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I hope my drive-by PRs don’t come off in the same way.
For example, as the simplest no-description, no-comment example, when I see typos or wording errors in text on a random blog I check if there’s a direct way to contribute - to GitHub edit and submit a PR, and when there is, I do that.
There’s nothing for me to say or describe, really, and it’s not like I interacted with their project or community before or even plan to after. (Sometimes I do look into the issue tracker etc depending on the project or website. But that’s beside the raised concern.)
I see it more of a collective and open collaboration. But that’s not necessarily visible on the receiving end.
I was thinking the other day how easy it would be for someone malicious to put a back door in whatever AI slop they make
I’d almost rather see all AI generated content be posted to its own separate open source platform “GitSlop” or something
😩 If you want to be absurdly narrow minded and treat OSI like some deity, their word like a holy book, and anything outside of that scripture or benediction as heresy, then maybe you’ll see the arrival of AI as some kind of ragnarok.
Opensource will change but it won’t be “killed”. You can’t and won’t stop people putting the code for their projects online. The stuff you (or your agent or whatever) publish will continue to be used as an open portfolio.
A good amount of stuff published will be filth and indistinguishable from clonker filth or human filth. Additionally, local AI will also become more common. Making your code indistinguishable will also make the “AI code is unlicensable” argument worthless. Go prove that the trash heap I published was written while drunk and high or by an AI.
Some projects are already quietly saying “just don’t tell people it’s AI” and to make it look indistinguishable, then get on with life.
Can’t say I have any good rebuttals against that tbh.
That’s pretty much the subtext of bans anyway. To guarantee undetectable use the contributor must treat gen code like a junior’s draft and refactor prior to PR. If it’s undetectable, the end result is the same from the maintainer’s perspective.
And it’s not a new approach. This has long been true for contributions containing “found” code; we define what’s allowed knowing we can’t actually enforce the rule against the most artfully obfuscated violations because, aside from achieving ostensibly the same result, having that tappable sign protects the project from a lot of BS down the line.
It’s getting harder to tell the difference though. Slop artists can still prompt their agent to follow the codebase’s existing style/format.
And we have to expect that trend will continue. I haven’t tested frontier capabilities since April but I know for a fact my local drafters are producing far fewer obvious smells than I remember seeing in frontier outputs even just last year.
Current frontier is likely still detectable by an experienced engineer, especially if they’ve seen enough gen code to recognize the patterns, but might otherwise be indistinguishable from junior-level work. That is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current frontier models didn’t output ANY giveaway “slop” code or outright hallucinations. Symptoms might be more abstract like inelegant architectural decisions, obtuse alg/structure selection, or design choices that demonstrate no grasp of overall objectives.
My point was that from a project maintainer’s perspective, quality is more a side effect, and there’s no effective difference between no AI and no detectable AI. The actual point of a no-vibecode policy is (A) to communicate expectations, ensuring contributors know their PR must pass a sniff test, that their name is on it, so blind PR submission is never a safe choice, and (B) to have a bulletproof policy to refer to in retrospect if ever issues relating to AI use in the project arise.
Slop projects and slop submissions existed before the current crop of AI but it’s certainly lowered the barrier. That said I suspect there are places AI can help. Simple patches, human guided refactores, test cases. We’ll have data points from the projects that turned on the slop cannons and started auto accepting PRs soon enough.
Yeah, I think calling out the demise of opensource is too early as there isn’t enough data to support such a position.
In addition to the other comments here, we can’t rule out the human love for hobbies either. Did I spend 2 days hand coding an entire blog that I won’t show to anyone just for fun to learn some HTML and CSS? Hell yeah I did. Will I use that knowledge to make something less chaotically coded that I can actually be proud of? More than likely.
Obviously that won’t be a large percentage of the market if even a noticeable one but, I’d like to think hobbyists will help preserve some good open source projects.
Where can I find your blog? ;)
I think ai will enhance open source projects. Maybe not all, but some. World be be completely different in 10-20 years anyway.
When we have something even remotely resembling this mythical AI that has fundamentally different characteristics from LLMs maybe we can talk about it instead of speculating
Overall I agree, but it is missing and important aspect: maintainability.
This is maybe the most insidious part of LLM use to write code. Since LLMs have no real understanding of the structure of the project they will duplicate functions and generally make a mess that very quickly becomes unmaintainable by humans. The only “solution” LLM users have for that is perpetually rewriting large swaths of the codebase introducing new bugs, removing features and so on.
Since open-source software is usually especially long lived and maintained by a changing group of people, this results in code bases that are like asbestos that no one wants to even touch.
I’m of an opposite mind. I reckon the author wrote this in the dip, and we’ll see a rebound soon where FOSS is strengthened by anti-AI sentiments.
We need to stop being agnostic, draw a line, and begin rejecting any genAI involvement in open source before it’s actually too late.
exactly.
Anti AI licenses will do that. To the naysayers or OSI zealots: The 2026 EU AI directive makes a lot of these licenses possibly enforceable.
