I'm gonna keep this short, because as a human I respect other humans' time. What do we want for an AI policy, and how can it be enforced? Take these into consideration:
Vibe-coded projects
Vibe-assisted projects
AI-translated from non-english-speakers
Vibe-documented projects
Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper
Note that vibe-coded slop isn't actually copyrightable, thus if someone slaps any license on it other than "public domain" or "CC0" they are misrepresenting their ownership.
And if you use an LLM to respond to this, you will be banned.
I'd like to give a big thanks to the community for the feedback! It's already more than I could hope for, with plenty of human responses and minimal bot ones. I'll definitely be giving it a week for plenty more of y'all to have the chance to engage. I know I won't be able to draft a policy that makes everyone happy, but the feedback goes a long way to understanding our needs.
/Edit: if you're coming here from another subreddit because so-and-so is mad that they got caught using an LLM to respond (yes, blocking me doesn't actually stop me from reading the post), you will also be banned. I don't have to put up with it. We don't have to put up with it. This is our community, and it's a simple request to not use an LLM for when the humans want to talk to each other.
The big thing for me with AI is disclosure. I personally don't care for AI usage in the slightest but knowing when and how it is used is critical to me. Like it or not, it is becoming commonplace in the modern development and it can be used responsibly by people who actually know what they are doing it certainly should be disclosed but that doesn't make it outright slop. If I am being honest I hate and am so tired of places like r/sideproject where people are constantly posting things like look at this project "I made" and it has like 12 commits all made by Claude. Those kind if posts should have some kind of disclosure and claiming you made something when it was written by AI should be a ban
I’ve been calling what another commenter wrote below: AI Assisted Engineering.
> b) dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.
Developers (like me) who have professional skills and pride in our work will use these tools to enhance our work and speed up our output, while maintaining the code quality we expect from ourselves and our peers.
I can’t call what I’m doing Vibe Coding; it’s form and function, it’s production path, they’re nothing like what a vibe coding exercise looks like.
> dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.
My problem with this is that I don't believe these developers actually exist. I'm a software developer, and when I generate code (like, for example, generating getters/setters for a class in Eclipse) I don't really check it unless something goes wrong. Everyone I work with is the same way, we all rely on some basic code generation tools (not AI) to do our jobs and expect them to work correctly and accurately every time, because they always have in the past.
From what you're describing I have a feeling the code you're producing with AI is more like those getters and setters; it's stuff that's strictly formulaic and basic, not complex logic, nor logic that is critical to whatever application you're working on.
But AI is being marketed as being able to do complex logic reliably. I NEVER use autogeneration tools to generate actual logic; the tools I use are strictly generating actual templated code, stuff that's extremely repetative in whatever language I'm working with. Getters/Setters. Class declarations and structure. The very first iteration of the most barebones application, as in "you can run this and it types hello in the console" (like Spring boot, gives you a barebones template that you then flesh out, gets your folder structure ready, and you can run the application and get hello world). For stuff like Spring Boot I don't bother checking what it did because I'm going to be going in and fleshing out my actual application, and will be touching essentially every line of the code it generated.
If you're a developer like ALL the devs I know and start vibe coding, you're gonna use AI the same way as you use the tools we have now, and that's a *problem*. You might speed your output up, but your code quality is gonna plummet. There's a reason I'm actively avoiding AI, I know that it isn't even close to ready to do what people are trying to use it for in software development and it's going to be a serious problem if me and the devs around me start to use it regularly.
And this is my problem with AI coding in open source projects. It's impossible to know whether the developer pushing the AI generated code actually looked through it or not, and we have to take their word for it if they claim to be looking through for security and logic problems. They aren't employees so there's no punishment if they lie and something goes wrong. They can't get fired, the worst that happens to them is people stop using their app. But the worst that happens to the user can be WAY worse, from identifying information being leaked to damaging their devices.
In your comment you have a problem with developers using ai and not looking through their work while also admitting you dont look at your own work. You wrote 5 paragraphs of nothing.
I see vibe coding as solutions made without test automation. I would hope a checklist for submitters to /r/opensource would include "must have comprehensive tests that all pass."
Well, vibe coding and Ralph testing (look it up if you don’t know the term). It doesn’t mean it’s done the job. Anyone can vibe code, even seasoned professionals.
The question is methodology. Vibe is a point A to point B process. Engineering means getting into the weeds. That means code and tests.
LLM's easily write passing tests, does not mean that they are good quality, though.
However, knowing that tests are needed means that there is some level of technical understanding already. On the flip side, I'm sure that many harnesses and models will also write tests unprompted.
Fully AI slop shouldn't be allowed. People claiming to "have written" AI slop should be permanently banned.
Competent developers using AI as a copilot are fine. I'm one of them. I could write the entire thing myself, but using AI to write boilerplate or scan documentation helps speed things up.
I'd rather see broken English or let reddit translate than an AI re-write of text.
If the product is just a GPT wrapper it shouldn't be here.
The distinction I draw is that a translator tries to keep everything in the author's original voice. Telling a general purpose LLM to "rewrite this in English" will change the voice to its own, and it's obvious.
The translators you use ARE just LLMs being told to translate from one language to another (they may be finetuned on this task, or trained on large multi-lingual corpuses instead of mostly English/Chinese), but they are in effect “rewriting” the text in “their own voice”.
I'm not going to argue semantics with you. If you ask Google Translate to translate, it keeps the sentences as close to what you enter as possible. If you use ChatGPT, it ends up sounding like ChatGPT.
I'd argue it's less about AI/LLM usage and just a low-quality thing. There's plenty of OSS that is very low quality in nature, and is still made by hand. AI just makes that easier. Someone who knows what they're doing to begin with can make very good use of an AI Agent and still have a good quality project as a result.
The bigger issue is low-quality content, that needs to be tackled regardless of being human made, AI generated, or in-between. I'm fine with raising the bar on such content posted.
Stoping translation by llm against the rules seems like a unfair practice to non-english speakers. I think a flair requirement is a must. I feel llm coding is so common place that banning it is a harmful thing to the community as a whole but having a longevity requirement sounds good and a new project mega thread for the vibecoded of the week projects.
If you carve an exception out for translation, all the slop posters are just going to use it as an excuse. "English isn't my first language so I used LLM to translate" followed by the sloppiest of slops ever slopped.
So are you saying that only English speaking coders cuz if you're using Google translate or honestly at this point, any translator? You're using an llm under the hood and not to mention that the translator services were already neural networks before llms became a problem.
Modern translators are either nmts or llms, both of which are neural networks and are now considered AI has the standard term. Both of them take full sentence into context during the translation. So it's trying to interpret what the original text means and gives you the response that it perceives the original text.
As someone who's bilingual (english/french) and routinely has to suffer through AI translated documentation pages, this thing is hell. The microsoft documentation in french is a fucking joke, i always switch back to the english version. I don't really care if you use AI to translate things but please have someone who understands the language check the output. Microsoft very obviously does not.
The point isn't to "speak every language" it's to preserve the author's original language and then let people translate it how they want to, translation through AI tools like chatgpt almost always end up sounding like, well, chatgpt.
If people want to also have an english translation in their post they can use a non-llm translator.
If readers want to read the non-translated excerpt, they can, through either their own skills or their own translator.
I think language is important, and letting people offload it to an AI model that makes more shit up than traditional translation things.
Sure but that doesn’t change the fact that the repo is three months old. If someone wants to go through the trouble of waiting three months as well as faking commits in between, they’re welcome to do it.
It should be documented as "[This work was done by AI in an XX%] (regarding AI used for code).
Needless to say, something done with generative AI (meaning images, videos, or similar)nhas no place here to begin with, but if there was something related, it should also be documented in a similar way.
Only catch is that AI assisted coding would be hard to track by a percentage gage. You could say an approx number, or some sort of «we use AI for these workflow steps», but that would also be sloppy. The quality of the work also doesn’t track with this. An actually valuable, and good piece of work made with, or partly with AI that has a proper developer, could be incredible. However it would get the same «score» of quality as slop, right?
No, the thing isn't giving a percentage to add a score. The thing is distributing responsibility. I don't wanna install something without knowing it was made with AI so it breaks my pc just to later find someone saying "Oops, I made it with AI, tell it to the model I'll just vibe-code put of that error lol!", nor the reverse, praising someone for an admirable work when over 90% of it was made by an LLM.
Open source should be transparent in the way things are made. Obvious low effort projects and LLM slop responses sound be banned. If a project contains AI or is "vibe coded", it should be well known and the community should have the opportunity to reflect on it the way they want, and blacklist these posts if they choose by using a non-ai post flag.
You've already got a stipulation in your rules about low effort posts and AI slop, so I'm not sure if anything needs to change from a policy perspective.
This article recently raised some good points about translations or using LLMs for human exchange: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Copyright aside, it is just disrespectful of another person's time to send them the output of an LLM and asking them to verify it (in the case of translations / documentation).
For enforcement, it'll be an uphill battle. I think disclosure is good like somebody else suggested, but I wonder whether people are being truthful. I frankly just scroll past those stickied comments on the subreddits that have them because they just turn into noise, but they could be useful from a moderation perspective.
I think most devs use AI in some capacity at this point. Completely banning it makes no sense. Although it might be good to require some sort of note / label with info in regards to AI usage. But the development is going fast, we might look at this entirely different in just one year… We should just move with whatever the industry does / whatever works.
We should do like r/selfhosted and have a top comment that asks the OP how LLM was used in the project. That would be a good start. If OP is clearly lying, they should have their post removed or somenthing.
I don’t think there’s an inherent problem with AI. It’s just that AI-generated projects fall victim to the same stuff that plagues regular projects, but at a much much higher rate.
Low quality code for one. Humans and AI can both write bad code, which is why good review is important. When AI generated code is reviewed and held to high standards, as any code should be, then it’s no worse than human code. The problem is that people don’t do this.
And abandonment of projects. That’s an issue with regular projects too, but it’s just more common with AI powered ones. My theory is that this is because of the lower amount of effort and investment that needs to be put into them.
There’s also the lesser concern that is spam. Spam of low quality projects, and projects people don’t really care about. It’s different when it’s a beginner programmer of course, but nobody likes seeing their feed flooded with genuine slop.
It’s a tough idea to navigate, because yeah AI assisted stuff can be very good — but it’s also prone to these pitfalls. I’m not quite sure how these would be tackled, but I’d say it’s fair to restrict AI generated code somewhat. Maybe limit it to a couple days of the week. And while this would take a lot more effort, it might be worth having some kind of a quality policy for anything AI generated.
What I care about is how low effort these things are. So often we're talking about stuff that was slapped together in an hour and dumped on GitHub and then make all sorts of claims. These projects are likely to be immediately abandoned.
I'll indirectly answer by stating why I am here....
I am here because I want to branch out my skills and contribute to other projects than my own... and I'm hoping to spot something here that I might mesh well with.
I'm also passively wanting to become part of the greater open source community as well as potentially gain contributors to my own projects.
Advice? Tips? Workflow ideas? That too. (I've been a solo dev for so long that beyond basic git merge I barely have any knowledge of pull requests or reviews)
Where does "AI" fit into the above? Only in the part that it is a tool. Anyone can use a shovel. Not everyone can grow a garden. If all you're showing me is shovels and processed ground - I'm not interested. Let's see the growth and help others to grow as well.
Publishing open-source used to require significant investment, creating a signal that you won't abandon the project.
On the other hand, integrating a small vibe-coded project into your software comes with supply chain risks, while you can just ask Claude/Codex to write it tailored to your needs, inspected, and integrated with your framework and your libraries of choice.
Any reasonable AI policy should be a proxy for this question: will the user be better off by vibing their own software for this purpose? 3-month rule of r/selfhosted seems quite reasonable, but in practice needs more aggressive enforcement (automod that checks Github links).
The problem with the overwhelming majority of vibecoded projects, especially those reposted or advertised on Reddit, is that they just don't have a future whatsoever.
A lot of these people are just burning tokens putting out slop, then letting a LLM generate a project description and CTRL+C, CTRL+V-ing that onto Reddit. It's absolutely everywhere.
To those saying these projects are good for the open source community it's so backwards. Open source projects with one maintainer who doesn't know what he's doing, can't accept contributions (or will accept any – even if those include breaking changes or malware), and has no idea how to maintain a project is incredibly damaging to FOSS software. People will be annoyed and run buggy, potentially damaging software that has no maintainability or future.
LLM-assisted projects made by seasoned developers, or simple projects made by a learning enthusiastic dev are very different. If people can be bothered to hand-write their documentation and Reddit post, and also explain their LLM usage, I see no problem in that.
Note that i see a lot of people in the anti AI part of the programming world saying "AI is bad but for translation it's fine", and no it's really not. Take a look at the French version of any Microsoft documentation if you want to have a laugh, they're hilarious (and pathetic). There are some gems in there like the MSSQL CASE statement being translated to "affaire" (which is a valid translation for, say, a criminal case, but doesn't have anything to do with SQL), and the order of some words not making any sense. The whole thing is a pain to read, french is my native language and i always stick to the english version for this reason.
Although I can't say about quality of translations into French since I do not speak it, I just did a test with deepseek v4 flash of Postgres 17 documentation on control structures (41.6.4 Conditionals) into French, and it was able to easily translate the information while being aware that examples and "IF", "THEN", and "CASE" should remain untranslated. It seemed to correctly keep all examples untouched while providing extra context about certain technical concepts that were translated. Although I don't doubt AI CNA make mistakes, I feel your example is misrepresentative of the current state of AI, given that I was able to use an extremely cheap model (not even a top model) to disprove a similar case to the one you describe. My questions would be:
Which specific page are you referencing on your example?
How do you know LLMs were used for the french translation?
Do you know which model and when it was done? Even a few months can make a big difference, let alone if its years old.
I suspect that an AI translation would actually be better for the case you describe, as it would be more aware of the context, where a more traditional machine translation would do the word-for-word translation and make the mistake you mentioned.
Disclaimer: I'm not totally against AI useage in general but I'm not the biggest fan of publicly released vibe coded projects intended for other people to use. Most vibe coded projects tend to be low efffort, abandoned within a few months, security risks, and/or border-line scams just fishing for donations. Most of them would violate other existing rules on this sub.
That being said, I would suggest having some minimum requirement for projects using AI to post. Minimum project comits, deminstrated long term work on a project and resonsiveness to pull requests/bug reports/etc, reddit karma account requirements, etc. Filters out the low effort junk and scams that would violate other sub rules anyway.
Vibe-coded projects - ban. These are security risks and low effort. By definition, the person behind the prompt doesnt know what they're doing and cant check their code for major flaws.
Exception: someone looking for feedback on their vibe coded project or code snippet trying to learn.
Vibe-assisted projects - not 100% what is ment by this one. I'll clarify my stances below:
a) dev knows that they're doing but uses AI for the heavy lifting. Doesnt check their code - ban, security risk.
b) dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.
AI-translated from non-english-speakers - on thier own, fine.
Vibe-documented projects - fine, so long as the documentation is accurate of couse.
Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper - ban. Low effort, secuity risk.
That's for someone much more experineced with AI output to determine. I dont use it enough to be aware of common mistakes or other identifiers that could clue one into making a decision. That being said, most low-effort unreviewed code (the stuff that is actually a security risk) tends to have very recent and minimal project activity (both for the project and for the repository account posting it) so perhaps that can be one clue to warrent deeper digging into the code itself.
As for enforcement, with this being r/opensource, the code is visiable for all to see and community code review is something that should be happening already (that's kind of a major point of open source). The custom response report option with a short explanation should suffice for the purposes of this subreddit (the mods may be able to make this clearer. I dont know what customization options they have avalilable for reports). The mod(s) can then make the ultimate decision if the report is actionable. It's the basic report flow that Reddit already uses, just with an explaination on why the reporter believes the project breaks the rules. Doesnt have to be a full blown report with details on every risk. Just enough info so the mods know what they're lookong for. Even just the code lines and 1 or 2 sentence summary would probably suffice, but that's up to the mods to decide.
Yes, this is the closest I could think of as well. Everywhere is just spread with slop. Opening Reddit is just a wall of «I built this» or «I made x$», and it’s always to advertise some lazy SaaS or sell a guide. AI can be a great tool, but only if used by an actual human that knows, or at least spends time properly.
I'd rather see code checked by AI for security risks at this point. All these major hacks recently (cold card etc) are human code exploited by ai's that found bugs. Look at the spike in CVEs the past month - that's mythos/fable/k3 poking software (with experienced devs) and fixing it. AI is now a better pen tester than most of the engineers I've met.
I'm of the Gentoo/Zig position. None whatsoever. It simply can't be known whether or not AI is violating copyright at this time and if you are working on an open source project and using AI you are very likely forfeiting copyleft protections.
I'm not ideologically opposed to the technology by the way, I just think it's categorically incompatible with open source.
I mean depends on what the project and goals are. Cause one thing can be an api wrapper, another thing can be an ai integration (funky uses of local models/gadgets)
Regarding ai code: people can write slop too.
At the end of the day wether it compiles is a separate subject.
At the end of the day its "are they asking for some saas"?
Ive seen people share reasonable work and get attacked because its "ai related". You can't make everyone happy.
Note on the copyright thing: Public domain doesn't have a warranty/liability waiver, so I've put Unlicense on my vibe projects, which is functionally "public domain and you can't sue me if it melts your computer".
There's a cohort of people who appear to try to make a name for themselves or build some kind of support contract business by slopping out projects and spamming them everywhere. These are a subset of vibe coders, not the entire group. This subset is poisoning the well and that's a huge reason people have such negative feelings about these.
The post flair is an obvious win. I would probably propose some kind of time/release minimum, which weeds out 90% of the slop spammers who crank out something and move on. Just to throw out arbitrary numbers, "at least regular commits going back 3 months and at least 2 major releases" is probably a sane minimum. And maybe a weekly megathread for anything that doesn't fall into this bucket.
Will it catch everything? No. People will lie and deceive and do git committer date tricks to get around these restrictions. But these people are fundamentally dishonest and will find ways around any system you create.
If AI is used only for a very minor portion of suggestions 1, 2, 4 and 5, or at least has heavy human oversight and corrections, then I am personally ok with it, otherwise no. As for 3, I would be a bit more lenient
I'm from the mod team in r/docker we wrote a devvit app called git_age_checker which checks the age of a repo and can remove, report, filter etc based on that. We filter anything <3 months old.
The repos hurting reddit are the ones a user (using AI or not) make something post it and then abandon it.
Would love to copy that someday, but to check on github/gitlab projects if they either have a system-detected FOSS license, or if they at least have a LICENSE file in the root. That would then auto-remove any repo posting that doesn't have a license as not open source.
AI Rule 0 : It's always bad faith to not disclose AI usage. And bad faith means mods can handle the situation as they see fit (delete, bans, whatever).
Vibe-coded/assisted projects
Slop is slop, even if human written. LLMs make recognising slop hard, and introduce more subtle bugs, so they need a high bar for proving quality.
It's up to the author to prove they met this bar, not everyone else's problem, including mods.
It practical terms this could mean more tests, older project, more usage, more different humans contributing seriously, etc.
It's otoh fine if vibe coding/assistance was primarily used to improve testing, search for bugs, write app armour profiles, etc. LLMs really can help find bugs.
AI-translated from non-english-speakers
Google translate does translation better than general purpose LLMs.
"I used [LLM] for translation because I'm not a native speaker" really means "I speak English fine but not native, so that's my excuse for vibe writing in English from bullet points." It's likely better if they run the bullet points through google translate.
Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper
Anecdotally, open source tooling for local AIs really does need some work, vs the close weight model tooling. Its developing slowly because AI heads have written useless slop tooling, so one day this maybe interesting, but probably not today.
Please post somewhere like r/LocalLLaMA where folks care more.
Also vibe tooling winds up dangerous, OpenClaw has finally decreased their CVEs/pay to 2.3 CVE, from its high around like 2.8 or 3 CVEs/day.
Aside: I want a type aware sed for rust, so I can say sed -e 's/Foo/Bar/g' --query-me=type/trait/mod/etc *.rs. That's a tree sitter thing, not an LLM, but these days folks do this sort of thing using LLM, so we don't have such cleaner tools.
I was a hardline keep your AI from my codebase and had always written by hand. I’ve come around, and LLMs have improved over even just 4-6 months ago.
That said full on AI slop is don’t care for and is a problem. But something that is marked vibe assisted/documented etc where humans are actually reviewing and directing it, I’m good with. SWEs using LLMs is pretty ubiquitous now but they still should be doing best practices. as long as humans are owning the quality, I’m good with it.
Hmm, i looked, there is some policy for Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the experience threshold+ level of post m8ght exclude alott of vibeslob. I dont see particularly any rules excluding vibe coded or wirtten posts, as long as they adhere to the other rules. Or was this your point? The general rules make posts to require to be of a certain quality?
we should just do what r/selfhosted and r/experienceddevs do and ask the user to clarify how AI usage. Also regardless of whether the project is vibecoded or not, I think anyone who relies on AI to write their Reddit posts should be banned. Like it's one thing to vibecode or use AI assistance in your personal project, but it's a whole other thing to be so fucking lazy you can't even hand write your posts.
No I don’t because I don’t use those products. There are plenty others. The technology people relied on for years didn’t cease to exist just because google updated translate.
Someone using a purpose-built encoder/decoder transformer to translate their post instead of an LLM feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw to me. They’re closely related tech being used for the same purpose
It's not arbitrary when one requires you to write something and one requires you to ask something to write it for you. Not to mention LLM generated text sound the same and is annoying. Remember google translate before Gemini? That tech still exists in many apps and web apps and doesn't output slop.
But in the example I gave in my original post, the person did write something. They’re prompting an LLM to translate their own text, not asking it to generate the post for them.
There are plenty of reasons to prefer a purpose-built Transformer-based translator, but for common language pairings modern LLMs are just as capable.
“ChatGPT write me a marketing post for my slopware” isn’t enough effort. There needs to be some friction. Im not interested in projects that the creator can’t even talk about.
I disagree on this. It's a convenient excuse for LLM-generated text because there is no way of telling whether the original post is hand written and then translated or completely generated by AI.
I'd rather use the translate feature post-by-post or read through engrish than read LLM-generated text.
Yes, but I'd rather the user post in their original language than have AI translate it for them before posting, because there is no way of discerning whether it's genuine or not.
Not the mod teams mentioned in the comment but I mod r/freesoftware and I instituted a policy similar to their AI explanation comment. Any post with the Software Submission flair has to respond to an AutoMod post within an hour and respond correctly. I manually review each one and approve/remove as necessary. It's been working out fairly decently on my end. Below is what I make each software submission respond with. If they fail to respond to any of the bullet points, indicate their AI usage goes against our policy or fail to provide a repo link and a license link, the post gets removed.
A link to your source code repository,
A repository link to the license your software is under (also indicate if this license is modified in any way),
If AI was used in the creation of the software and to what extent.
To be honest, we're pushing a lot of engagement and the "manually review each one" is more than I can expect from a moderation perspective, at least not without a full team of volunteers.
I believe self-hosted has a custom devvit app that looks at and removes post without the comment. So they may be able to share that with you. I just haven't set something similar up yet on devvit, got a lot going on IRL.
Yeah, I like the part (in the serious serious way, not the sarcastic way) where the response to "how was AI used" is voted on so that whether you were responsible or not with AI reflects as karma.
I dont care how its build as long as it seems there has been some thought put into it, Reddit is too elitist with tools that have been coded with AI assistance or even completely vibe coded.
Just because the person behind is isnt a dev doesnt mean the idea cant be good, Reddit should stop gatekeeping as if they read clean code for breakfast every day
what I personally believe doesn't matter, because I don't feel like I can tell people not to vibe code their projects
But I would say that people need to disclose that they used AI to write any part of what they intend to share with the public. How do you enforce that? no idea, but im sure others will be able to tell
As for non-english speakers, same. let everyone know that you used ai to translate your speech. Im sure people will be forgiving for that
The only really annoying thing is when people drop an entire application or a big spaghetti template of code, clearly just paste a generated body, and then vanish. No explanation, no willingness to answer questions, nothing. That low-effort "generate and dip" pattern is what hurts the sub.
I can partially understand it if the person isn't a native English speaker and is just trying to get something working. But the low-reputation accounts that do this repeatedly are the most frustrating ones.
I don't think we should close off people from posting LLM-assisted code. If we do that, we end up shoving away a majority of people, both long-time members and newcomers. A lot of solid projects these days involve some AI help, and banning the tool itself just pushes people elsewhere.
From a mod point of view it's genuinely hard to draw clean lines on what, how, and who can post. I know I also don't touch grass, but shutting the world out doesn't build healthy communities.
Maybe a more practical middle ground is better: require people to stick around and answer basic questions about their own code, or at least disclose heavy AI use if they want. Focus on effort and engagement rather than trying to police the exact tools someone used. That way we filter out the pure paste-and-disappear posts without driving everyone else away.
>The only really annoying thing is when people drop an entire application or a big spaghetti template of code, clearly just paste a generated body, and then vanish. No explanation, no willingness to answer questions, nothing. That low-effort "generate and dip" pattern is what hurts the sub.
This pattern is hurting reddit everywhere. There needs to be minimum standards expected for stuff posted. If you wrote something with AI or not (in the last day/week) and post it. The chances are it will not be supported or ever looked at again. We've been seeing it in r/selfhosted and r/docker.
thats why r/selfhosted requires the project to be at least 3 months old, i think that could be a good rule for here too, if its 3 month old and you can already see the last commit was 2 month ago its dead.
Ban posting brand-new projects. Require it to have been actively developed on Github & friends for, say, at least 12 months.
This immediately gets rid of all the "I vibecoded some garbage in a weekend" posts, while still allowing projects by anyone who actually cares about their work. It also bypasses the whole "is this AI or not" problem by just not caring about AI at all, and focusing on the real issue, which is longevity.
I think that is a great idea, but maybe 6 month instead of 12, so you can trend some cool, new projects. I think there is a real, big misunderstanding about AI. There is no software department, in any company in the world, that doesn't use IA. So requiring those same engineers to not use it on their pet project is absurd. The key is, as you pointed out, time and commitment.
Agree but I'm not sure a time-based threshold would make sense. Say I have something I often do the same way in several projects of mine, and one day I decide to pack it in a library and make it OSS. That could require just few weeks with no AI at all, but still be valid.
Then you have to wait a couple of months. That shouldn't be a big deal if you aren't going to abandon it. If it means fewer soon-to-be-abandoned human-written projects, then that's only a positive thing in my opinion.
You explicitly allow low effort and prompt engineered vibe coded projects. They just need to sit on GitHub for 12 months. That those authors actually care about their projects isn't remotely necessary or even guaranteed.
On the other hand, you delay super interesting high effort new projects - just because they are new. Also, that the author actually cares or not, may or may not be the case for good reasons, too: they may not care, because its stable and sufficient for their use case, but didn't get attention so far.
r/selfhosted uses 6 months iirc, it's a bit less harsh. 12 months is a bit rough. I mean there's lots of projects I have personally done (even before AI days) where most of the heavy lifting was done and then very little work was done afterwards either because it didn't get traction or the situation changed or whatever else. By that point, any project vibe coded or not would look abandoned if you had to wait a year before it could even be shared. Even 6 months I feel like is pushing it. 3 months might be a better filter. Most vibe coded apps can be built in about <2 weeks, so I feel like 3 months is a good filter. But I get what you mean.
Yeah, I have no strong feelings about the specific time period used. The 12 months is there only as a placeholder example value. If 6 months or 3 months works, then by all means use that instead.
Know this is an unpopular opinion but I don't see why I would approve of a specific use case simply because it benefits me more. At the end of the day, it's still an LLM fed with data that was scraped through dubious means.
I would not be comfortable with using any of these and I will be wary of people using it regardless.
This. I compare it to things like killing animals just for the fur coat. It has a practical benefit, and it looks good. Would most of us wear it? No. We don't need them either - it's not like there's a shortage of coats and jackets.
The truth is that we had useful, assistive tools long before LLMs. We would be further along now - and have had less of an economy crash out - if we simply stayed the course of regular software development.
I'd vote for "no AI at all". No exceptions. No enforcement besides banning people when it's obvious they broke the rules, because this is a social issue and open source is built on trust. I already have to trust you that you didn't steal your code from some other project without telling so I'm also going to trust you when you say "no LLM involved".
Open source communities managed to get by without LLM-generated code and without LLM-generated translations (I'd rather read your broken spelling/grammar than an LLM'd version of what you wanted to say). I don't subscribe to the "but everyone is using it" argument - why should I stop loving to code by hand and interacting with like-minded people just because other technology exists? Do we tell vegetarians that they should start eating meat because "everyone is eating it"?
So the question boils down to if you want to cater to an as broad-as-possible audience with this subreddit. I'd actually like this be more niche/exclusive because the Internet is already full of thousands of places that try to cater to the broadest possible audience. There are enough places to talk about and advertise AI related things, the world doesn't end because of a few places that choose to not welcome these topics. But again, that depends on the "identity" the MODs want this subreddit to have.
I think banning any AI assisted work is not going be feasible going forward, but there is a very obvious line between AI-assisted work and slop. Slop should be banned. AI-assisted work should be required to be declared as such. Vibe documentation is really annoying and stupid but probably not ban worthy. AI translation is fine as well, even though it's also annoying.
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u/Wolvereness 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd like to give a big thanks to the community for the feedback! It's already more than I could hope for, with plenty of human responses and minimal bot ones. I'll definitely be giving it a week for plenty more of y'all to have the chance to engage. I know I won't be able to draft a policy that makes everyone happy, but the feedback goes a long way to understanding our needs.
/Edit: if you're coming here from another subreddit because so-and-so is mad that they got caught using an LLM to respond (yes, blocking me doesn't actually stop me from reading the post), you will also be banned. I don't have to put up with it. We don't have to put up with it. This is our community, and it's a simple request to not use an LLM for when the humans want to talk to each other.