And we have to expect that trend will continue. I haven’t tested frontier capabilities since April but I know for a fact my local drafters are producing far fewer obvious smells than I remember seeing in frontier outputs even just last year.

Current frontier is likely still detectable by an experienced engineer, especially if they’ve seen enough gen code to recognize the patterns, but might otherwise be indistinguishable from junior-level work. That is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current frontier models didn’t output ANY giveaway “slop” code or outright hallucinations. Symptoms might be more abstract like inelegant architectural decisions, obtuse alg/structure selection, or design choices that demonstrate no grasp of overall objectives.

My point was that from a project maintainer’s perspective, quality is more a side effect, and there’s no effective difference between no AI and no detectable AI. The actual point of a no-vibecode policy is (A) to communicate expectations, ensuring contributors know their PR must pass a sniff test, that their name is on it, so blind PR submission is never a safe choice, and (B) to have a bulletproof policy to refer to in retrospect if ever issues relating to AI use in the project arise.