I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it.
Also, even if you avoid AI-generated slop, you can't really avoid the human-generated or human+AI-generated slop that passes your filters.
Still, I can definitely think of good non-functional reasons: provenance, accountability, proof-of-work, encouraging people to write code themselves, empirically tracking how humans develop codebases, etc.
And some projects like WINE or ReactOS probably have to worry about that even more given they need to guarantee clean-room reverse engineering...
For many people that’s enough of a reason.
As for functional, you can see it all up and down this comment thread. People don’t check their work and leave these massive walls of text and codebases that someone else has to audit/cleanup. It’s exhausting. Too many people offload their work to AI and put zero effort into vetting the results, which punctually means they are just offloading the work downstream. So many maintainers are simply going “no I will not do your work for you,” which is a very functional decision.
To butcher a comment I read on HN that put it very succinctly months ago: everybody wants to let AI do their work for them, but nobody wants to be downstream of AI work. It’s a seriously problematic dynamic on many levels. And that dynamic will not change until the vast majority of people start reliably vetting the results, which I don’t think is going to happen because babysitting a black box and trying to force it to output something a specific way (or constantly copy editing middling work) is not something that most of us enjoy.
1. In the case of AI generated code, the tool is the author.
2. Its far easier to enforce.
3. The alternative gate keeps against new contributors.
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file; [...]
How about if AI generates code in a file, then I copy/paste bits... like stack overflow ?
However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policies:
- Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.
- Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments - "here's the code, here's why I made that change, here are the effects of that change". Even if AI-generated, these small contributions may become much easier to verify & validate. We may even see some standardization in terms of what qualifies as an appropriately sized contribution, what requires more thorough review (e.g., adding unverified dependencies), etc.
I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.
From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.
> Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments
That would be a dream.
Contributors can have good intention but verbosity and number of automatically submitted issues kills it.
Few days ago, I have found a small json-based bug in one of popular software. So I submitted an issue that was written by Claude. But it was so verbose that explanation was longer than the bug itself :) So I had to shorten the text manually.
Isn’t there a /skill for this?
The idea that you can't trust code that was generated by heavy users of AI, because _they_ don't understand it enough to fix it, is false, because they can use AI to fix it.
In general, I have hard time understanding how one might even block other contributors from using ai.
That is to the point!
On the other hand ... it is a bit strange though, because what if code contributions objectively improve something? I dislike AI slop spam, but from a purely objective point of view, I am not sure it should be forbidden based on it intrinsically making a change, which COULD be an improve. Now I am also aware of the AI slop spam worsening things; ton of documentation is useless, look at what matz produces with claude, this seems to be written purely by an alien, aka AI. I don't understand anything that this AI generates. But I think from an objective point of view, I'd actually lean more towards not completely disallowing AI slop contribution. The issue seems largely with:
a) the quality
b) the amount of text generated
Both these problems, in my opinion, could be solved. The time required by a real human to look at it, though, will always be a bottleneck, so perhaps the more honest answer would be that humans don't have enough time for contributions from skynet.
If the contribution is complex enough, it is no longer an 'objective improvement' but rather a judgement call, and in the process becomes copyrightable. This is where the trouble lies, and why this kind of AI involvement is banned.
If it is not, for example by being a one-line fix that literally cannot be performed differently, it's a different story. Then it can be merged, viewed either as a menial change (exempt by the ban) or by transfer of ownership (the reviewer becomes the effective author) because it is not copyrightable.
If someone thinks they're building better open source with their AI, let them fork; their AI can maintain downstream. If it's really better, people will join the fork. Good luck.
In all likelihood anyone attempting this will realize the value that a maintainer provides. On the odd chance they discover a new working model and produce better software, all the better, everyone wins.
There, I solved FOSS sponsorship.
This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking variable naming conventions, changing APIs you shouldn’t, making amateur language mistakes, all indicate that yes, maybe the patch does work, but that there are other good reasons to reject it.
A way around this might be to mark a PR as rejected because of AI and then ask the author to point out some part of it they’re particularly proud of and explain in their own words, not a wall of AI text, what this does and why they like it. Just something where the author has to show that they have something an AI can’t, namely taste and an opinion.
https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index#why-care-a...
you can see it sort of like making a list of vegan restaurants. you might not see anything wrong with other restaurants (they might even have vegan dishes) but to some people it makes all the difference because they get to choose who they support
I don't think the problem is the (AI generated) code per se, but as the article mentions, it's the human interaction. A reviewer can spend hours on reviewing the code and leaving feedback to the author, but if the author just feeds it into an AI (or worse, it's automatically fed into it) and processes it within seconds, only to start with a blank slate for a next change, what's the point of putting in all that effort?
Humans can learn and adapt, AIs can... ingest more stuff into their context, I suppose, but it's been proven that things break down if they have too much stuff in said context, and said context is limited.
Allowing AI use by 'trusted contributors' has been suggested and discussed, but there were enough reasons against it and not enough established benefit.
I think this may be an example of deliberate hostile design, attempting to force users to adopt LLM based solutions to then summarise the vast output. Pushing back against AI contributions as such in this context makes sense, especially in software with an existing proven track record of great value delivery like Godot.
endre•55m ago