R/open source bans all solo projects and projects using LLMs

12329876

Banning AI, sure. But demanding multiple contributors? All of D.J. Bernstein's software would be banned. This is typical Reddit nonsense.

jonathanstrange

Who cares, it's their choice and probably because they were overwhelmed with LLM-generated project announcements. I'm aware that being anti-AI is trendy right now, so many people won't like to hear that, but the reality is that it won't take long until the opposite will occur. Projects will get rejected for not having been thoroughly checked by AI, if not written by AI, because purely human development will cause too many security and code quality concerns.

satvikpendem

r/rust did something similar although more broad, banning code dumps. Other subs like r/programming, r/cscareerquestions, r/experienceddevs banned in part or in full anything related to AI or using AI (unless highly technical) and frankly they're much nicer places to read now, because I don't have to hear about yet another engineer who "lost the love of programming" as if they're the only one. It's a repetitive thread that still gets upvoted highly and is sort of an easy way to farm upvotes and thus is quite annoying to read generally.

fishgoesblub

Banning the dime a dozen slop projects popping up every 5 minutes isn't so bad of an idea, but banning new, or projects that have less than 3 contributors is just wrong. XZ would be banned from being posted. There's also the fact that it appears to be a blanket ban on LLM contributions, so I guess the Linux kernel is verboten?

paxy

r/opensource isn't a particularly large or important community. This is just another reddit mod on a power trip. Happens every day.

theturtletalks

Just like r/math banning the huge math release by OpenAI. Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless. I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less. X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.

eeko_systems

we made a new sub for this r/opensource_projects would love to have your open source projects shared

dizhn

Wonder how they plan to find 3 people who want to code by hand together in a few years. The best feature of LLMs might be that you can do so much without needing anybody's help. (Or that you don't have to deal with anybody)

augment_me

After pondering this for a while, I actually agree with this from the principle of community and socials. I have been in 4-5 open source communities where I met a lot of friends, but since LLMs the communities are flooded with slop PRs, slop projects, and the human interaction in general has fallen dramatically. In some sense, if everyone can build everything, people's attention becomes the currency. If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal.

JodieBenitez

And that's how you kill a subreddit.

preommr

We essentially need a human interface for llm-based projects Some simple rules that would work better: - Projects should have someone that understands the overall project at a systems level - If you link to a github, or code project, it can't be ai-written, it has to be a clear README, maybe with some code examples. But, it can call the other project that has AI generated stuff.

_pdp_

The latest frontier models no longer produce slop. The code is pretty good in general - better in fact in many situations compared what a human might have produced with limited time, resources and experience. The argument against AI-assisted programming just doesn't hold anymore.

AmazingTurtle

seems like those subs are asking to become the new stackoverflow of reddit

drbscl

I understand not wanting slop but banning solo projects and AI augmented projects is just a typical Reddit moderation power trip

josteink

I guess in some parts of the FOSS movement, predominantly in the left-wing politicised (“woke”) parts, there is a hard anti-AI wave flooding through these days. They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like. On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care. Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it. Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.

dw_arthur

Sorry folks, gatekeeping is coming back. In a world where AI can produce infinite software and infinite "content" there have to be stricter rules to participate in a community.

iloveoof

From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general. My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.

2Gkashmiri

I'm an open source contributor. The mod is overreacting. By this logic, Linux kernel is banned on the sub... This is ridiculous and it would be reverted. I'm sure of it. They can't have this long term

Aurornis

Every subreddit eventually has a collapse of quality due to popularity. As the activity of a subreddit grows it becomes too attractive to those who want eyeballs, clicks, responses, traffic, or attention. All of my interesting and helpful subreddits became unusable over time as the low effort posts took over. Every one of my hobby subreddits that became popular is now 90% or more posts that fit 3 categories: 1. Questions about getting started in the hobby. The same asks about what to buy or requesting feedback on something they’re thinking about buying. The subreddit can have a perfect wiki and up to date buying guide posts, but it will still get 5 posts per day from people who want personalized advice. 2. Posts from people who acquired something new and want to show it off. They’re excited for their new 3D printer or skis or other hobby acquisition so they post a photo. I know the subreddit is cooked when these posts start getting upvotes and taking spots in the feed. This is the sign that the low effort beginner posts are becoming the central content of the subreddit. 3. People posting every small achievement and looking for praise. I get it. It’s fun to share little progress with a community and feel excitement when sharing it with others. Feeling like you’ve made it with a group of other beginners is fun. There really should be a place for this, but once it takes over the subreddit it becomes uninteresting to see the same beginner posts day after day so the experience commenters leave. The availability of LLMs has caused an explosion of #2 and #3 type posts for any software related subreddit. Starting late last year every subreddit with a software component become flooded with posts about something someone had cooked up with Claude Code. Some of them might be interesting but most were quickly abandoned. Many of them didn’t even work at all. LLMs made it easy to feel like you’re joining the club. Spend $20 of a subscription and tell Claude what you want and you now have something to post and collect praise for. The absolute worst are the posts where all the content is also generated by Claude. Even the OP’s comments are Claude written for many of these. You can click on their profile and see their comment history is written in one style for everything else, but suddenly they’re posting capitalized sentences and Claude-style prose paragraphs in this one subreddit. Then you realize you’re entirely viewing the output of a robot, which someone is putting forth as their own work. It’s just not interesting. It’s not even fun for the #3 feature because the person copying LLM output into the subreddit is not interested in anything about the community other than taking praise and upvotes from it. They aren’t participating in other threads or encouraging others. They are there to promote their project, extract traffic, praise, and upvotes, and go back to prompting Claude. I don’t know if banning solo projects or projects using LLMs is going to lead to a quality outcome, because those two measures aren’t specific for the slop that people hate. I do understand why they feel the need to do something, though.

chung8123

I think AI and open source go hand in hand. Open source can make AI so powerful and in return AI can bring to open source so many projects that were likely not possible before or are now considered "low value" because AI could replicate it so it makes more sense just to open source the project.