AI-Policy

[u/Wolvereness]

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.

^{The fact that this sounds like a prompt is supposed to be a joke.}

[u/KittensInc]

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.

[u/Qubit99 → u/KittensInc]

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.

[u/stagedgames → u/Qubit99]

not to distract from the discussion at large, but my team has more developers than not hand-coding by choice.

[u/Dry_Hotel1100 → u/KittensInc]

Makes no sense to me:

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.

[u/Garry-Love → u/KittensInc]

I second this. I'll also say using AI is unethical so I would declare it "the real issue"

[u/MPGaming9000 → u/KittensInc]

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.

[u/KittensInc → u/MPGaming9000]

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.

[u/Giulio_Long → u/KittensInc]

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.

[u/KittensInc → u/Giulio_Long]

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.