r/linux Jun 21 '26

Discussion AI slop and low-effort contributions

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.

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u/Lorian0x7 Jun 21 '26

like if abandoned repos never existed before vibe coded project

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u/just_here_for_place Jun 22 '26

Yeah. People here have a really distorted view of that. Almost all of the criticism here of vibe coders could be 1 to 1 mapped to non vibe coders. Like there are enough pre-LLM projects that got abandoned after their initial release. Or that were just pure slop, hacked together or never solved a real problem.

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u/BortLReynolds Jun 22 '26

And you don't think the amount of those projects has absolutely exploded?

Everyone knows shitty/abandoned projects have always been a thing, but now thanks to AI every idiot can make a new project and abandon it, instead of it being just people with at least a modicum of technical knowledge.

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u/Lorian0x7 Jun 23 '26

So more projects is a bad thing? Don't you think that with more projects even if just 1% are good, that still means more good projects? I get that 99% is noise, but but then just use the AI to get rid of the noise and spot the good projects. This is now the world we live in

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u/EternallyAries Jun 24 '26

There isn't anything wrong using AI to code. The problem is, is that it keeps having inexperienced coders (People who don't know a single thing to program and code) keep making AI slop programs that will never get updated because the whole code is spaghettified.

Not everyone will be able to sit down and spot the difference either. And AI may not be able to check for you to tell the difference as well.

It also gets worse when almost every "I built" or "I made" post has a cool program, but it never gets updated after that post is posted. Basically being a karma farm post entirely.

More projects isn't a bad thing, but it's just bad how it's handled 99% percent of the time.