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?
Just make people disclose it in the title
Remove them
I vote to remove myself but I’d be fine with just having to state AI involvement
Remove them
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.
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.
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.
Remove.
Allow them. Anti-AI hate is kneejerk sentiment. AI is the future whether your sentiments agree with it or not, and it’s a major enablement tool for OSS developers.
Require an AI tag for anything written in part or in whole by AI.
remove
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.
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.
How about making a rule that it is at least six months old and in continued development? This would filter out most slop.
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
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?
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.
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.
Totally agree. The project has to be developed by someone that knows what they’re doing.
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.
