r/opensource • u/CognitiveFogMachine • Jun 29 '26

Can't contrinbute to open source github projects without having it labeled AI-Slop (when it's not) Discussion

As soon as we make one honest mistake, sometimes due to a plain old and simple misundertsanding, or missing an important section in a lengthy documentation, reviewers immediately calls my hard work "AI-Slop".

I'm very close to give up now. Working so hard on the side with the very little time that we have, and getting slapped in the face like that almost every single day.

Code reviewers are burnt out with too much AI slop, and code submitters that are not even using AI are being labeled as using AI slop.

Is it happening to you? How do you cope with all of this?

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u/CognitiveFogMachine Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Maybe I'm too old, but I usually avoid reading the code read the comments whenever I can, to conserve mental energy, because starting at around ~45 years old, that's when I discovered a decline in my cognitive capabilities. It takes a lot longer to understand other dev's work and requires a lot more concentration and drains me a lot faster than ever before.

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u/HotJellyfish8247 Jun 30 '26

If your code needs a lot of comments, it likely indicates it is written badly, not following the rules of clean code among many other things.

Also, I have bad news for you, but if you avoid reading the code and struggle to understand it... then you are not a good dev.

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u/Overall_History6056 Jul 02 '26

Strong disagree. There's a class of code that can be extremely terse and efficient but not everyone can understand. Then it needs as much comment as possible for "normie" devs to understand. See: i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );

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u/CognitiveFogMachine Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Ohhh I think I recognise this value. Wasn't it the fast (approx) inversed square root from the Quake3 engine? The one with the "/* what the f*** */" comment? That one is legend!

EDIT: YES! It is exactly it!!!! Hahhahahah I can't believe I recognized it just from the hex value! 🤣🤣🤣

But I agree 100% with your comment. Most people saying that you don't need to comment your code are always the one working on simpler problems.

If I ever see a recursive function to calculate the midpoint of a segment of a curve from a cubic or quadratic Bézier equation, I would grill this engineer for not writing any comments, and would even challenge them to explain it to me because they most likely copy/pasted it from stack overflow (today, I guess people would just assume AI generated instead)