It’s really telling how AI-assisted software development is simply divided into black and white, as if there were no in-between. Apparently, although there is.

I think they should be allowed if they have actual effort and maintaining put into them, but that’s usually the problem. Most LLM projects get abandoned very fast.

This is a major difference with a project like Linux. Even if they start using slop code there, you know that they’re not going to suddenly abandon it.

Maybe we need to think out of the box, and instead of an LLM tag, we need a tag like how long the repo has existed which can be automatically checked by a bot.

All these “remove” votes will only accomplish developers not disclosing their use of AI 🙄 It’s very silly.

If it’s not open source, remove them.

If they’re open source then the people posting them are in the right place.

A policy like what’s being suggested in the op will only be walked back in a few months.

E: also disclosure is a stupid requirement. All it does is give people something to fight over and there’s no industry accepted process for evaluating ai code as opposed to human written code, so disclosure doesnt even serve a useful purpose. It’s literally just giving people something to argue about when the hypothetical post is ostensibly about the software or what it accomplishes.

Minimum age requirement and activity requirement. If it was built all in one go it’s more likely to be abandoned and full of problems and just pollute the landscape. If it’s been under development with multiple commits over a time-span of months or a year or more it’s more likely to be higher quality, have human in the loop somewhere, continue development, patches, etc. Linux itself for example would be exempted because it has a significant age, significant recurring activity in development, multiple human developers, etc.

I do think exceptions on a case by case basis for clever simple programs that address a not previously addressed need might be fine as well. I really think there needs to be a little discretion for mod action.

What a lot of people hate and I do as well are these “look daddy I can ‘code’ too” baby’s first/second/etc vibecoded programs that people proudly toss out there without any real thought beyond pride they told an LLM to make something and it did it. Those rarely add much value, often are redundant with one another (why reinvent the wheel again and again?), and would tend to be lower quality and end up just being so much spam that makes it harder to understand what’s worthwhile.

There needs to be an actual framework for what you’re excluding and why. The majority of developers use LLMs to some degree, an outright ban is unrealistic and motivated by emotion not logic.

I’d suggest limiting submissions of brand new projects with no history and nothing to indicate they’re going to be maintained going forward. There also needs to be some proof the maintainer actually understands how their own project works but that’s far more difficult to prove.

If you’ve been working on a project for 6 months and plan to continue doing so then I’m happy to learn about it regardless of whether AI was used in the process or not.

Remove!

• I think AI disclosure has to be a hard rule. Not done properly? Remove.
• I think there has to be a threshold of when to allow, otherwise we’ll get (and are already) overwhelmed. For example, be X months old is an easy check that would filter out low-effort posting.

Besides these basic rules that I think are absolutely mandatory, I’m not sure how far to go. I’d want to say that the project needs to explain Free Software affinity or explain why it’s posted on lemmy or something like that… But it’s so easy to fake it with, the irony of it, AI texts.

In conclusion,

• Decision-wise, I wouldn’t mind if the resolution is the full removal on AI-driven projects.
• Decision-wise, I would absolutely request a hard-ban if the lemmy text is AI-written.
• Decision-wise, I could accept if the rule is to accept some small sliver of AI posts that would come our way otherwise. Maybe some projects where AI assists in writing code, but does not replace the programmer. Maybe that is OK, if the project otherwise is “relevant to the open source ideology” (Rule 1 of this community).

EDIT: Also, something to think about is… community, not just code. For community health, it might be better to remove AI-driven projects entirely. Because we aren’t just about code. We’re also about continuing to exist long-term.

EDIT 2: I think codeberg actually did it better than my improvised thinking. I’d go with codeberg’s rules: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

+1 to remove them. 99% of those AI projects will go unmaintained and abandoned after a year.

There’s no such thing as “AI”. Nothing to disclose.

Even if there were something to disclose, people don’t know how much of their dependencies were computer generated. It’s a purity test.

But all apps should be vetted for malware, etc.

Just make people disclose it in the title

I vote to remove myself but I’d be fine with just having to state AI involvement

Removed by mod

Remove them

My secret non-disclosed own policy on projects I control: if I realize you used LLMs, the change will be rejected. There are people who use LLMs but still it’s 100% their change and design, they just didn’t type it by themselves and you cannot figure out.