, slop projects, and the human interaction in general has fallen dramatically.
In some sense, if everyone can build everything, people's attention becomes the currency. If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal.
If you say you want to go and get some milk, but then on the way to the shop waste 3 seconds to avoid an old lady instead of plowing right through her, even though it's the middle of the night and there are no witnesses, the result of your milk getting is suboptimal, and you cannot claim to primarily have been getting milk, but something else.
Who cares, it's their choice and probably because they were overwhelmed with LLM-generated project announcements.
I'm aware that being anti-AI is trendy right now, so many people won't like to hear that, but the reality is that it won't take long until the opposite will occur. Projects will get rejected for not having been thoroughly checked by AI, if not written by AI, because purely human development will cause too many security and code quality concerns.
I keep comparing AI versus human coding as the difference between power tools and hand tools.
Hand tools have no place in the modern economy outside of bespoke or otherwise high-end goods. Today, the economics of power tools make them necessary to embrace in business, or your competitors will out maneuver you in the marketplace.
That doesn’t mean all of existing craftsmen believe that the power tools are safer or produce better results; their opinion ultimately does not matter, as it would lead to the demise of their income stream. The majority will learn to swallow their pride, because they cannot deny that things have changed forever.
My company put off adopting AI until this month. We will never go back, because I am now effectively leading a team of egoless juniors at a fraction of the cost of a single human. The economics will never work out in favor of me writing another line of code.
I like the analogy. Interesting to note that a lot of the really high end furniture is still made using hand tools. But it is not affordable for most, who will buy mass produced furniture made by machines.
Pfft, a circular saw will cut pretty much as straight as a normal saw, and it will repeat this over and over with expected results. It is not comparable to the woolly and changing nature of AI as it stands.
The ego thing is one of the biggest draw for me to AI. I hate working with other people. God damn fragile egos, arrogance, impertinence, and bad hygiene. I would pay extra for AI.
I'm trying to picture a time when a VP or other upper management can tell the AI "hey! We need an app that will do this thing!" And it will magically figure out all the unstated things that it needs to do, and absolutely not do, and provide that app. Maybe it's just my lack of imagination.
I am teaching my Ai to write good code, just as I have juniors at a dozen orgs in the past. I am teaching to be as good as me.
Your might be too young, but I remember the Graat Outsourcing. Engineering teams were replaced wholesale with overseas counterparts. The original engineers literally trained their own replacements.
Those companies have for the most part continued to thrive, despite the resulting enshitification of their products and services.
You are not accounting for the inherent error rate; around 20-40% as I understand it. Reducible with tokens but then not cheaper than humans.
Sure a good analogy is physical vs robotic; but if it was say burgers. It would be a current McDonalds burger vs some new robot place that makes then half price or cheaper but every aspect of the burger is off quality wise; missing ingredients, mistaken orders, incorrect ingredients, weird toppings; BUT DARN ARE THEY FAST.
You’ve gotten faster but you’ve added an error rate that either you expensively inspect for or it moves to the edge.
Nope, the quality is good. Any errors it makes are being caught in automated reviews. If you don’t have good review and testing processes, yeah, stuff will slip through. The same is true for humans. I would not put juniors above your cited error rate, so I would rather skip the squish.
They use completely different techniques. You do not need to learn how to use hand tools first, but most individuals are more likely to afford them.
Then again, you have the saftey factor. Some people should be given hand tools first, so you can see whether they can be trusted with power tools. Just as you would give a junior small tasks before trusting them with something bigger.
I'd wager 70% of people driving cars on US roads can't change a tire or change their oil.
I don't think "must" is correct here.
People will use AI all they want without understanding it. Same as the way most people go through life never understanding how basic things work. Our capitalist fixation enables it because ignorant consumers will buy whatever is put in front of them for the most part. Ignorance is profit in capitalism.
Folks don't want to understand. That's work. Why bother?
Uhh really? Here's an example, my first experience with gardening started off with a chainsaw. Needed to cut some trees/foliage, went out and bought a decent corded electric chainsaw and went to work. There were a few branches I couldn't get to since the cord was too short so I found an old handsaw and tried cutting it by hand. Gave up after 30 seconds and just got an extension cord. Why do I need to master hand tools?
r/rust did something similar although more broad, banning code dumps. Other subs like r/programming, r/cscareerquestions, r/experienceddevs banned in part or in full anything related to AI or using AI (unless highly technical) and frankly they're much nicer places to read now, because I don't have to hear about yet another engineer who "lost the love of programming" as if they're the only one. It's a repetitive thread that still gets upvoted highly and is sort of an easy way to farm upvotes and thus is quite annoying to read generally.
This logic would work just as well to ban all mentions of automatic transmission because some people complain that they lost their love of driving once they stopped driving manual. If the complaints are annoying and low-effort, you could just ban the complaints.
Just quiz any of these AI detractors on pure asm + CPU implementation details. Oh what's this? You're writing this in Rust? Can you please tell me how the compiler optimizes this code and what assembly will it produce. Oh what's that, you can't do it? Well, it's obviously because you're not a true engineer™ and you're relying on the slop your compiler gives you.
That seems completely unrelated to what I was responding to and what my response was. All I said was that the one specific rationale in the parent comment seemed flimsy to me; I didn't claim anything about other potential rationales.
Banning the dime a dozen slop projects popping up every 5 minutes isn't so bad of an idea, but banning new, or projects that have less than 3 contributors is just wrong. XZ would be banned from being posted. There's also the fact that it appears to be a blanket ban on LLM contributions, so I guess the Linux kernel is verboten?
Single contributor new project open source is LARP open source. It makes no difference what your license is, if nobody cares about your project. That comes first.
Every subreddit eventually has a collapse of quality due to popularity. As the activity of a subreddit grows it becomes too attractive to those who want eyeballs, clicks, responses, traffic, or attention.
All of my interesting and helpful subreddits became unusable over time as the low effort posts took over. Every one of my hobby subreddits that became popular is now 90% or more posts that fit 3 categories:
1. Questions about getting started in the hobby. The same asks about what to buy or requesting feedback on something they’re thinking about buying. The subreddit can have a perfect wiki and up to date buying guide posts, but it will still get 5 posts per day from people who want personalized advice.
2. Posts from people who acquired something new and want to show it off. They’re excited for their new 3D printer or skis or other hobby acquisition so they post a photo. I know the subreddit is cooked when these posts start getting upvotes and taking spots in the feed. This is the sign that the low effort beginner posts are becoming the central content of the subreddit.
3. People posting every small achievement and looking for praise. I get it. It’s fun to share little progress with a community and feel excitement when sharing it with others. Feeling like you’ve made it with a group of other beginners is fun. There really should be a place for this, but once it takes over the subreddit it becomes uninteresting to see the same beginner posts day after day so the experience commenters leave.
The availability of LLMs has caused an explosion of #2 and #3 type posts for any software related subreddit. Starting late last year every subreddit with a software component become flooded with posts about something someone had cooked up with Claude Code. Some of them might be interesting but most were quickly abandoned. Many of them didn’t even work at all.
LLMs made it easy to feel like you’re joining the club. Spend $20 of a subscription and tell Claude what you want and you now have something to post and collect praise for.
The absolute worst are the posts where all the content is also generated by Claude. Even the OP’s comments are Claude written for many of these. You can click on their profile and see their comment history is written in one style for everything else, but suddenly they’re posting capitalized sentences and Claude-style prose paragraphs in this one subreddit. Then you realize you’re entirely viewing the output of a robot, which someone is putting forth as their own work.
It’s just not interesting. It’s not even fun for the #3 feature because the person copying LLM output into the subreddit is not interested in anything about the community other than taking praise and upvotes from it. They aren’t participating in other threads or encouraging others. They are there to promote their project, extract traffic, praise, and upvotes, and go back to prompting Claude.
I don’t know if banning solo projects or projects using LLMs is going to lead to a quality outcome, because those two measures aren’t specific for the slop that people hate. I do understand why they feel the need to do something, though.
I guess in some parts of the FOSS movement, predominantly in the left-wing politicised (“woke”) parts, there is a hard anti-AI wave flooding through these days.
They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like.
On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care.
Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it.
Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.
The latest frontier models no longer produce slop. The code is pretty good in general - better in fact in many situations compared what a human might have produced with limited time, resources and experience.
The argument against AI-assisted programming just doesn't hold anymore.
If you read the post, the argument isn’t that AI-made projects are bad, just that they’re uninteresting. It’s similar to the argument I’ve seen people make of “don’t open a AI-written PR, just post your prompt and let me use my own LLM”
That’s not my experience. The frontier models produce ok code that works but it’s still very sloppy. Further evidence is that the number of massive PRs is increasing not decreasing, i.e. the LLMs are brute forcing changes rather than introducing quality code patterns.
This is not a good metric IMHO. I would expect new projects to have bigger changes initially as they try to find a suitable architecture. That is not slop. This is no different than rewriting a project 2-3 times pre-AI to find out what sticks and how to organise it better.
I have yet to see the churn ever go down. I'm not saying it won't but what I see is that current frontier LLMs are still bad at identifying functional abstractions or patterns that can actually scale.
I have not seen an LLM rewrite 2-3 times and then settle on what sticks, it just rewrites constantly and usually while leaving residue of previous attempts behind.
Which in some projects is still fine. Like I said, they are generally producing working code, but I haven't seen proof yet that it can actually scale and evolve well over time.
From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
> Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review
That is the problem in these subreddits.
Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.
In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.
For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
> For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.
As an avid reader: thanks for helping with that!
Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I've never wanted to deal with running an open-source community (I'm way too introverted and focused on coding, not chatting), but now that AI is here, I will be releasing something awesome. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the community though. Possibly it will be so awesome that others create the community in my absence, and that solves the problem.
A 1 hour old post on a Sunday morning is not conclusive for anything.
Just like r/math banning the huge math release by OpenAI. Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless. I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
I have sympathy for the users of these subs. I imagine you’d want to come to /r/opensource to discuss the code. The whys, the hows. When the answer every time is “because that’s what Claude chose” it’s not going to make for interesting discussions.
Being realistic, a lot of decisions pre-AI work out to "Because that was what was on top of Google search".
Also there doesn't seem that much discussion of code in there.
>Being realistic, a lot of decisions pre-AI work out to "Because that was what was on top of Google search".
That's not the same. Whenever you do a google search, it only gives out what to do. The decision making ultimately ends up towards you.
In AI case however, its like replacing the person who used to make decisions about what to copy and implement. It makes you a proxy towards the AI's decision making. At least that is how I interpreted it.
You can always exercise decision making.
Realistically, people do a lot of Googling "parse Json in Python" and going with whatever pops out, like "import json" probably. But there's other options out there.
With a LLM, you're almost certainly also going to get the standard json module if you just ask for a JSON parser.
But nobody says you have to stop there. For instance if I say I want "the fastest JSON module", it goes for orgjson instead.
And if I wasn't happy with that, I could ask it to just write a benchmark using every module available and actually measure what's optimal for my hardware and my data file.
Choices don't go anywhere, and a smart user can take advantage to evaluate possibilities for whatever factors might matter -- speed, size, number of dependencies, etc. I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
>I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
Honestly I agree with this take. The problem is that, under the context of the people banned for using LLMs, no one makes decisions like this.
For instance, say I want to do some data analytics on a pretty large csv file. Of course before AI I would need to think of 1.How to open the CSV file 2. What is the specific data I want to extract 3. How to extract the data 4. How do I change the data into a specific format (say a list, a set etc ..) 5. How do I sort it. 6. How do I visualize it .... and so on. Those kinds of steps on how to write the code forces you to research the libraries and methods and decide what is required. (for instance using pandas in python)
Using AI for that task however, I wouldn't have done any decision for how to extract the data in question. Maybe the AI's decision was marginally better than mine (Writing a csv parser from scratch is faster for that specific data for example). Maybe in the case of data analytics, there is no point in the code cause in the end what is desired more is the visualization. But dumping the code into communities where people were interested in how you came to that decision falls short cause you didn't do it in actuality. I think that is the current issue at hand.
> But nobody says you have to stop there.
Yeah, but what's more likely to happen is that when you look inside the code you see thousands of lines of code of a handrolled parser and when you ask "why would you write your own rather than use some existing one here?" you only get silence in return.
I don't really generate big chunks of code, but in general I found AI outputs to be quite sensible. It knows what the main modules are and uses them, I've not seen any as egregious as making a JSON parser from scratch without a need.
Maybe not a JSON parser in particular, but I've already seen a fair share of MRs that contained many thousands of lines that no human would have ever written without stopping to ask "do I really need to do it?". LLMs aren't bothered.
Anyone can make their own subreddit.
Were you actually a member of /r/opensource before this announcement?
> I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
How can this be true when the problem they’re dealing with is an explosion in the number of submissions? Even with some of these policies, the number of software projects being submitted to these subreddits is so much higher than a few years ago.
Doesn’t add up.
Reddit has never been about AI, so shunning it hasn't made it useless. Reddit's purpose was to allow communication between people, not to talk about AI.
I don't think it's that simple. I don't agree with them banning anything AI related. However, I used to frequent several programming related subereddits that overtime became unbearable because every other post is someone posting an obviously vibe coded horrible slop project. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve on a forum like Reddit.
It's because X is where people go to post controversial and harmful content.
It makes sense AI would explode on a platform now used by the bad parts of society.
The AI defense people don't seem to realize the funny things they say defending AI and how detached it is.
Lol calling reddit useless because mods are pumping the brakes on low quality AI slop posts. Hilarious.
Reddit mods aren't paid to deal with low effort auto submittions from LLMs. It ruins the subs.
> X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
Reddit struggles with AI submissions, there were like 20 AI oss projects per day in /r/Rust at some point. Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
The Rust moderators were overreacting. Most of their front page was not slop. Now their front page is blog posts and language details. It used to be a place where you could talk about the language's actual impact.
so ban slop. if its easy to see 'most of them are slop' then surely its easy to filter that. maybe use AI lol
> Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
Most of them aren't slop. They're actually quite useful, but I guess the anti-AI cult wants to silence all AI-aided projects in an attempt to point out how "there's no new software being written by AI".
The ones that I have seen were90% slop. Bitcoin in Rust, 10 new agents in Rust. Zero explanations on why a project exists and how it is better.
It might be good to define “slop”. My definition is roughly, “was created with little to no human thoughtfulness in its architecture and doesn’t have the faintest hope of being maintained in the long term”. Using that criteria, easily 95%+ of AI-coded projects I’ve encountered are slop.
For me the key thing is that a program that cannot be maintained and improved over time without introducing numerous regressions may as well have not existed, because even those that were useful at one point in time quickly cease to be so due to bugs cropping up from the project being a quivering, duct taped together mass of misery or because it stopped getting updates when the project owner found themselves painted into a corner and broke with an OS update.
Note that I am not a hardline anti-LLM type. I have my reservations, but do make use of them. I do however see a massive difference in quality between knowledgeable devs using them to augment their own abilities and non-devs or newbie devs just telling Claude to bake the whole pie.
Are we talking about r/rust in particular? Here are the following projects I've seen that were called "100% AI slop" and "code dumps", all projects were written in pure 100% rust:
- ffmpeg port
- a novel web browser engine
- multiple kernels/os projects
- POSIX shell
- a from scratch crypto implementation library of all commonly (and uncommonly) used crypto primitives
- new VCS that outperformed Git
- git rewritten in rust
- multiple custom new languages written in rust
- new experimental borrow checker
- from scratch new standard library
- countless (genuinely unique) command line tools
What do you find interesting about ffmpeg and git ports? Why do you need to know about them? Porting them is trivial, but maintaining them is not, especially a better version. It's not rocket science. Everyone can prompt "rewrite it in Rust" and abandon the project in a few months. There is no novelty.
If there is something novel in the port, people usually write an article about that or at least mention it in the README.
If you like nonhuman content and nonhuman takes on nonhuman content just chat with an LLM. If reddit is only useful as a secondary source o lf LLM consensus I think you could vibe code your own reality and let the rest of us who like talking to humans about human content out of your loop
It's ironic that Reddit started as a place to share links, and then every community banned sharing links.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
It's because you otherwise get loads of self promotion spam by people only interested in promoting what they have to sell, who don't otherwise participate in, or care about, the community.
How do you find the good ones between the bad ones and the malware infected?
> Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless.
Hyperbole much?
This is a direct response to AI slop destroying a community; what’s your solution to the AI spam problem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
If you want to find people's vibe coded projects, you have no shortage of places to do that. You have almost the entire rest of the Internet, have fun. For myself, I don't have any interest in someone's project that they couldn't actually be bothered to make and just handed it off to a clanker. So I'm glad there are communities banning those.
Sorry folks, gatekeeping is coming back. In a world where AI can produce infinite software and infinite "content" there have to be stricter rules to participate in a community.
What qualifies you to speak on behalf of anything? Who exactly are you speaking to?
We essentially need a human interface for llm-based projects
Some simple rules that would work better:
- Projects should have someone that understands the overall project at a systems level
- If you link to a github, or code project, it can't be ai-written, it has to be a clear README, maybe with some code examples. But, it can call the other project that has AI generated stuff.
Even though I'm starting to hand-code more in my project, I think AI can still be useful for example for finding security vulnerabilities. Although I think too many are vibe-coding projects for no one...
Banning AI, sure. But demanding multiple contributors? All of D.J. Bernstein's software would be banned. This is typical Reddit nonsense.
Numbered throwaway account 24 minutes old, this is a spam wave using residential proxies and dang is banning these accounts as they pop up.
19 day old cowlevel account that specializes in witty one liners gives their opinion again. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
"Numbered throwaway account 24 minutes old, this is a spam wave using residential proxies and dang is banning these accounts as they pop up."
Here, I said the exact same thing with a 5 year old account, does it make it more true to you?
Yup, that's exactly the point.
Cowlevel commenting on that topic is (unintentionally? or cleverly?) hypocritical.
which is a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
This is the same guy, but he's being alphabetic now.
we made a new sub for this
r/opensource_projects would love to have your open source projects shared
I think AI and open source go hand in hand. Open source can make AI so powerful and in return AI can bring to open source so many projects that were likely not possible before or are now considered "low value" because AI could replicate it so it makes more sense just to open source the project.
Did you use AI to generate that statement? Could you be any more boilerplate?
After pondering this for a while, I actually agree with this from the principle of community and socials. I have been in 4-5 open source communities where I met a lot of friends, but since LLMs the communities are flooded with slop PRs, slop projects, and the human interaction in general has fallen dramatically.
In some sense, if everyone can build everything, people's attention becomes the currency. If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal.
> If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal
If the result of your software project is suboptimal software compared to what others are achieving, what was really the goal you say you get to keep?
If your argument is to hold together, the goal must have been something besides the software.
To be clear, this is fair, but then you cannot claim to primarily have been working on a software project, but something else.
If you say you want to go and get some milk, but then on the way to the shop waste 3 seconds to avoid an old lady instead of plowing right through her, even though it's the middle of the night and there are no witnesses, the result of your milk getting is suboptimal, and you cannot claim to primarily have been getting milk, but something else.
fwiw c/opensource@lemmy.ml is also discussing banning them.
https://lemmy.ml/post/54271214
https://lemmy.ml/post/53021594
And that's how you kill a subreddit.
Who cares, it's their choice and probably because they were overwhelmed with LLM-generated project announcements.
I'm aware that being anti-AI is trendy right now, so many people won't like to hear that, but the reality is that it won't take long until the opposite will occur. Projects will get rejected for not having been thoroughly checked by AI, if not written by AI, because purely human development will cause too many security and code quality concerns.
I keep comparing AI versus human coding as the difference between power tools and hand tools.
Hand tools have no place in the modern economy outside of bespoke or otherwise high-end goods. Today, the economics of power tools make them necessary to embrace in business, or your competitors will out maneuver you in the marketplace.
That doesn’t mean all of existing craftsmen believe that the power tools are safer or produce better results; their opinion ultimately does not matter, as it would lead to the demise of their income stream. The majority will learn to swallow their pride, because they cannot deny that things have changed forever.
My company put off adopting AI until this month. We will never go back, because I am now effectively leading a team of egoless juniors at a fraction of the cost of a single human. The economics will never work out in favor of me writing another line of code.
I like the analogy. Interesting to note that a lot of the really high end furniture is still made using hand tools. But it is not affordable for most, who will buy mass produced furniture made by machines.
> I keep comparing AI versus human coding as the difference between power tools and hand tools.
Or the difference between Guitar Hero and a real guitar
Pfft, a circular saw will cut pretty much as straight as a normal saw, and it will repeat this over and over with expected results. It is not comparable to the woolly and changing nature of AI as it stands.
Juniors without egos? Never heard of it.
The ego thing is one of the biggest draw for me to AI. I hate working with other people. God damn fragile egos, arrogance, impertinence, and bad hygiene. I would pay extra for AI.
I wonder, when you retire, who will they find to replace you?
At our current rate of AI progress, I no longer expect this career to last until my retirement. It’ll be agents all the way down soon enough.
And I have been an AI skeptic, so it pains me greatly to admit that.
I'm trying to picture a time when a VP or other upper management can tell the AI "hey! We need an app that will do this thing!" And it will magically figure out all the unstated things that it needs to do, and absolutely not do, and provide that app. Maybe it's just my lack of imagination.
I am teaching my Ai to write good code, just as I have juniors at a dozen orgs in the past. I am teaching to be as good as me.
Your might be too young, but I remember the Graat Outsourcing. Engineering teams were replaced wholesale with overseas counterparts. The original engineers literally trained their own replacements.
Those companies have for the most part continued to thrive, despite the resulting enshitification of their products and services.
History says this time will be no different.
Nope.
You are not accounting for the inherent error rate; around 20-40% as I understand it. Reducible with tokens but then not cheaper than humans.
Sure a good analogy is physical vs robotic; but if it was say burgers. It would be a current McDonalds burger vs some new robot place that makes then half price or cheaper but every aspect of the burger is off quality wise; missing ingredients, mistaken orders, incorrect ingredients, weird toppings; BUT DARN ARE THEY FAST.
You’ve gotten faster but you’ve added an error rate that either you expensively inspect for or it moves to the edge.
Nope, the quality is good. Any errors it makes are being caught in automated reviews. If you don’t have good review and testing processes, yeah, stuff will slip through. The same is true for humans. I would not put juniors above your cited error rate, so I would rather skip the squish.
And yet you must learn the hand tool before you start using the power version.
They use completely different techniques. You do not need to learn how to use hand tools first, but most individuals are more likely to afford them.
Then again, you have the saftey factor. Some people should be given hand tools first, so you can see whether they can be trusted with power tools. Just as you would give a junior small tasks before trusting them with something bigger.
I'd wager 70% of people driving cars on US roads can't change a tire or change their oil.
I don't think "must" is correct here.
People will use AI all they want without understanding it. Same as the way most people go through life never understanding how basic things work. Our capitalist fixation enables it because ignorant consumers will buy whatever is put in front of them for the most part. Ignorance is profit in capitalism.
Folks don't want to understand. That's work. Why bother?
Uhh really? Here's an example, my first experience with gardening started off with a chainsaw. Needed to cut some trees/foliage, went out and bought a decent corded electric chainsaw and went to work. There were a few branches I couldn't get to since the cord was too short so I found an old handsaw and tried cutting it by hand. Gave up after 30 seconds and just got an extension cord. Why do I need to master hand tools?
It's the choice of the moderators* and they are banning solo projects, and any kind of AI usage even if not slop.
are they banning Linux? :D
r/rust did something similar although more broad, banning code dumps. Other subs like r/programming, r/cscareerquestions, r/experienceddevs banned in part or in full anything related to AI or using AI (unless highly technical) and frankly they're much nicer places to read now, because I don't have to hear about yet another engineer who "lost the love of programming" as if they're the only one. It's a repetitive thread that still gets upvoted highly and is sort of an easy way to farm upvotes and thus is quite annoying to read generally.
This logic would work just as well to ban all mentions of automatic transmission because some people complain that they lost their love of driving once they stopped driving manual. If the complaints are annoying and low-effort, you could just ban the complaints.
Just quiz any of these AI detractors on pure asm + CPU implementation details. Oh what's this? You're writing this in Rust? Can you please tell me how the compiler optimizes this code and what assembly will it produce. Oh what's that, you can't do it? Well, it's obviously because you're not a true engineer™ and you're relying on the slop your compiler gives you.
That seems completely unrelated to what I was responding to and what my response was. All I said was that the one specific rationale in the parent comment seemed flimsy to me; I didn't claim anything about other potential rationales.
Banning the dime a dozen slop projects popping up every 5 minutes isn't so bad of an idea, but banning new, or projects that have less than 3 contributors is just wrong. XZ would be banned from being posted. There's also the fact that it appears to be a blanket ban on LLM contributions, so I guess the Linux kernel is verboten?
Single contributor new project open source is LARP open source. It makes no difference what your license is, if nobody cares about your project. That comes first.
How are you going to get people to care if you are barred from sharing it on reddit?
Apply to give a talk at FOSDEM.
Try another subreddit.
I understand not wanting slop but banning solo projects and AI augmented projects is just a typical Reddit moderation power trip
seems like those subs are asking to become the new stackoverflow of reddit
r/opensource isn't a particularly large or important community. This is just another reddit mod on a power trip. Happens every day.
Every subreddit eventually has a collapse of quality due to popularity. As the activity of a subreddit grows it becomes too attractive to those who want eyeballs, clicks, responses, traffic, or attention.
All of my interesting and helpful subreddits became unusable over time as the low effort posts took over. Every one of my hobby subreddits that became popular is now 90% or more posts that fit 3 categories:
1. Questions about getting started in the hobby. The same asks about what to buy or requesting feedback on something they’re thinking about buying. The subreddit can have a perfect wiki and up to date buying guide posts, but it will still get 5 posts per day from people who want personalized advice.
2. Posts from people who acquired something new and want to show it off. They’re excited for their new 3D printer or skis or other hobby acquisition so they post a photo. I know the subreddit is cooked when these posts start getting upvotes and taking spots in the feed. This is the sign that the low effort beginner posts are becoming the central content of the subreddit.
3. People posting every small achievement and looking for praise. I get it. It’s fun to share little progress with a community and feel excitement when sharing it with others. Feeling like you’ve made it with a group of other beginners is fun. There really should be a place for this, but once it takes over the subreddit it becomes uninteresting to see the same beginner posts day after day so the experience commenters leave.
The availability of LLMs has caused an explosion of #2 and #3 type posts for any software related subreddit. Starting late last year every subreddit with a software component become flooded with posts about something someone had cooked up with Claude Code. Some of them might be interesting but most were quickly abandoned. Many of them didn’t even work at all.
LLMs made it easy to feel like you’re joining the club. Spend $20 of a subscription and tell Claude what you want and you now have something to post and collect praise for.
The absolute worst are the posts where all the content is also generated by Claude. Even the OP’s comments are Claude written for many of these. You can click on their profile and see their comment history is written in one style for everything else, but suddenly they’re posting capitalized sentences and Claude-style prose paragraphs in this one subreddit. Then you realize you’re entirely viewing the output of a robot, which someone is putting forth as their own work.
It’s just not interesting. It’s not even fun for the #3 feature because the person copying LLM output into the subreddit is not interested in anything about the community other than taking praise and upvotes from it. They aren’t participating in other threads or encouraging others. They are there to promote their project, extract traffic, praise, and upvotes, and go back to prompting Claude.
I don’t know if banning solo projects or projects using LLMs is going to lead to a quality outcome, because those two measures aren’t specific for the slop that people hate. I do understand why they feel the need to do something, though.
I'm an open source contributor.
The mod is overreacting. By this logic, Linux kernel is banned on the sub...
This is ridiculous and it would be reverted. I'm sure of it. They can't have this long term
I guess in some parts of the FOSS movement, predominantly in the left-wing politicised (“woke”) parts, there is a hard anti-AI wave flooding through these days.
They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like.
On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care.
Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it.
Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.
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Actually mostly sane.
Good. Glad some folks in the community still have backbones to stand up to this, unlike the likes of Linus Torvalds, Debian, etc.
AI needs to be shamed in FOSS. It's not good. This fad will die eventually.
nah AI is fine when used as a complimentary tool. theres nothing wrong with automating some focus-intensive tasks that are mostly data entry
however, being unable to understand the code is an issue. creating code with an AI and then calling yourself a coder is a straight lie.
The latest frontier models no longer produce slop. The code is pretty good in general - better in fact in many situations compared what a human might have produced with limited time, resources and experience.
The argument against AI-assisted programming just doesn't hold anymore.
If you read the post, the argument isn’t that AI-made projects are bad, just that they’re uninteresting. It’s similar to the argument I’ve seen people make of “don’t open a AI-written PR, just post your prompt and let me use my own LLM”
All interesting projects that I have seen in recent times are all done with AI.
That’s not my experience. The frontier models produce ok code that works but it’s still very sloppy. Further evidence is that the number of massive PRs is increasing not decreasing, i.e. the LLMs are brute forcing changes rather than introducing quality code patterns.
This is not a good metric IMHO. I would expect new projects to have bigger changes initially as they try to find a suitable architecture. That is not slop. This is no different than rewriting a project 2-3 times pre-AI to find out what sticks and how to organise it better.
I have yet to see the churn ever go down. I'm not saying it won't but what I see is that current frontier LLMs are still bad at identifying functional abstractions or patterns that can actually scale.
I have not seen an LLM rewrite 2-3 times and then settle on what sticks, it just rewrites constantly and usually while leaving residue of previous attempts behind.
Which in some projects is still fine. Like I said, they are generally producing working code, but I haven't seen proof yet that it can actually scale and evolve well over time.
I've been hearing that for years. It's no more true today than it was then.
3 years ago the best model was GPT-3.5 Turbo with 16,385 tokens context window.
Wonder how they plan to find 3 people who want to code by hand together in a few years.
The best feature of LLMs might be that you can do so much without needing anybody's help. (Or that you don't have to deal with anybody)