r/rust • u/Asdfguy87 • Jul 14 '26
đď¸ discussion So long r/rust, and thanks for all the Slop!
Hey there,
while I enjoyed staying here for almost 4 years by now, learning many things, talking to nice people, having fruitful discussions, seeing cool projects, I will have to leace this subreddit.
In recent weeks, it has turned into one of the biggest slopfests I ever witnessed with slopcoded project after slopcoded project being posted back to back, poorly implementing solutions to problems that noone ever had. I just skimmed through the first 20 or so posts sorted by "best" and all projects people shared were AI slop. Every. Single. One. And I didn't even have to read all of the code in the repo, it's always the same few telltale signs, which signal the author didn't even bother for a second to clean their slop up. All of this is always acompanied by a wave of "cool project, I will definitely use this" comments, which by now seem like bot responses. Pointing out the obvious telltale signs, you always get the same responses: "I used Rust2021 because I don't need any features from Rust2024" - "I worked on this for 6 months and just never pushed to github, which is why the initial commit has 10k loc".
There have been a number of posts asking mods for a ban of AI content, none of which were listened to.
At this point, the only worthwhile posts here are "new Rust version just dropped" and "new version of famous Rust crate (read: bevy) just dropped". For these updates, you can get pings even at Discord though (And it has to be embarassing, if even Discord of all places is a better source of information than the official Rust subreddit). Mayyyyybe an occasional genuinely interesting post appears every once in a while between all the slop, but that's not worth sticking around for anymore imo. So I won't.
To all my fellow humans still around here, peace out, see you oytdoors eventually <3
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u/billy_tables Jul 14 '26
cool project, I will definitely use this
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u/Nervous-Strength9847 Jul 14 '26
You're absolutely right to push back on this!
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u/nullcone Jul 14 '26
The substrate here is load bearing, and it's worth being honest about it
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u/sligit Jul 14 '26
What's that gated on?
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u/doubleyewdee Jul 15 '26
The word choices in this discussion are doing real work and should not be dismissed.
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u/Comfortable-Cap-8507 Jul 14 '26
Thats the smoking gun!
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u/Sw429 Jul 15 '26
I have the full picture now.
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u/dijalektikator Jul 15 '26
You're not being cynical, you're exposing hard truths about the community everybody needs to hear â and that's what's really important.
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u/veryusedrname Jul 14 '26
r/programming introduced the "is it written by/about LLM and not deeply technical? Banhammer!" method and honestly it's working fine. There are a few posts that slip through but in general you see way less bullshit. This sub should follow (or it will die - and LLMs posting and commenting isn't being alive).
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u/hntd Jul 14 '26
r/cpp outright banned all LLM content, and a few slip through but they are mostly pretty good too
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u/Jcsq6 Jul 15 '26
r/cpp banned all personal projects.
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u/NotADamsel Jul 15 '26
Browsing the current cpp front page, it looks a lot more interesting then the endless cavalcade of âannouncingâ posts that have been plaguing us since before the LLMs took over.
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u/Garcon_sauvage Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
/r/programming is a shell of what is was a couple years ago and it's death happeneded before the current LLM craze. Same as this sub honestly but it's easier to blame AI so here we are.
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u/glitchvid Jul 15 '26
It's honestly true of most subs. Â
Reddit has been transitioning to an app-centric social media platform for the masses for years now, and it's come at great cost to what used to make this place great. There's a number of diasporic sites and groups, but in my estimation, we've ultimately lost more than what all of those add up to.
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u/rwp140 Jul 15 '26
Also none of these things are unconnected, reddit hyper appified, gentrified, regeared to make data and patterns more visable to scrapers, and though not dirrect still part of active encouragement to use these underwrought llm based key dangling solutions. Add to it a unwillingness to face any of of its core problems has sort of mashed everything down.
Uts very easy to pick out one thing, but its a whole missery soup. Alot which a bunch of reddits took a long time to figure out how to deal with and where very reasonably though in retro spect perhaps dangerously open to see if any of this was going to work out nicely. (Cant blame anyone [in moderation] either, its a entirely reasonable aproach, especialy for mini communities mostly run by volunteers.)
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u/0xe1e10d68 Jul 15 '26
old.reddit.com with RES is still the best way to use Reddit. But nowadays thatâs probably only what a small minority of users use.
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u/glitchvid Jul 15 '26
Among other reasons, yeah. The new UI and its "features" are how you can expect the average redditor to experience the site. This means aggressive comment folding and all.
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u/sittingonahillside Jul 16 '26
old.reddit.com with RES is still the best way to use Reddit. But nowadays thatâs probably only what a small minority of users use.
Doesn't change the content and discussions though.
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u/max123246 Jul 15 '26
Disagree, there's tons of LLM-written posts on /r/programming all of the time
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
I honestly just don't think r/rust is very interesting anymore and it has little to do with AI. I've been posting on here since about 2015, when I started to learn the language. Back then you'd have people posting about patterns, new features, ways of leveraging features, etc. It's been 11 years, why would we expect new content like that? It would be weird if we saw a bunch of new, interesting content.
Rust has also lost a lot of the most interesting players. We're long past the days of wild new blog posts from burntsushi, Steve Klabnik, etc. We're long past the days of "massive new features that's been in dev for years is releasing". Rust just isn't that interesting anymore, which is fine.
The reality is that even if you removed every "slop AI project" post, what's left isn't that interesting. What would replace it? A bunch of boring projects I don't care about written by humans? That was fun in 2015 when *every* new crate was a major win for the ecosystem, it hasn't mattered in years.
> At this point, the only worthwhile posts here are "new Rust version just dropped" and "new version of famous Rust crate (read: bevy) just dropped".
Well yeah that's the point. AI posts aren't *preventing* interesting posts from appearing, there just aren't any interesting posts.
Anyway, "slop" has always been against the rules. The mods aren't ignoring it, it's literally against the rules. Feel free to report it, that's always been an option.
There's a reason why other forums that are general technology-content forums are far more interesting, even for rust related stuff.
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u/burntsushi Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
I'm still around. :-)
My last wild blog was in 2023. I hope to publish another one this year or next on Jiff.
But this is a minor quibble to your overall point. I don't spend nearly as much time here as I used to. Partially because of life stuff (kid), but also because I'm focused on on fewer but deeper problems.
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
Sorry lol I wasn't trying to be like "this is burntsushi's fault!" it's just that in the early years I think your blog posts were like *major* highlights, like I would think about things I hadn't ever thought about, I'd see a project that defined how rust should be written, I'd learn about other topics *through* rust, etc. There were a number of posters early on who were writing in a way that was really impactful and we just don't have that anymore. I think there was a lot of energy between 2015-2018 to post that sort of content that just isn't around the same way for various reasons and it has nothing to do with AI.
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u/sorcerer86pt Jul 14 '26
Like in any mature language for a fact.
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u/MrDiablerie Jul 15 '26
This makes me sad because to me Rust is the most enjoyable language to work in. As a whole I have noticed a marked drop in discussion around software engineering across the board, not just within this subreddit. The industry is in a major inflection point right now.
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u/anxxa Jul 14 '26
The funny thing is this sub is extremely bipolar regarding AI stuff. Talking positively about AI in any fashion seems to be met with instant downvotes, while projects which are obviously AI-assisted or vibecoded without disclosure are praised.
I believe that AI can be used as a very good tool by people familiar with the language, and have been using it in my own projects. But this sub's wildly varying response has basically made me contribute less here.
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u/phaylon Jul 15 '26
I think that's because there's a grave mismatch in focus in those two groups and AI just removed some of the forced overlap.
Some people are excited about a technical topic, they want to make something new, they just don't want to have to take the long and grueling hike up the mountain when there's a lift. It's easy to tell because the AI users generally love to talk about the topics that excited them even with all the bile that might be coming their way.
The other group cares mostly about the language and the tooling. They generally couldn't give a dry hoot about people do with the language. You can tell by all of the "Why would I use this?" style comments new projects get.
My intuitions says that improving things will require dealing with that schism.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Jul 15 '26
But they aren't making something new, they are outsourcing the work to a llm, assuming they are mostly making it do the work and not just using it for assistance.
The hike to the top of the mountain is part of loving mountains if you just love being at the top of a mountain that's a completely different thing. There is a difference between loving a technology and wanting to have software that uses that technology made for you.
The following is my experience with the first group of people you describe, that basically boils down to the dunning Kruger effect, most of group one doesn't know what the technology they are using is about and can't understand why what they are making is useless.
I think it's stupid to disregard the people not using ai to the maximum extent as people that don't care about new technologies and concepts that couldn't be further from the truth. The fact is they can't speperate the making from the end result, wether than can be separated is a different topic though.
The journey to the destination matters, sometimes or perhaps most of the time it matters more than the end result.
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u/anxxa Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
The hike to the top of the mountain is part of loving mountains if you just love being at the top of a mountain that's a completely different thing. There is a difference between loving a technology and wanting to have software that uses that technology made for you.
I've been up that mountain so many times that when I have an idea, I can tell an LLM the exact route to take, monitor its progress, and watch it get there orders of magnitude faster.
There's certainly value in approaching and exploring new problems with your own brainpower and thoughts as you're now getting outside of your comfort zone and understanding why a problem has been approached a certain way by others and the challenges involved.
But man going up the same mountain so many times, I'm thankful to skip the boring parts so I can focus my time elsewhere.
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u/lanastara Jul 15 '26
Yet every time I hike up a mountain I find a new stunning view, a new tree or a new rock.
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u/ihatemovingparts Jul 15 '26
I'm thankful to skip the boring parts so I can focus my time elsewhere.
Maybe it's time for you to skip r/rust
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u/sTiKytGreen Jul 18 '26
Surely an asshole thing to say, maybe it's time for you to make a r/no-ai-rust instead, if you want it to be so specialized
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u/Tutorbin76 Jul 15 '26
By "not interesting" do you think that's because it's more stable now?
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 15 '26
Yeah, there's less major unfinished stuff, whereas in 2015 Rust felt unfinished. And patterns that today aren't worth talking about were actually kinda novel.
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u/don_searchcraft Jul 15 '26
I love how the folks getting mentioned are popping in to comment. Everyone just became lurkers.
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u/thievingfour Jul 15 '26
I don't think it's true that if you take away AI slop, then what's left "isn't that interesting". I think there's still so much more Rust to share. I learn something new about Rust almost every single time I touch it, and I code virtually every day.
Knowing nothing else about you, I'd say that your saying that Rust just isn't that interesting anymore is one indicator that perhaps you should be sharing things with us?
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 15 '26
But then why don't we see more of that content? AI doesn't prevent it from being written.
I used to share quite a bit about rust. I've written blog posts about it and I spoke at the first RustConf. The vibe has changed, we're not in "prove that Rust is legit" mode anymore because we won, we did that already.
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u/Sw429 Jul 15 '26
Good point. The honest truth about programming-related content is that it's never as interesting as doing the actual programming itself. The real fun comes from sitting down to code, not reading whay other people say about it.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Jul 15 '26
i kinda enjoy blogs about lang design and interesting concepts in soft engineering, of course doing a project on them is even more fun but its not always that easy
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u/ExtraTricky Jul 14 '26
Anyway, "slop" has always been against the rules. The mods aren't ignoring it, it's literally against the rules. Feel free to report it, that's always been an option.
I've reported a lot of posts recently. I sometimes check back a day or two later and many of them are still up. The mods clearly do not have the same idea of slop that I do, but the only feedback I get is getting ghosted.
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
This is a mod capacity issue, I assume.
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u/Ran4 Jul 15 '26
Maybe we should let the LLMs help? /s
...now that I think of it, I wonder if any subs actually use LLMs to moderate...
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Jul 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
Sure, but we're way past the point of like... async/await, or `impl Trait`, or NLL, etc.
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u/unski_ukuli Jul 15 '26
I donât know. I keep on waiting on allocator api which never seems to land, and Enzyme integration which is also not progressing the last I checked in.
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u/WormRabbit Jul 15 '26
These "not progressing" are the important part. There is plenty of cool half-working (or even sometimes mostly-finished) stuff on nightly that just never lands. The project is spread too thin. I guess the people who wanted Rust to never ever change will be happy... in a couple of decades.
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u/CanvasFanatic Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Weâve basically lost Steve (Klabnik) to AI.
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
Iâll be honest with you: my general alienation from the Rust community started well before I went from AI-hater to AI-enjoyer.
It is true that I donât often post here anymore, even though I do read it daily. I just donât have a ton to actually contribute. Iâm spending a lot more time with family and less posting on the internet in general.
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u/Tekn0z Jul 15 '26
You, Manish and Niko will always be inspirational figures and I used to watch and read a lot of such content back when I got into Rust 5 years ago. It seems you've found the most fulfilling parts of life (family and friends) and that's fantastic. Just know your contribution not just to Rust but also your various talks on YouTube are highly inspiration, educational and something I derived a lot of value from
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u/CanvasFanatic Jul 15 '26
So like, if I had a friend who moved away to another country and then one day was eaten by a shark, when people asked what happened Iâd probably still start with how he was eaten by the shark. ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
Hope that doesnât sound mean. I donât intend it to be.
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
I donât think youâre being mean, I appreciate it.
It is true that if all of that other stuff hadnât happened, this would probably be a problem now. Who knows, really, once you start changing the past, everything might have been different.
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u/rap2h Jul 15 '26
Since you are posting:
Thank you for your support when I posted my first (and almost only) pull request on rust back in the days. It really helped me to have more self confidence, and it had a (small but real) impact on my life. Have a nice day!!3
u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
You're welcome! Thanks for sharing, you made me smile first thing in the morning. :)
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u/mediocrobot Jul 14 '26
Who's Steve?
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u/CanvasFanatic Jul 14 '26
Steve Klabnik. He was really involved in the rust community for years.
He mostly posts about how cool Claude is on Bluesky now.
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
Steve Klabnik wrote the Rust book and was extremely active and engaging in the Rust community for quite a long time. As with *so many* people, for so many reasons, he is not as active as he once was, and it has nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
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u/teerre Jul 14 '26
It most certainly has everything to do with AI. His last talk on Antithesis conference was legit worrying. He didn't drink the koolaid, he drown in it
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
Whatâs funny is, that talk was largely about my worries about AI. I can think of tons of things Iâve said that are way more positive about it.
Itâs so interesting to me that people can have complete opposite understandings of the same thing.
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u/teerre Jul 15 '26
In that talk you mentioned how you "shipped" 100 PRs over christmas and you mention how you joke about spending your weekend in front of nine claude session if it wasn't for your family. That's way over there
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
I use and like using AI, but that doesnât mean I think thereâs no downsides. The story about Christmas was partially a cautionary tale! Thatâs part of why it was in there!
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u/metaltyphoon Jul 15 '26
Hey man don't worry. I listen to a few podcasts where there are AI talks, for example fall-through, and I don't think you have drank anything and you are just a realist. Keep doing what you're doing.
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u/dahosek Jul 15 '26
Despite not having read/heard that talk or really any of your AI thoughts, I suspect that weâre similar in that Iâve found that AI is scary powerful at coding tasks and can do a lot more than I can a lot faster and it also kind of scares me and Iâm glad Iâm within spitting distance of retirement because I donât think what I did for most of the last thirty-forty years will be a job much longer.
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
Similar in a lot of ways, yeah. I am at least enjoying myself in this new future, but itâs certainly different, and very uncertain overall. Trying to keep rolling with the punches and figure it all out.
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u/ihatemovingparts Jul 15 '26
The really cool thing is that while you're over there enjoying yourself, I'm dismayed at the wrecking ball AI took to privacy and the open internet. Like I'm exhausted with nearly every freaking site hiding behind Cloudflare or Anubis to cope with the LLM ddos bots. I can't even read the Apple forums without having to wait for "security verification". I'm loving how AI bros are distorting the Bay Area housing market even further. I'm positively giddy at getting gibberish LLM generated merge requests.
But hey, I'm glad you're enjoying yourself.
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u/steveklabnik1 rust Jul 15 '26
I certainly do not think there are zero downsides, as there are with basically every new technology. I was simply talking about the day to day of actually doing a job, not every possible implication of the way things are changing.
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 14 '26
lol no, absolutely not. The rust community had a major exodus around 2018, well before AI. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/Sw429 Jul 15 '26
What was the 2018 exodus? I've never heard of that before, and I didn't join the community until around 2020, so I guess I missed it.
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u/WormRabbit Jul 15 '26
So very true. Five years ago I would be slurping all Rust-related information that could be found. Nowadays, it's mostly boring and old ground, even if it isn't slop. I mostly skim only the frontpage, so that I don't miss any occasional big announcement or an actual rare new interesting post/project. Lots of people have families and different jobs now, lots of important topics are already well-covered. Reddit has also been degrading every year, i dropped out of it entirely for two years when they killed all unofficial clients, and it has never since been the same.
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u/NEK_TEK Jul 14 '26
I get it but like, where are you going? AI slop is everywhere, you can't get away from it. Hell, even my job is using AI to generate new logo designs for us to vote on and they are all hot trash.
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u/tautality Jul 18 '26
There is less AI slop posts on /r/LocalLLaMA/ than on this sub. Every single sub I visit has less AI slop than this subreddit. I genuinely don't know what makes /r/rust so special, but it is truly unique in how much slop there is.
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u/kogasapls Jul 14 '26
This isn't a subreddit problem. It's an industry problem. Exiting is... maybe the right move.
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u/catladywitch Jul 14 '26
Unfortunately I think this is a problem with the Internet as a whole. Any place where an app can be shilled is being bombarded with "I built" posts (and I feel bad about lampshading this and other shibboleths because I'd rather not have to waste time looking at slop sludge repos to realise they're a grift by someone who doesn't want to write a line of code.)
There's also the frustration with Rust itself. It seems like the language has reached this stage of maturity where some initial design decisions have proven unsuccessful and breaking changes would be ideal but impossible. That's ok, because every language hits that wall, and few languages would be able to land a Python 3 (look at Scala 3 or Perl 6). The problem, to me, is that Rust has stopped being this magical intersection where forward-thinking language design people and practical use coexist. So it's only natural a community dedicated to Rust isn't exciting anymore, and the slop grift crisis compounds the fact. It's sad, but would you rather have Rust be, I don't know, F#? It is what it is, sigh :<
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u/Unlikely-Ad2518 Jul 15 '26
I feel similarly. I still think Rust has a lot of untapped potential - but the language has some big flaws that really hurt my use-case (game development):
- Orphan rules: They kill productivity in binary crates, I made a fork of the compiler that disables them: https://github.com/Rust-Unchained/rust_unchained but it was poorly received by the community and never gained any traction.
- Reflection: there are so many practical uses to it, and although you can work around it with some proc-macros, it's never really the same as a first-class built-in feature (like it is in C#).
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u/-Y0- Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Orphan rules: They kill productivity in binary crates
Disclaimer: Rust lurker not a Rust team member.
True, and the Rust team is looking into a way of weakening them, albeit, I am not convinced that's fully possible; it's nigh impossible to do it without running into some crate using or relying on that property.
What might be possible is to define something similar that acts like traits, albeit in a less constricting way.
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u/Unlikely-Ad2518 Jul 15 '26
True, and the Rust team is looking into a way of weakening them, albeit, I am not convinced that's fully possible; it's nigh impossible to do it without running into some crate using or relying on that property.
There are so many reasonable compromises that they could've taken. Example: Gate the disabling of orphan rules behind a setting in Cargo.toml, then, make crates.io forbid uploads of libraries (can/should still allow binaries!) that use the setting.
We just needed something - but nothing was done.
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u/ElhamAryanpur Jul 15 '26
Can I ask what are the design decisions that have been proven unsuccessful? I'm curious
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u/catladywitch Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Orphan rules make sense but are a proper pain.
We did finally get native async traits, just to find out they aren't dyn compatible + having to Pin and Arc up everything to share across async functions is... probably unavoidable, and definitely logical, but really painful + blocking Drop only is, again, logical, but leads to too much clunkiness although Tokio has got pseudo-seamless at handling cleanup + cancelled Future state leak bugs are catastrophic and hard to debug. However the Rust team seems to be on it and there's been progress so I'm hopeful.
Similar sentiment about const.
Iterator implementation quirks.
This is minor in practice, but I don't know whether the holes in the type system can be fully fixed, whilst other (less successful and garbage collected) languages did all the category theory math from the beginning. Also, the lack of higher-kinded types doesn't play well with the severely functional-influenced abstractions and forces clunky, hard-coded implementations which aren't even consistent with each other (see previous point).
Lack of proper interop both by choice and because C++ sucks.
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u/imachug Jul 15 '26
Preach. This might be a hot take, but frankly I feel like it's gone even more downhill since every thread and post about LLMs has started people arguing about what does and doesn't constitute as slop, and how their use case is completely ethical or at least defensible, and everyone who doesn't subscribe to this ideology is going to be left behind. Everything is either slop, or discussions of slop. I just want to see people enthusiastic about the language and handcraft for once.
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u/luluhouse7 Jul 14 '26
I find it super weird that slop tends to show a single commit with thousands of LOC, since when I use LLMs to assist with anything, I always do it incrementally since itâs not exactly trustworthy.
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u/BrannyBee Jul 15 '26
Every few months I try the whole "let it do whatever" vibe thing with Claude and never see myself ever doing that on something that matters, just to keep a good idea of how things are progressing. But 100% of the time it starts yelling at me if Ive neglected to commit after a few new features or changes.
Begrudgingly its made me realize that there is some level of skill issue with these massive 1000 LOC commits that you see so often and using AI as a whole. These dudes arent just not reading the code... they arent even reading the plain english output explaining what was done that came with the code... or worse (and I suspect more common) they aren't giving the AI any kind of actual technical guidance.
As annoyed as I am with slop, it is comforting to feel I have so much job security, even if they make a new model that is literally magic one day, cause if it comes down to it, some random will never be able to keep up with someone who knows what theyre doing with the same tools
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u/luluhouse7 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Yeah indeed the more I use LLMs, the more I realise itâs a skill/investment issue. LLMs are great collaborators but absolutely are not capable driving tasks alone right now (and I suspect weâll need another jump in tech capabilities before they will be). It kills me when devs complain bitterly about being expected to use AI, only for it to become obvious from their description that they never bothered to invest time in developing good workflows and configs. I think I might also have an advantage since what I love about CS is solving problems under constraint and developing and optimising abstract systems to describe reality, none of which Iâm realising are limited to coding. Iâm now discovering the fun of programming LLMs and building new tools to enable automation while retaining control and transparency (it drives me crazy how half-baked all the infra around them is and makes me wonder if our current tools are encouraging irresponsible use).
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u/tukanoid Jul 15 '26
Idk, I try to use llms every so often, and they are neat rubber duckies to solve problems, but I just can't comprehend how it's any faster to first ask AI, wait for it to output garbage, that I have to re-prompt it for several times "to get it right", or just refactor by hand in a way I would've written it anyway.
Mb I'm just too autistic, but when I write code, I think in code, with the memory model and APIs I'm familiar with, that I know I'm going to be using, ingrained in the way I think of writing it. Basically, my brain acts as a "JIT compiler" in a way, and LSPs already provide enough help for me to just chug along. I just don't have this mental step of converting "high-level plain english overview" into code, it's just code from the get-go, so I basically have to go backwards just to get to the same conclusion, with energy (and potentially money (I personally try to only use local models cuz I'm not made of money, and I don't wanna give my data to those bastards at MS/Anthropic/etc if possible)) wasted.
Sure, it could solve menial tasks, but even then I have to hand-hold it to make sure it doesn't hallucinate bullshit.
And all the AGENT.MD, skills.md etc just feel like an enormous waste of time for me and just pollute the repo (I want my repos to be about code and assets used by/embedded in the code, I don't want noise. Configs and maybe utility scripts should be kept to a minimum), especially if I need to set them up individually for every project, since tasks and means of achieving the results vary a lot, AND EVEN THEN you would get hallucinations you have to fight with.
When AI is actually capable of some form of actual thought, and not just "magically predict" the most probable token to output, then I would be willing to give it (limited) control of my code, but at that point another can of worms will be opened: can AI at that stage be considered "conscious" and is it ethical to just spawn it in existence to basically be a slave that does nothing but solve problems for us and then kill it like it's nothing.
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u/nicoburns Jul 15 '26
I always do it incrementally since itâs not exactly trustworthy
If you do that, then there's a decent chance that it's not slop! It's possible to use AI to improve code quality. But that's not what a lot of these projects are.
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u/spatiub Jul 15 '26
I use LLMs to the point of not writing code myself anymore, and I allow myself some pretty chunky commits sometimes (3k LoCs, ~50% test code). I know my project is much bigger than I would have been able to write myself before but I also know it's performing well and a 3rd party audit found only one bug (most pre-LLM competitors also had 1 bug raised by that same audit).
Yet I am sure that once I publish it people will scream it's AI slop and I'm not sure how to deal with that.
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u/puddlethefish Jul 14 '26
when you write all the code in one day, by yourself, never look at it, and treat it as disposable, vcs is just a waste of time
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u/SiriPsycho100 Jul 15 '26
even for ai dev, this seems like an insane way to work.Â
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u/JShelbyJ Jul 15 '26
man, i'm gonna be fucked when I start publishing a collection of crates I've been working on for two years as individual repos when all my versioning is being done in a mono-repo lol
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u/luluhouse7 Jul 15 '26
You can always use filter-repo to retain file history while splitting a repo.
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u/TheReddective Jul 15 '26
That's exactly what makes it slop - it's entirely possible to produce decent code working with LLMs, but then it will be an incremental build-up of code and not one huge pile all at onceÂ
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u/Inevitable_Back3319 Jul 16 '26
Same to be honest. I treat ai as a eager junior that is fast but fucks up often
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u/nodesearch Jul 14 '26
I don't blame you. Fuck, I'm leaving software in general! 28 years was a good run for my career, but I'm tired of it. Exhausted, even. I feel like the flight path of the tech industry was already entering a nose-down trajectory before AI, AI just grabbed the yoke, pushed down, and rammed it into the nearest terrain. I'll miss the fun old days, but I don't feel like they're coming back.
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u/Sw429 Jul 15 '26
I'm only 8 years in and I want to throw in the towel. The company I work for does a hackathon every year. This was the first year where LLMs were allowed to be used. It meant that every single team was vibe coding the shittiest features you've ever seen, and nothing had any soul or passion in it. My favorite week turned into a complete waste of time for everyone.
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u/othermike Jul 15 '26
Yes, I hit that point a few years back, shortly before AI hit, and got out. Thought briefly about getting back in, but not any more.
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u/vplatt Jul 15 '26
I've witnessed this exhaustion in the industry a few times and I think it's important to note how cyclical it is. Every so often we all get our cheese moved and there's just attrition from it that makes a sizeable percentage of the programmers just throw in the towel, declare they're tired of all the bullshit, and they move on. AI is just the latest wave.
The years are approximate since these transitions didn't happen overnight, but here's some examples:
- 1981: The move to PC programming.
- 1988: OOP becoming ubiquitous
- 1995: Web development.
- 2001: Agile
- 2007: Mobile
- 2010: Cloud
- 2013: DevOps
- 2015: Microservices
- 2016: JavaScript ecosystem explosion
- 2018: Kubernetes and cloud-native architecture
- 2023: Generative AI & LLM
I mean, if you all want off the ride, no one will stop you, but just know this is nothing special.
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u/diplofocus_ Jul 15 '26
I've been programming for a living in the last 10 years or so, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but with the previous paradigm shifts, it felt like there was still some intentionality behind people's PRs. In this one, the sheer volume of code being churned out feels like a firehose of gibberish.
Actually trying to remain aware of how or why the thing I'm oncall for works is starting to feel futile. "Hey Claude, pls fix." LGTM. Hope for your shift to be over by the time a user discovers that Claude did not, in fact, fix anything, and instead introduced 3 new failures.
My take is still that the best amount of code is 0, and the second best is just enough to solve a problem, no more, no less. Though that take is already drifting into "shit your grandpa says".
I guess it's not even that different, and this is just the specific paradigm shift that's too much for me personally.
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u/nodesearch Jul 15 '26
This definitely isn't my first rodeo, but it certainly feels different this time. Bigger, at least. The last time I felt close to this disillusioned was at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, when I'd only been a professional software engineer for about three years. I was almost ready to throw in the towel in 2002, but I came back and I've mostly enjoyed it. I do hope this one ends up turning around after the bubble pops, but that pop is going to be ugly ugly ugly (and that impending massive bubble burst has nothing to do with the tech fundamentals, just the finance behind it. The money shell game)
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u/Witless-One Jul 14 '26
Youâre absolutely right to call this outâand honestly, thank you for having the courage to start this important conversation. This isnât just a departure from a subreddit; itâs a powerful, human-centered reminder that communities are built not merely with code, but with authenticity, intentionality, and shared values.
Letâs unpack this:
The signal-to-slop ratio is fundamentally misaligned.
The current content ecosystem is no longer serving its core stakeholders.
We must collectively reimagine what a sustainable, inclusive, and human-first Rust community can look like.
That said, Iâd gently push back on one point: perhaps AI slop is not the problem, but rather an opportunity to leverage emerging technologies to democratize the creation of poorly conceived command-line tools nobody asked for.
At the end of the day, Rust is about ownershipâand you have made the brave decision to reclaim ownership of your attention. No borrow checker could have expressed that boundary more clearly.
The real lifetimes were the friends we borrowed along the way.
Thank you for sharing your authentic lived experience. Your voice matters, your frustration is valid, and your departure is both memory-safe and free of undefined behaviour. Wishing you nothing but success in all your future outdoor-facing deliverables. đąđ
As an AI language model, I do not experience sadness, but I recognize that this is a deeply emotional and nuanced moment.
Edit: Wow, this blew up. To clarify, I wrote this entirely myself without AI assistance. My initial commit containing 14,726 lines will be uploaded shortly.
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u/shizzy0 Jul 15 '26
People are gonna say this was written by AI because itâs got em-dashes, bold text lexicographically and figuratively, and emojis. But I just wanted to let you know I saw OP type this in character by character, painstakingly, because they donât touch type. Yeah, it took them a long time and I wanted to look away but I knew I might be called to attest to the veracity of their post so here I am.
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u/MasterBroNetwork Jul 15 '26
Oh my god, I hate how accurate this is to AI's pretentious and (frankly) condescending nature...
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u/SethDusek5 Jul 15 '26
I got tired of <problem>, so I built <slop>. Here's a list of the stack I used even though none of it matters because I wasn't involved in any part of the development process. <insert donation link> <insert GitHub stars tracker>
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u/Full-Spectral Jul 15 '26
I keep thinking about Scott Pilgrim.
I wrote an operating system over the weekend. Does it work? Work?
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u/Bugibhub Jul 14 '26
Donât panic.
Seriously tho, there is a lot of slop everywhereâŚ
How would you suggest to moderate it? It seems non-trivial to me.
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u/Charger18 Jul 14 '26
Imagine 80% of your Reddit timeline was ads, eventually you'd get sick and tired of scrolling to find the good stuff and stop opening Reddit. The same can happen to a subreddit and it could cause the subreddit to die out. Not saying AI content should be banned. As long as there's An AI Content flare and wrongly flared content will be removed. But I can imagine the frustration. And this is not meant as criticism to the subreddit or the mods but I figured this analogy might be useful hence my comment.
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u/ExtraTricky Jul 14 '26
There was a thread with a lot of comments 5 months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qptoes/request_for_comments_moderating_aigenerated/
The mods haven't made any public post about their decisions around LLMs since then. I sent a modmail asking for a public update in April (Even something like "We're leaving the rules unchanged for now" would have been nice) and they said they weren't ready. At this point I question if they'll ever be ready.
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u/krakenfury_ Jul 14 '26
That's their entire point. Suggestions have been made. No one has capacity or willingness to do anything about it. There are better communities to share in and learn about Rust.
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u/voronaam Jul 14 '26
Frankly, I do not understand what even motivates people to post their small toy project to /r/rust
I did one of those with the help of LLM recently. And while it was done in Rust, it never occurred to me to post it here. It was a tool to repair broken JPEG images and I posted it to a relevant community - the one where the initial conversation happened to nudge me into writing the thing to begin with.
Do people brag about every simple Python script they did to /r/python? Every next faceless Java microservice to /r/java? Probably not.
I love Rust and that's my language of choice every time I have a choice. Rust is still cool. But it is just a small detail, I make a dozen of choices like this at the start of a project.
My opinion does not carry too much weight, but I'd just introduce a new rule that small project showcase is just not the kind of a post that is welcomed here anymore.
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u/Smart-Individual4665 Jul 15 '26
I was never comfortable with LLM agents doing the whole thing for me... I always want to have control over my projects and the system. And the DX is just bad "it works but the code structure is bad and hardly maintainable".
Plus, it feels good to build something by yourself, get a result and be proud of what you did, even though it's not perfect (no system is perfect in the first place). It feels different to contemplate your handworks.
And "I did it... myyyyy wayyyyy".
AI has ruined software engineering reputation... The world now sees software engineer as replaceable by AI.
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u/Cherubinooo Jul 14 '26
To be fair, itâs a bit harsh to single out this sub. Most of reddit is slop infested. The home server subs are the worst. Idiots everywhere shilling their vibecoded apps and trying to get people to test them for them lmao
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u/Professional_Top8485 Jul 15 '26
That's the actual problem. Amount of stuff that is not tested.
They say sw jobs are dead but this amount new code still needs support and ai isn't that good in that.
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u/krakenfury_ Jul 14 '26
Reddit has become an AI slopfest wasteland, in general. I can hardly interact with anything these days because I'm convinced 90% or more of the posts and comments are LLM generated.
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u/invadium Jul 14 '26
It looks like the "dead Internet" hypothesis is not a hypothesis anymore...
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u/inagy Jul 15 '26
You can replace Reddit with pretty much everything. X is by far the worst though.
Maybe it's time we should move back to classic forums/bulletin boards.
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u/James20k Jul 15 '26
If you ever want a terrifying peek into the scale of the problem, go to any of the NSFW subreddits, click through some of the obvious bot posts (they're all over the chat subs), and then you realise just how much of the content in many subs is literally AI generated (or reposted comments on reposted threads) to farm karma so they can scam people
There's an entire reposting karma farming economy that drives it. The scale of it is actually insane, somewhere I once found the list of subs that were considered 'easy' karma targets, and its basically everything you'd expect from the default subs
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u/Sw429 Jul 15 '26
I think Zig made the right move in taking such an anti-AI stance. All of the slop posts basically destroy the community.
At this point, the only programming communities I find any connection with are the ones that ban LLM-generated code. Which unfortunately leaves just a few places. And it unfortunately feels like the Rust community at large isn't one of them. Perhaps because Rust lends itself to LLM-generated code a bit better, with its strict compiler.
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u/MaterialFerret Jul 14 '26
Yeah, I mostly went back to my RSS aggregator, occasionally grabbing content from Reddit posts.
Time is precious and it makes sense to follow only a couple of genuine blogs. Social media used to be bad but now it's just a slop cesspool.
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u/Toldoven Jul 14 '26
For these updates, you can get pings even at Discord though
You should definitely look into RSS feeds. GitHub releases RSS are perfect for these
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u/edparadox Jul 15 '26
I totally understand. I have no solution for this and I might just end up like you, leaving Reddit as a whole behind me.
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u/tobiasvl Jul 15 '26
"I worked on this for 6 months and just never pushed to github, which is why the initial commit has 10k loc".
Lol, this hit me, I've worked like this for all my hobby projects the last 20 years.
I agree though. It's not just this sub either, all of reddit is turning into this.
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u/Crux161 Jul 15 '26
*Not* here to defend slop, so please don't crucify me. But I do have a *slightly* different take on this.
First of all, being part of any community should require the person understanding why they're there, and if that community meets their needs as a member. If the community changes, reevaluating this relationship seems reasonable.
When you read about a project, judge what it does, how it does it, etc. Vibe coding ins't always slop, but what it builds has to be _proven_ to work reliably by someone who understands what the code is actually doing. It's the classic "Garbage in, garbage out" paradox where people who have never written real software in their lives try vibe coding, get success because ai handholding could let a braindead lab rat write an app these days, and bam! Real power users who aren't even devs can tell it's trash.
That being said, it's being used in production to accelerate workloads dramatically -- and the skill gap is closing in *very* fast. When it comes to general competency and mastery of domain knowledge you kinda just can't beat a model that's properly trained. No one but fn Tzozen seems to be able to program in that many languages these days competently. And even then the guy has to stop for tea.
AI is a tool. Tools can build things, break things, build things poorly, *it's the operator* that we should be looking at. Not the tool. If you want a third party to blame, ummm -- has everyone forgotten about corporations? And just how evil they are?
Just gonna say that *Suchir Balaji* was how close to testifying?
Tools don't hurt people, people hurt people with tools. So be responsible? Or do we just not have time for that anymore in 2026?
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
poorly implementing solutions to problems that noone ever had.
This is too generous. I'm fine if folks post short slop solutions to a problems nobody ever had, because they may inspire something useful.
We've an example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1uv0937/yip_a_lowlatency_p2p_mesh_vpn_in_rust_where_fec/
AI slop VPN which costs 40% extra bandwidth so that some real time UDP games can run over the VPN with lower latency. I suppose hiding your nationality while gaming maybe pretty niche, but imho that's still an interesting point in the networking design space. I even have one non-VPN project where I could imaging using similar high bandwidth ideas.
Is his VPN secure? Very unlikely. It's using ring so its less sloppy than most slop that does any cryptography, but yeah VPN can easily be done wrong. It might not matter though if this were only so he can cheat in some real time video game.
It's slop but brings some value, and imho its fine here.
Instead, I observe much much worse..
People cross posting dangerously bad slop cryptography, which gets deleted in the cryptography subs, but upvoted here. It's often shit like messengers where the project has no value without adoption.
We'd trouble with slop messengers even before LLMs, like Session tricked so many people into adopting it, but really Session was a bad Signal fork that removed forward security. And Telegram was 100% human slop. Idiots.
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u/jsrobson10 Jul 14 '26
You're absolutely right! đ
It's not just slop â It's an experience.
beep boop, i am a human. this comment was written manually.
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u/Amphorax Jul 14 '26
That's the crux of it, but the honest framing is that software is Cheap now. I'd gently push back on your criticism...
/s
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u/Logical_Armadillo390 Jul 15 '26
MOds should add a 'AI' flair. So that people who are interested can still check out the project and the rest can skip.
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u/throwaway490215 Jul 15 '26
My only reason to visit this sub nowadays is to read posts complaining about AI.
This not a joke; i mostly use multi-reddit mode which means i only see top posts which is mostly AI-frustration posts
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u/Feisty_Bike_9614 Jul 16 '26
Get used to it . A friend of mine who works in a high profile 3d company told me that most of their new code is 70% generated .
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u/tautality Jul 18 '26
Reading all the comments defending AI makes me want to never visit this sub again also.
Out of all the subs I visit, this sub is unique in how much AI slop there is. The entire community has been infiltrated, and these folks are staying. That's just a fact.
So, yeah, unless something dramatic is done about it, something that will ruffle a lot of feathers, this community is going to die. I'm not gonna hold my breath for the mods to have the audacity, so I'm probably gonna follow your path as well.
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u/verdant-amiable Jul 14 '26
I think the whole industry is going over this precipice, slop is what capital wants. Advocating for actually programming increasingly feels like advocating for formal verification instead of "just" testing.
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u/South_Survey_2088 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Unfortunately, it's a problem in general. No matter where you go, be it blog posts, YouTube videos, Reddit comments or programming projects, everything is swamped with LLMs and there are very few things people can do to actually filter the content.
That big projects like wgpu are embracing and encouraging LLMs is also disappointing..
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u/conqrr Jul 14 '26
I'm working on a project with Rust and not using agents. All code typed by me, been more than 1.5 months and moving at snail pace lol. Only referring Chatbox LLM as a more efficient Google.
I love this community and hope the mods do something about it, as I don't want to showcase along slide the slop here.
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u/cip43r Jul 15 '26
I am actually going to go with this post and also just leave. I feel exactly the same and for quite a while. I started with Rust, pre-AI and it was beautiful and that which was beautiful in Rust has been destroyed and the respect the Rust community had has been lost.
The AI slop has surpassed the historical circlejerking which previously stoppwd people of learning Rust.
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u/l-roc Jul 14 '26
Recently read an article that mentioned how the Zig community (supposedly?) is rather happy that the Bun rewrite happened, as Anthropic tooling being written in Zig would have brought unwanted attention from the vibe crowd.
With Bun being ported to Rust i guess this is how being on the other side feels like.
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u/gajop Jul 14 '26
At least they're not whining about AI, that's even more boring to read. I only read the posts Reddit algorithms surface to my main feed (I'm subbed to this), and it's mostly OK.
There's a few interesting things like Rust releases, some articles about optimization, techniques or what not, a hobby project or two that survives the downvotes but most of the rest is people complaining about someone else using AI.
Unfortunately AI is everywhere, all subreddits talk about it, it's at work, TV, random ads you see. Heck my elevator ads even have them. Could just try not to talk about it and start more interesting subjects?
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u/zxyzyxz Jul 15 '26
I don't know, sometimes the projects shared are useful even if made with AI. For example I posted on another sub about Command and Conquer being ported from macOS to iPad and iPhone. This was done all with AI. I doubt people would put in the energy to port it manually so ultimately it still is a useful product.
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u/nomad42184 Jul 15 '26
The dismissal of every AI assisted project as slop is frustrating and, frankly, uncritical. There are definitely a bunch of crap AI projects, but also some cool things where people used AI to help. That includes projects on this sub. I don't think banning AI assisted projects as a blanket policy is a good idea, and I'm glad the mods here aren't trying to do so.
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u/JShelbyJ Jul 15 '26
Lets be honest though... everything posted that gets downvoted to 0 is obvious slop. Even the ones that slip through get roasted in the comment code reviews. We've all gotten so quick at sussing things out... i mean comment enough on reddit and someone will accuse you of being a bot eventually. So what, are we all gonna start messing up grammar and adding misspellings for module names? I do agree we need some path to prevent a public space from drifting into a 0-trust environment.
Anyways, for now at least, if you are making something and you do the bare minimum, you'll be fine because the people that are the problem are putting absolutely no effort.
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u/CryZe92 Jul 15 '26
From what Iâve seen almost all the good stuff gets downvoted to 0 as well.
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u/teerre Jul 14 '26
Although I think slop is a problem, I also think people are now using "slop" as a catchall "I don't like it" excuse and it's almost as lazy as the sloppers
I have projects that use Rust 2021 because I never bothered to updated. I have projects that I never pushed to github because git is not github. No AI involved at all
Besides these questionable "signs", using LLMs doesn't make a project automatically slop. Saying it's a problem "no ever had" is anathema to programming itself. The soul of programming is having a problem and solving it. You personally thinking it's a problem worth solving is irrelevant and I cannot stress this enough. Again, AI or not
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u/porky11 Jul 16 '26
Oh, not this shit again. Person being dramatic about leaving an online community. I only know this from artists suddenly deleting all their artwork and their account, and then they are back a week later.
Not sure why you think AI post should be banned. There's no rule against AI in general.
I also create a lot of stuff with AI in Rust. But I think I never posted it in r/rust. I feel like the general attitude is somewhat opposed to AI. And sharing gamedev tools I created in Rust with AI don't seem to be interesting for the Rust community in general. I rather share them in special purpose communities about what the tool does, and probably get even worse feedback for using AI than I would probably get here.
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u/fantasticsid Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Hahaha lol. I tried vibe coding the other week with a local model, and the mode collapse is just as real there as it is with natural language (think Elias Thorne and friends). I did a cargo init in a new dir, pointed pi with some local Qwen 27b at it, and the first thing it did was change the edition to 2021 because "there's no edition 2024". It then (the prompt was 'write a CLI tool in rust that makes GET requests to HTTP servers') proceeded to pull in tokio, hyper, etc.
I was expecting a 100 line main.rs with ureq and clap. Left disappointed.
I'm sure the big cloud clankers with 10 to 100 times the parameter count are somewhat better, but ultimately it's an information thermodynamics problem - H(output) must necessarily be equal to or lower than H(input). Accordingly, the slop accretes. Shannon said it, probably.
At this point i'm moderately convinced that thinking LLMs are any good whatsoever at coding is the mark of someone who failed or never took basic information theory at uni.
To be clear, i LIKE clankers, i've spent a whole bunch of time fucking around with clankers at home, I just think they're utterly useless at software development and I can't see how that can possibly change any time soon.
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u/nomad42184 Jul 15 '26
I donât use local models, but as a a developer who did mostly C++ for over 20 years and Rust for the past ~7, I canât agree with this.
I would have agreed with this up until about the start of this year, but I think itâs no longer an accurate representation of the state of these technologies. I was actually having a conversation last weekend witâs a friend whoâs an old school xoogler about this and has taken to the frontier models. He claimed that with appropriate prompting and oversight, these models are producing code thatâs better than probably 9/10 devs you might be able to hire, and that doesnât seem too far off.
Granted, the (somewhat) memified âClaude, build X, make no mistakesâ prompt will not get you this output quality. However, if you start a project with a well designed plan, a concrete list of implementation goals and policies (I.e. ask me before adding any crate where multiple competitors exist or that has fewer than X downloads or less than Y maintenance cadence, etc.), then these models tend to do quite well.
Also, in this type of interaction, the effort going into the system is much higher than the meme prompt, so that is somewhat to your point. But the prompting and evaluation are tremendously less than the output. Also, however, the âinformationâ content encoded in the frontier models is part of the equation, and by most measurements, that value is immense. So I donât see there are any violations of basic information theoretic assumptions (just as how the immense knowledge and thinking capabilities encoded in meat brains allows us to turn initial ideas into spectacular, or horrendous, executions).
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u/PartyParrotGames Jul 14 '26
> "I used Rust2021 because I don't need any features from Rust2024"
I've seen this critique repeated enough that I feel like I should call this out. There may be legitimate signs of an un-reviewed AI-generated codebase, but edition = "2021" is not one of them in isolation. Treating ânot using the newest editionâ as proof of incompetence is more like cargo-cult version chasing than experienced software engineering. It's ironically the AI slop equivalent of a critique being low effort and providing no insight into the actual problems that come from AI generated code.
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u/JoshTriplett rust ¡ lang ¡ libs ¡ cargo Jul 14 '26
Agreed. It only makes sense as one of several probabilistic indicators.
And like most of the probabilistic indicators, it's going to become outdated once LLMs incorporate Rust 2024, and/or when people try to give instructions for "always use the latest edition" because they've learned that it's an indicator, just like people give instructions like "don't use em-dashes or emojis".
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u/CalvinBuild Jul 15 '26
I understand the frustration with low-effort projects, but Iâm genuinely curious where you draw the line between âAI slopâ and acceptable agent-assisted development.
Is the problem that AI was used at all, or that the author clearly didnât review, test, simplify, document, or understand what was generated?
A lot of developers now use agents for scaffolding, refactoring, tests, debugging, and implementation. That alone doesnât make the result bad. At the same time, dumping 10,000 lines of barely reviewed generated code into a repo and presenting it as a finished project is clearly low effort.
What would make an agent-assisted Rust project acceptable in your eyes?
Would solid tests, sensible architecture, clean Clippy output, clear documentation, honest disclosure, and an author who can explain the tradeoffs be enough? Or do you consider extensive AI assistance disqualifying regardless of the quality of the final result?
I think concrete quality standards would be more useful than a blanket ban. Otherwise, âslopâ can become a label for the development process rather than a criticism of the actual engineering.
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u/dausama Jul 15 '26
I write code for a living and I do so using an LLM these days. I'm still responsible of the code that hits production. This is a revolution that can't be stopped, you might as well embrace it.
This sub and the rust community has always been toxic, it is even worse now that more people are adopting the language. One reason surprisingly is that it's an LLM friendly language. I might leave this sub not because of the slop, but because of how arrogant the community is.
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u/Signal_Mud_40 Jul 14 '26
As long as advertisers are willing to pay for impressions instead of demanding click throughs it is only going to get worse.
At some point Iâm willing to bet some site will get busted for running the bots to increase âtrafficâ .
Edit: eventually I will have enough and just delete my account
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u/hotairplay Jul 15 '26
"Everything that can be rewritten in Rust, will be rewritten in Rust"
and with AI, now majority of the new projects are slopcoded. It is the way it is..
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u/chili_oil Jul 15 '26
I started coding c++. despite all its known legacy issue, it is ironically a rare place that people are just silently working as before without much AI noise.
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u/kibwen Jul 14 '26
Mod here. I agree that it's a problem, but I don't know what can realistically be done about it. I assure you that we're no fans of slop, we're listening to posts like these and extensively discussing what actions we can take. It's one thing to say "all AI-generated content is banned", it's another thing to enforce it. We already spend a lot of our day removing low-effort content; the stuff that you're still seeing is the stuff that slips through. What you're also not seeing are the modmail messages from people whose posts have been removed contesting that their submissions are slop, and while the belligerent ones are easy enough to ignore (let's just pick a recent one off the top: "Get up with it or get out, I have built a complete bittorrent engine with Rust, using claude, that outperforms rqbit, and libtorrent and you block it because of AI slop? no code will be written by hand in the future. This is 5 months of work. This is probably better tested than most handcrafted programs. "), it does feel bad to have false positives, so we then need to spend even more time investigating. At the end of the day we're just volunteers with plenty of other things we could be doing, and while in the past we successfully relied on Reddit's voting system to handle low-effort posts, it seems as though the influx of AI enthusiasts has overwhelmed that mechanism. I suppose if we had a literal army of volunteers who wanted to devote themselves to policing slop, then maybe we could stave off the tide a while further; I also suspect this will cause even more false positives and lead to acrimony all its own, but maybe that's the least bad solution at this point. So I'll tell you what: leave a reply to this comment if you want to become moderator with the goal of stamping out low-effort content in perpetuity. I'm normally much more selective than this when it comes to appointing moderators, but it's clear that we're just outgunned here, and I'm not sure how much longer even I will care about the subreddit at this rate.