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.
I have sympathy for the users of these subs. I imagine you’d want to come to /r/opensource to discuss the code. The whys, the hows. When the answer every time is “because that’s what Claude chose” it’s not going to make for interesting discussions.
I don't think it's that simple. I don't agree with them banning anything AI related. However, I used to frequent several programming related subereddits that overtime became unbearable because every other post is someone posting an obviously vibe coded horrible slop project. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve on a forum like Reddit.
It's ironic that Reddit started as a place to share links, and then every community banned sharing links.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
> X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
Reddit struggles with AI submissions, there were like 20 AI oss projects per day in /r/Rust at some point. Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
The Rust moderators were overreacting. Most of their front page was not slop. Now their front page is blog posts and language details. It used to be a place where you could actually talk about the language's actual impact.
> Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
Most of them aren't slop. They're actually quite useful, but I guess the anti-AI cult wants to silence all AI-aided projects in an attempt to point out how "there's no new software being written by AI".
If you want to find people's vibe coded projects, you have no shortage of places to do that. You have almost the entire rest of the Internet, have fun. For myself, I don't have any interest in someone's project that they couldn't actually be bothered to make and just handed it off to a clanker. So I'm glad there are communities banning those.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This logic would work just as well to ban all mentions of automatic transmission because some people complain that they lost their love of driving once they stopped driving manual. If the complaints are annoying and low-effort, you could just ban the complaints.
Just quiz any of these AI detractors on pure asm + CPU implementation details. Oh what's this? You're writing this in Rust? Can you please tell me how the compiler optimizes this code and what assembly will it produce. Oh what's that, you can't do it? Well, it's obviously because you're not a true engineer™ and you're relying on the slop your compiler gives you.
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.
That’s not my experience. The frontier models produce ok code that works but it’s still very sloppy. Further evidence is that the number of massive PRs is increasing not decreasing, i.e. the LLMs are brute forcing changes rather than introducing quality code patterns.
If you read the post, the argument isn’t that AI-made projects are bad, just that they’re uninteresting. It’s similar to the argument I’ve seen people make of “don’t open a AI-written PR, just post your prompt and let me use my own LLM”
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?
Single contributor new project open source is LARP open source. It makes no difference what your license is, if nobody cares about your project. That comes first.
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.
I keep comparing AI versus human coding as the difference between power tools and hand tools.
Hand tools have no place in the modern economy outside of bespoke or otherwise high-end goods. Today, the economics of power tools make them necessary to embrace in business, or your competitors will out maneuver you in the marketplace.
That doesn’t mean all of existing craftsmen believe that the power tools are safer or produce better results; their opinion ultimately does not matter, as it would lead to the demise of their income stream. The majority will learn to swallow their pride, because they cannot deny that things have changed forever.
My company put off adopting AI until this month. We will never go back, because I am now effectively leading a team of egoless juniors at a fraction of the cost of a single human. The economics will never work out in favor of me writing another line of code.
You are not accounting for the inherent error rate; around 20-40% s I understand it. Reducible with tokens but then not cheaper than humans.
Sure a good analogy is physical vs robotic; but if it was say burgers. It would be a current McDonalds budget vs some new robot place that makes then half price or cheaper but every aspect of the burger is off quality wise; missing ingredients, mistaken orders, incorrect ingredients, weird toppings; BUT DARN ARE THEY FAST.
You’ve gotten faster but you’ve added an error rate that either you inspect for or it moves to the edge.
I like the analogy. Interesting to note that a lot of the really high end furniture is still made using hand tools. But it is not affordable for most, who will buy mass produced furniture made by machines.
Pfft, a circular saw will cut pretty much as straight as a normal saw, and it will repeat this over and over with expected results. It is not comparable to the woolly and changing nature of AI as it stands.
The ego thing is one of the biggest draw for me to AI. I hate working with other people. God damn fragile egos, arrogance, impertinence, and bad hygiene. I would pay extra for AI.
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.
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.
I have sympathy for the users of these subs. I imagine you’d want to come to /r/opensource to discuss the code. The whys, the hows. When the answer every time is “because that’s what Claude chose” it’s not going to make for interesting discussions.
Anyone can make their own subreddit.
I don't think it's that simple. I don't agree with them banning anything AI related. However, I used to frequent several programming related subereddits that overtime became unbearable because every other post is someone posting an obviously vibe coded horrible slop project. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve on a forum like Reddit.
It's ironic that Reddit started as a place to share links, and then every community banned sharing links.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
> X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
How do you find the good ones between the bad ones and the malware infected?
Reddit struggles with AI submissions, there were like 20 AI oss projects per day in /r/Rust at some point. Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
The Rust moderators were overreacting. Most of their front page was not slop. Now their front page is blog posts and language details. It used to be a place where you could actually talk about the language's actual impact.
> Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
Most of them aren't slop. They're actually quite useful, but I guess the anti-AI cult wants to silence all AI-aided projects in an attempt to point out how "there's no new software being written by AI".
The ones that I have seen were90% slop. Bitcoin in Rust, 10 new agents in Rust. Zero explanations on why a project exists and how it is better.
If you want to find people's vibe coded projects, you have no shortage of places to do that. You have almost the entire rest of the Internet, have fun. For myself, I don't have any interest in someone's project that they couldn't actually be bothered to make and just handed it off to a clanker. So I'm glad there are communities banning those.
> Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless.
Hyperbole much?
This is a direct response to AI slop destroying a community; what’s your solution to the AI spam problem?
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.
Banning AI, sure. But demanding multiple contributors? All of D.J. Bernstein's software would be banned. This is typical Reddit nonsense.
Numbered throwaway account 24 minutes old, this is a spam wave using residential proxies and dang is banning these accounts as they pop up.
19 day old cowlevel account that specializes in witty one liners gives their opinion again. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
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.
That's ironic, I can't tell bots from real users anymore on Reddit.
we made a new sub for this
r/opensource_projects would love to have your open source projects shared
seems like those subs are asking to become the new stackoverflow of reddit
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.
> 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
If the result of your software project is suboptimal software compared to what others are achieving, what was really the goal you say you get to keep?
If your argument is to hold together, the goal must have been something besides the software.
To be clear, this is fair, but then you cannot claim to primarily have been working on a software project, but something else.
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.
This logic would work just as well to ban all mentions of automatic transmission because some people complain that they lost their love of driving once they stopped driving manual. If the complaints are annoying and low-effort, you could just ban the complaints.
Just quiz any of these AI detractors on pure asm + CPU implementation details. Oh what's this? You're writing this in Rust? Can you please tell me how the compiler optimizes this code and what assembly will it produce. Oh what's that, you can't do it? Well, it's obviously because you're not a true engineer™ and you're relying on the slop your compiler gives you.
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)
I understand not wanting slop but banning solo projects and AI augmented projects is just a typical Reddit moderation power trip
And that's how you kill a subreddit.
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.
That’s not my experience. The frontier models produce ok code that works but it’s still very sloppy. Further evidence is that the number of massive PRs is increasing not decreasing, i.e. the LLMs are brute forcing changes rather than introducing quality code patterns.
If you read the post, the argument isn’t that AI-made projects are bad, just that they’re uninteresting. It’s similar to the argument I’ve seen people make of “don’t open a AI-written PR, just post your prompt and let me use my own LLM”
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?
Single contributor new project open source is LARP open source. It makes no difference what your license is, if nobody cares about your project. That comes first.
How are you going to get people to care if you are barred from sharing it on reddit?
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.
I keep comparing AI versus human coding as the difference between power tools and hand tools.
Hand tools have no place in the modern economy outside of bespoke or otherwise high-end goods. Today, the economics of power tools make them necessary to embrace in business, or your competitors will out maneuver you in the marketplace.
That doesn’t mean all of existing craftsmen believe that the power tools are safer or produce better results; their opinion ultimately does not matter, as it would lead to the demise of their income stream. The majority will learn to swallow their pride, because they cannot deny that things have changed forever.
My company put off adopting AI until this month. We will never go back, because I am now effectively leading a team of egoless juniors at a fraction of the cost of a single human. The economics will never work out in favor of me writing another line of code.
Nope.
You are not accounting for the inherent error rate; around 20-40% s I understand it. Reducible with tokens but then not cheaper than humans.
Sure a good analogy is physical vs robotic; but if it was say burgers. It would be a current McDonalds budget vs some new robot place that makes then half price or cheaper but every aspect of the burger is off quality wise; missing ingredients, mistaken orders, incorrect ingredients, weird toppings; BUT DARN ARE THEY FAST.
You’ve gotten faster but you’ve added an error rate that either you inspect for or it moves to the edge.
I like the analogy. Interesting to note that a lot of the really high end furniture is still made using hand tools. But it is not affordable for most, who will buy mass produced furniture made by machines.
I wonder, when you retire, who will they find to replace you?
At our current rate of AI progress, I no longer expect this career to last until my retirement. It’ll be agents all the way down soon enough.
And I have been an AI skeptic, so it pains me greatly to admit that.
Pfft, a circular saw will cut pretty much as straight as a normal saw, and it will repeat this over and over with expected results. It is not comparable to the woolly and changing nature of AI as it stands.
Juniors without egos? Never heard of it.
The ego thing is one of the biggest draw for me to AI. I hate working with other people. God damn fragile egos, arrogance, impertinence, and bad hygiene. I would pay extra for AI.
And yet you must learn the hand tool before you start using the power version.
r/opensource isn't a particularly large or important community. This is just another reddit mod on a power trip. Happens every day.
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.