OSS projects banning AI-generated contributions

austin-cheney

The submit button is currently returning a github 404.

maxloh

I don't think this is a good trend. Projects like Servo or Redox OS are community-driven and already lack funding. Blocking AI-assisted code will only drive potential contributors away. Some projects have built strong communities around AI-assisted development. The T3 Code community [0], for instance, is very active, and most PRs are created with LLM assistance. The real issues are disclosure and taking responsibility for your own submissions, including carefully reading and testing your code. Code written by humans isn't inherently better in any sense. [0]: https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code/pulls

relyks

Why is this a thing? There is AI code slop where no one reviews the code, and then there is closely human-guided agentic coding... maybe they got too much slop as pull requests?

lemagedurage

Try clicking on "All projects", the vast majority of projects that this website lists are labelled "restricted". The conclusion that open source "says no" seems somewhat dishonest.

TrackerFF

I'm no AI-evangelist, but this makes them look like AI-luddites. Gatekeeping that will only shrink the number of contributors over time. If someone finds the projects interesting, but can't contribute, they'll just fork the projects and let AI run wild - there's no way human engineers can keep up with the sheer speed of AI-enhanced updates.

staminade

Some of these are misleading. Immich, for example, doesn't accept PRs created using an LLM, but the project has an agents file and there are Claude co-authored commits in the history.

unified101

Silly initiative. All it puts is a target on the repo, and no benefit at all. Atleast let the projects have the option of changing later, rather than publicly branding them.

Arbortheus

I have sympathy for the OSS maintainers, and I don’t see it purely as a “Luddite” behaviour. I expect the problem isn’t necessarily the AI generation itself, but the difficulty to distinguish between someone that’s really understood the problem domain versus someone with LLM-induced “Dutch courage”. That in combination with a large uptick in volume of community interactions (issues, PRs, …) risks burning out OSS maintainers. Perhaps giving it a few months/years for the flurry to die down, and for people to establish better best-practices for using these tools is the motive.

danielsamuels

The irony of this website being in Claude blue with fingernail cards and status pills.

ssenssei

I saw yesterday that YT-DLP also have banned AI.

IshKebab

I feel like this is maybe a good thing but for the wrong reasons. It's pretty clear at this point that AI coding works and is here to stay. But accepting external AI means you have way less knowledge about how it was generated, what models were used, were they given correct instructions etc. And also there's less benefit to accepting AI contributions because you're really receiving just a few minutes of contributor effort, which you could have easily done yourself. There was a project highlighted recently that doesn't accept PRs at all and the maintainers just run the AI themselves. I expect that's where we're heading. If you want to contribute to open source projects in future it's going to be in the form of money for tokens. Maybe submit a feature request/bug (prompt) and also pay some money to run the agent.

ChrisRR

I get the feeling that banning AI code from a project nowadays ends up with people lying about their AI usage. I think the approach other projects take where AI may be used, but the contributor holds the responsibility for it is more appropriate

nsoam

This is absolutely unenforceable, so I assume it’s a CYA move - if someone sues for copyright infringement they can shift the blame.

jlengrand

Author here. This is an early project. I've seen projects banning AI pop up quite a few times on HN and was curious in seeing how large the trend is. Yes, this is a vibe coded project, I'm simply curious to see how large the trend is, and also look into how people handle writing about AI contributions in their projects. I do not intend to make any conclusions our of this. The domain name is mostly a pun on "computer says no"

koalalorenzo

This is super helpful to pick projects. I really care about human-authored code, quality, and I avoid when possible using tools that are vibe coded. OpenSource projects have always been about sharing knowledge and building things together, and I am a little sad to see that AI and LLMs are taking over. Recently I was picking a self-hosted tool for planning trips, and I deleted it after a day, because it was extremely vibe-coded and none of the security issues reported in GitHub were ever fixed. It can be a prompt away to fix those! I noticed this way too often in OSS that is vibe coded, people focus on looks, feels and code does not get reviewed enough, because it "looks good with the CSS gradients" and "an LLM is always right". So I understand why they would ban and forbid AI / LLM contribution, and I am happy they are banning them, I assume mostly for the mental sanity of maintainers and for making sure that knowledge share and somewhat better PR reviews happens. I will always pick a human-made project over an AI / LLM coded one.

jonathanstrange

While limiting AI can make sense and it's particularly important to keep contributors responsible (for example, not allowing pull requests submitted directly by AI), it's outright dangerous to ban the use of AI altogether. Not using AI for vetting code and bug hunting is going to make your software very vulnerable. AI can find bugs in your open source repo that no human might find and you can bet your ass that attackers will use AI to find exploits. It's only a matter of time until code only written by humans is widely going to be considered unsafe. Sorry if that hurts anyone's feelings but that should be crystal clear to anyone working in the industry.

mik1998

I believe this will mean that established FOSS software will significantly improve thanks for using AI for catching bugs & human-reviewed code, while commercial programs will become significantly more unreliable due to being 100% AI generated, with a focus on LOC/token quotas instead of any metric of quality.

blauditore

One problem is also that it's hard to tell low-effort contributions from high-effort ones, unless you spend significant time into reviewing it yourself first.

Propelloni

That's just misattribution and banning AI-generated contributions is, frankly, lazy and stupid. Contributions being AI-generated is not the issue! The issue are low-quality contributions and there are a lot more of those because AI has made it easier for less qualified coders to tackle more and harder problems. Now, I understand the maintainers who just filter by "AI-generated" do it because it is a simple heuristic that is easy to apply and a quick stop-gap solution to an immediate problem. But this can only be a starting point to develop a better way to handle low quality input. Turning this into a fundamental position is just lazy and stupid. And to be fair, reading the projects' statements on the website shows that many projects are getting to grips with the new reality and are much more differentiated on the issue as a website called "osssaysno.com" suggests.

axegon_

I only have a handful of projects I've open sourced and a few dozens I intend to one day when I'm happy with them. And although there are have been very little contributions over the years, getting private emails such as "hi, implement {THIS}, k, 10x, bye" has been insanely irritatin and largely the reason why I've ALWAYS ignored those. In addition, I ditched github completely partially because microsoft and partially because I was sick of all the slop that was thrown down my throat. I see no value in a PR that no one has even bothered to read, because let's face it - only a handful of people worldwide have the discipline to do it. And to me, this seems to be the ultimate technical form of disrespect: if I get a PR and I'm the first human in the loop that reads it, what value do you bring. Even more annoying: "let claude review it". Absolutely no! And when I have a question, your purpose in the supply chain is to be a meat reverse proxy to the llm. Hell na. So good on those projects.