imo this community should have a rule against posts promoting new primarily-written-with-an-LLM software projects. as an admin, i've deleted a few myself when there are reports of them and the mods aren't resolving them.

banning all AI-assisted software is obviously no longer reasonable now that many large and old projects are using it (with varying levels of care...) but I don't think we actually need a very firm definition of "slop" to be able to say some things clearly are slop and some AI-involved things clearly aren't. When in doubt about if something is of sufficient quality that we should keep it here, the age of the project and the number of developers involved are useful secondary metrics.

@gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml created a new community which I think should be linked in the sidebar here as an alternate place for sharing these things. How about this for a rule (in the !opensource@lemmy.ml sidebar)?

This is not a place to promote new single-developer heavily-AI-assisted projects. Another community exists for sharing AI-Assisted Libre Software: !aials@lemmy.ml

note that the word "slop" is intentionally absent from my proposed rule (and from name and description of the community) - the point is that this is a place for people to share their AI-created software, regardless of if it is 100% vibe coded or is actually high-quality "agentic engineering" - only time, review, and users will ultimately tell which category many of these new things fall into. But enough of it is slop that we shouldn't have this community flooded with it, imo.

cc @CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml @kevincox@lemmy.ml

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.

This was a problem in !selfhosted@lemmy.world and they've done a good job of dealing with it. You could take a look at that past discussion to see what worked / what didn't.

IMO there is an organized effort behind some of these new accounts pushing AI projects, and you need to deal with it in some form to stop them from coming

Both the Linux Foundation and the EFF have permissive policies towards AI generated code, even Linus Torvalds accepts it as a tool.

Some FOSS projects that have AI generated code in it:

• The Linux kernel
• Fedora
• Mesa 3D
• Jellyfin
• Firefox
• Chromium
• Homebrew
• OpenSSL
• FFmpeg
• Curl

Should we ban them all? If so, this community would be either dead soon OR it would be hypocritical.

Or because they started pre-AI it's ok now? Shouldn't we care more about disclosure, policies, licensing, code quality and maintainability?

Users should downvote crappy software and crappy devs, regardless of the tool it was written with.

Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.

I am convinced that, with the right tools, it's possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.

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.

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...

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.

I think one of the appealing traits of open source is that you can identify what piece of software and hardware does what (and how, if you're interested). You can post your exact method, and another person can follow along and replicate the result.

But if AI tells you how to build everything, you don't get the opportunity to learn, and your stack depends on what that particular model thought was best on that particular day. Maintenance also becomes harder if you just did a sudo apt install whatever Claude told me to without knowing what everything does and how it interacts

Just ban low effort content, AI or human made slop both count and have no value.

Vibe coded code whose "author" understands the language and actively challenges the agent for his decisions in the interest of long term window is OK. Vibe coded coded that are one-off without any future prospects should be 100% banned.

I'm in favor just requiring AI-generated code to be tagged in some obvious place in the post. If there's a full restriction on it, I think quite a few people would just try to hide the fact that it was vibe-coded and post anyway,

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.

Yes. They are useless. Get rid of them.

Most important step is to decide exactly where you want to draw the line.

For me the most important thing is that something is free software. I've seen people advertise proprietary stuff in this community and have reported it, and nothing has been done. I don't know if that means my reports don't federate properly or if it's tacitly approved by the moderators. I know in the degoogle community there are "trusted' proprietary apps that are often recommended but this should not be the case in a free software or open source community. In any case, any rule that bans "AI slop" while allowing proprietary products is in my mind backwards.

Regarding "AI slop" I am generally in agreement with Codeberg's policy which states,

You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex).

I suppose "mostly" is up to interpretation but for me this specifically targets vibecoded apps where there is no or very minimal human involvement. This may be heterodoxy but I actually don't think "an otherwise human-written codebase with a single line of LLM code" is the same thing as an entirely LLM generated codebase. I think there's room for nuance especially if the usage is disclosed (I don't think punishing transparency should be encouraged).

I think a blanket ban would make people try and hide the fact that something is ai. Like it or not ai isn't going away. I feel disclosure in either the title or body is the better choice. By all means ban those blatantly not adhering to the disclosure rule though.

Tags in Lemmy would be really helpful here as users could chose yo filter out all ai related posts from their feed, though a similar effect can come through requiring a keyword like "[AI]" to be in the title and a user end keyword filter.

Maybe start out with strict labeling guidelines. If it's AI then it should be labeled as such. If a user posts something that's Ai and doesn't label it then ban that user. Maybe a warning first up to you.

But if the choice is between blanket everything allowed or blanket ban I lean more toward blanket ban.

+1 to banning AI projects.

Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having fewer but actually good quality posts.

AI slop is completely against this.

+1 for the option self hosted went with - AI use must be labeled. It allows those of us that don't want to see it to easily filter it out.

I saw that million lines of code in 3 months but also when I saw the post title I really just had a feeling that's what it was to begin with. On one hand it's kinda cool that just about anyone can make a program that does what they want, but on the other side of it I understand LLM generated code and bot submitted pulls are literally killing beloved FLOSS projects. This greatly saddens me. A good friend of mine quit contributing to projects she used to enjoy helping develop because rather than read her code, an LLM the lead dev fed it through claimed her code was AI generated. It's fucked and causing brain rot of the worst kind.

But I also want to acknowledge that in the hands of a professional developer/coder LLMs are a valuable tool. But a person needs to be able to read and understand and verify the generated code.... All this to say is that I think we need a sane and nuanced approach. Let's not start a witch hunt, let's just put labels on boxes and let the community decide what it wants to view or filter out.

Yeh I’d prefer no slop. You’d probably also need to clarify what the definition or threshold for this might be. Just the code? Slop docs? LLM used for any aspect whatsoever? Other communities must have a definition that might help. But your goals with it as stated are sound. Let’s not drown in vomit.

Yes please. No AI at all. Assisted, human reviewed, none of it. Only fully human written code.

I'm team "no slop allowed", but you have to define what slop is somehow.

I think there's a bunch of metrics to consider, but it might be difficult to assess as a mod.

define slop. it means different things to different people.

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.

Since speaking directly to the proposed change didn’t do much, here’s an alternative to “banning ai slop”:

Ban the thing that’s happening. If there are too many “low effort” posts, ban low effort posting. If there are too many posts about non open source packages, ban posting about non open source software. If you really don’t want people self promoting with open source (a thing they’ve been doing for decades!) then ban self promotion.

The problem with all the things I just suggested is that they require serious consideration on the part of a moderator. “Is this post too low effort?”, “is this person promoting themselves in a way the community doesnt want?” and “is this post even about open source?” Are questions that require moderator effort. “Was the repo signed by Claude?” Takes no effort to answer.

Of course kicking kids out of the sandbox for not playing right kind of defeats the purpose of a sandbox and placing unnecessarily high barriers to entry on the commons defeats the purpose of a commons but what the hell do I know…

Let people choose by their owns. In my client, I can filter by texts; I already used to hide some topics. Maybe it's more convenient to include a tag in the title. For example: if your contribution/project is made by or include generated content from a LLM, include the tag [AI]. That way, anyone can hide these contributions by filtering by the text "[AI]".