with acceptance of vibecoded contributions, the trustworthiness of the tool - and things built with it - goes down. it pushes the burden of verification downstream, unless the maintainers can show that they have full understanding of and legal rights to, the contributions.

ken thompson (of unix and c) demonstrated in the 80's how he could add code to a compiler binary that in turn added code to everything built with it, including itself, without any visible traces in source code. researchers at the university of minnesota created deliberate exploits in the linux kernel for years without consent to test out the reliability of the reviewers, and the entire university was banned from contributing as a result.

when running tools with ai contributions, you risk doing both of these things on accident because when prs become hundreds of files big nobody can verify everything, and we've already seen ai inject seemingly nonsense code into projects which can be used as a backdoor.

"Vibe coded" should mean "generated by people who aren't coders."

Its often a red flag for sprawling, buggy, over hyped projects with questionable functionality.

This does not apply to Python, Rust, the Linux kernel and such because the maintainer teams have been coding forever, and know what they're doing. They have contribution standards. They have institutional structure that doesn't change at the drop of a hat. If there are regressions or missed quality checks, they will deal with it, like always.

These languages are not vibe coded. You should not lose sleep over this as a user. With Python/Rust in particular, pip/cargo security is a MUCH larger existential threat.

Now, smaller projects?

Theres definitely a risk of tiny maintainer teams going off the rails with "AI psychosis." Thats a real thing. You should still evaluate, not automatically reject, but an obsession with AI is definitely a red flag for a project.

tbh, imo the major languages' maintainers are probably mostly competent enough to not fuck up the codebase much even when using llm for codes. they'd reject slop code from llm just like how they've rejected slop merge requests from humans till now.

random "html programmer" doing "vibecoding" is whole different from old veteran greybeards using llm

Though Rust suffers from the same kind of toxic positive hype that is also driving AI, it's not slop so far.

D has some bigger issues, as some community members, especially discord member Serg Gini, think we need to embrace AI as much as possible, including straight out vibe coding in the standard library and the compiler, this allegedly already led to issues with the lesser used Dcompute (GPU, etc.) target. Some community members (including me) are thinking about creating a fork, with our own improvements on the language that would make it better to use (such as fixing opApply) rather than chasing trends dictated by tech oligarchs in the hopes of getting tech oligarch money, and hustlebro users that like to LARP as software devs.

How exactly are these languages that were around before vibe coding vibe coded?

What does it mean for a programming language to be AI slop?

It doesn't mean anything. Programming languages are just programming languages.

It means the anti-"AI" movement is full of people who have no idea what they're talking about. This is sad because there are many legitimate reasons to oppose "technology" under capitalism, but we mostly get these distractions.

Ignoring whether these languages are implemented using AI (I think Rust’s LLM policy prohibits AI code atm), some of the properties of these languages might make them appealing to AI users.

Rust has its safety guarantees, detailed error messages and the “if it compiles it probably works” mentality, which I assume makes it easy to use with AI. And Python probably just had a humongous amount of training data available, so LLM outputs for Python might be higher quality?

It’s why I think I see these two languages pop up in a lot of vibe coded projects. Which sucks for me since I actually enjoy programming in Rust like you do and have to put up with all the AI hype bros in the community

Such big claims require very thick reports with evidence.

The argument is that those languages are incorporating ai code into the codebase sometimes without documentation. That's all it means is that they don't differentiate for before this codebase started using AI code (slop).