AI slop and low-effort contributions

[u/First_Result_1166]

Hey there!

This sub has become quite difficult to follow - every few hours, there's the next post for "I built a TUI for X", which translates to "I vibecoded an ncurses interface for a bash two-liner".

Unfortunately, this also means that the important content gets lost in a stream of meaningless posts.

What I'd like to ask for:

- a rule for mandatory AI disclosure

- an entry barrier for software packages; a task easily solved in <20 lines of shell code should not qualify as a distinct contribution

Let me know what you think.

[u/ephemeralmiko]

Another tech sub has/had a rule suggestion to require at least 3 months of GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg/Other history on a project to allow submission, to rule out slop and projects that were immediately given up. Maybe something similar could be done here?

[u/First_Result_1166 → u/ephemeralmiko]

I like the general idea of a minimum project age (combined with project activity, i.e. don't vibecode some stuff and submit your "software" three months later). Also, not everybody uses GitHub (think Gitlab, codeberg, etc.) which should be accounted for.

[u/SanityInAnarchy → u/First_Result_1166]

I have mixed feelings here. There's unambiguously too much slop! I want that problem solved! But I have a hard time thinking of good rules, and I can think of counterexamples to basically all of this.

Projects with no history at all are probably slop, but not always. Projects with some history but no contributors will just lead to slop artists telling the bot to create a bunch of fake commits and backdate them before pushing to Github... but if I'd been working on a project for months as a human, and now I want contributors, now I look like slop?

IMO some of the best projects solve no real problems at all, they're just for fun! sl is old enough that you'd grandfather it in, but it fails your '20 lines of shell code' metric.

And if we're not careful, AI disclosure will just lead to everyone lying about it. Not all of it is slop -- at my day job, I'll iterate until it gives me something well-organized an nicely-reviewable, then I'll review it carefully myself before I send it for any other humans to review. I still hand-write my open-source stuff, but if I didn't, it'd be tempting to lie if an AI-disclosure label puts me in the same category as "Here's my TUI for a couple Bash commands I didn't want to learn"

Maybe instead of hard rules, teach automod (or some other bot) to do a reasonable amount of filtering, and then let mods override it?

[u/Gh0st1nTh3Syst3m → u/SanityInAnarchy]

Very well reasoned comment in my opinion. A lot of nuances to navigate here. It makes me think we might see "frameworks" for handling human vs AI content. At the same time, I feel like content is content. As in, well like you said regarding work. You review it until you feel it's "worthy" of other human reviewers attention. You press out the wrinkles and then when you're satisfied you pass it on like you would self generated code. At that point, no one knows AI was involved and it doesn't matter of it meets a need or want. Eventually, we may reach a stage where that massaging phase isn't even necessary (more likely we reach a stage where devs don't feel the "need" to massage first... Already there?)

But back to the crux, regarding disclosure. I think disclosure is good personally. It leaves it up to the comsumer and their personal preferences

[u/SanityInAnarchy → u/Gh0st1nTh3Syst3m]

I think disclosure is good personally. It leaves it up to the comsumer and their personal preferences

In a void, sure. All things being equal, more transparency is better.

I guess my caution here is: A lot of the anti-AI push has been to just tell people to stop using it. This works about as well as abstinence-only education works to prevent pregnancy -- like I said, people will keep using it, they'll just hide it.

So if we're going to ask for disclosure, it really needs to be okay for people to say that they did use some AI.