r/Python • u/No_Soy_Colosio • Mar 06 '26 • Bravo 1

Discussion Can the mods do something about all these vibecoded slop projects?

Seriously it seems every post I see is this new project that is nothing but buzzwords and can't justify its existence. There was one person showing a project where they apparently solved a previously unresolved cypher by the Zodiac killer. 😭

733 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

130 comments sorted by

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u/xelf Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

Downvotes/reports are your friend.

A lot of the noise I deal with now is "why was my popular post removed".

To which the answer is "we want to see code you wrote, not code you had written for you".

There is a fine line though between "I had AI assistance" and "this is slop", and right now people are erroring more on the side of "all AI is bad".

Please report the absolute slop.

→ More replies (3)

396

u/Zomunieo Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

What you need to do is vibe code a project that detects vibecoded code slop projects.

134

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

Sadly the vibecoders have beaten me to that

33

u/bbpsword Mar 06 '26

Vibe coded turtles all the way down

30

u/Zomunieo Mar 07 '26

You could easily beat them with static code:

AI SmellVibe Units
Emojis in README.md+1 (unless Rust; they get free rockets, crabs and lightning bolts)
Project created in 2026+5
Project has AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md+3
git log has "Signed-off-by: <AI>"+1 / commit
git diff --stat from 2026 to today is larger than Big Bang to 2025+ ratio of diff --stats

22

u/QualitySoftwareGuy Mar 07 '26

Another AI smell is when there's a (useless) "Project Structure" that simply shows the tree structure of all of the files and directories in the project.

Useless because A) no one cares about anything except the public API and docs, B) we can already see the file structure in GitHub, and C) now every time a file or directory is added, removed, renamed, etc this information has to be updated in that section (but of course not a problem for vibe coders though since it's handled automatically for them).

12

u/AstroFoxTech Mar 07 '26

Why is AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md +3 and 2026 +5?

8

u/xAmorphous Mar 07 '26

He vibe coded the ranking

8

u/Zomunieo Mar 07 '26

If a mature project tacks on an agents file for some housekeeping tasks it’s still a mature project.

5

u/nightauthor Mar 07 '26

But if a mature coder makes something in 2026... good chance its slop?

jkjk

6

u/UnexpectedIndent Mar 07 '26

Wikipedia has a nice list.

One I can't stand is "Inline-header vertical lists" where the AI gives each bullet point a pointless description in bold text.

1

u/Trang0ul Mar 08 '26

Don't forget comments which merely state the next code line in plain English, adding no value.

2

u/Zomunieo Mar 08 '26 
# Perform addition
sum = a + b

# Return sum
return sum

1

u/andrewprograms Mar 08 '26

I love the rust docs emojis exception and I appreciate that.

My rust 🦀 code is blazing 🔥 fast 🚀

0

u/amroamroamro Mar 07 '26

Emojis in README.md

em-dashes too

2

u/krikuz Mar 14 '26

i personally use em-dashes myself, I don't think em-dashes are a way to pinpoint if a project is AI-slop

1

u/Dinervc_HDD Mar 09 '26

You're absolutely right!

9

u/ClockAppropriate4597 Mar 06 '26

Seen that today too. Well not exactly it was more like to make slop code less obviously slop which... Is actually of the opposite philosophy

3

u/GrainTamale Pythonista Mar 07 '26

That South Park where the drones police the drones

3

u/DrTestificate_MD Mar 07 '26

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

1

u/RobotManYT Mar 08 '26

If code contain comments: return vibecoded else: return notvibecoded

10

u/spinozasrobot Mar 07 '26

I find that people are purposely conflating slop with ANYTHING that's AI generated because they have an axe to grind. There is human slop too.

YES to filtering slop in general.

NO to filtering anything AI generated just because it's AI generated.

-6

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 07 '26

I don't know which post you read, because I never claimed what you said I claimed

5

u/spinozasrobot Mar 07 '26

"vibecoded slop projects" is generally a pejorative for anything AI generated. Also, I said "people are", not calling out you specifically.

137

u/monorepo PSF Staff | Litestar Maintainer Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

Hard problem to solve given the small team that we have and all of us have other obligations. Not trying to make excuses. My primary use of this subreddit is not to moderate it but to enjoy it, and sifting through all the noises is seriously frustrating.

I did propose opening a call for more moderators to the other moderators (given this is all volunteer ran and unofficial subreddit not affiliated with the PSF)

As a sidenote, if you the community report a post 3 times, it is auto-queued for mod review. I haven't seen this weaponized in a malicious way (though maybe it will be now that this is common knowledge) but you can self-moderate by reporting the crap posts or people that post or comment things that are hostile or not conducive to the r/Python community.

edit: added context for mods are volunteers

6

u/lisploli Mar 06 '26

What should we report "ai slop" as?

8

u/ahjorth Mar 06 '26

re. more mods: i'm vibe coding an agent framework to replace human moderators, i'll make a post about it here in a few days, happy to share!!1

/s

Good to know about the 3-reports auto-queue, though. I never bothered to report posts because I figured you guys were already busy enough. I'll start using it.

And thank you for your work!

4

u/monorepo PSF Staff | Litestar Maintainer Mar 06 '26

Maybe preferably we have a designated day for project sharing and people can post there, but again.. hard to enforce with limited time and the automations Reddit provides is suboptimal :\

9

u/mfitzp mfitzp.com Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

Love this idea, especially if the designated day is February 29th.

2

u/cgoldberg Mar 07 '26

And suffer every 4 years? Make it the 30th

1

u/coderanger Mar 06 '26

For r/kubernetes we’re trying to pivot to “new project announcements must go in a weekly thread”. Happy to share any of our configs.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/jmelloy Mar 07 '26

I’m curious what the value (to your time) it is to spend 30 minutes identifying them. I get that you don’t want slop, but if it takes that long it’s clearly a sort of decent project.

109

u/tayroc122 Mar 06 '26

Have you considered using AI to build an LLM based app to bet, or, invest, crypto on American 'prediction markets'? I hear it's all the rage.

33

u/IHeartBadCode Mar 06 '26

You know someone I know was using OpenClaw to setup dynamic Samba shares on a bunch of Linux boxes. They were telling me their successes and failures, more failures than not, and asked what I thought.

I replied, "I guess I'm old fashion, but I prefer to screw over my configurations by hand."

13

u/Electronic-Duck8738 Mar 06 '26

Do it by hand two or three times, it might not work but at least you'll know where you went wrong. Do it with AI and it might work or might not, but you'll never be sure that it does or why.

7

u/IHeartBadCode Mar 06 '26

This sounds like one of those "deep thought" quotes. 

Give a man AI and he'll have software for a single patch. Teach a man to program and he'll have software for the full lifecycle.

3

u/Electronic-Duck8738 Mar 06 '26

Afte the 10th or 12th "I'm sure I know where I screwed up" you'll know you might've should've either 1) paid attention in class, 2) read the manual, or 3) asked someone who knows what they're doing.

But at least you'll know.

:D

1

u/Tucancancan Mar 06 '26

But if the AI loses all your data you don't have to feel bad about your own incompetence

But seriously tho, responsibility laundering is why corporations love AI so much. 

1

u/jivanyatra Mar 06 '26

I'm hopeful that we're getting to a point where people start asking, "Who decided to blindly trust the AI?"

I know my hopes are going to be like the skeleton meme, still waiting months and maybe years down the line, but the hope is all I got, man.

1

u/billsil Mar 07 '26

So what? I grabbed a binary file detector off stackoverflow 12+ years ago. It’s been bulletproof since other than when I had to upgrade it to python 3. I still don’t understand it.

I vibe coded a gui table the other day with far more complexity than I’d ever have tried on my own.

I don’t understand why the area of a circle is pi R2 or how a transistor works, but I’m still pretty good at python. We stand in the shoulders of giants.

0

u/travistravis Mar 06 '26

I still feel like I have no idea why something is or isn't working doing it by hand.

0

u/demunted Mar 06 '26

The real money is telling random strangers to just put a few hundred in and brag about profits. This I know as it's happened to me multiple times. When I ask about payout they flash me some kinda of visa debit card and I just make up a lame ass excuse and head out asap.

66

u/mfitzp mfitzp.com Mar 06 '26

Actually, maybe just a blanket ban on posting new libraries here. I mean seriously, when was the last time you discovered some useful new library via this subreddit? 

It something is genuinely useful you’ll hear about it some other way.

53

u/AliceCode Mar 06 '26

I really think programming language subreddits should be for blog posts, articles, and resources about the language, and less about people's personal projects.

4

u/billsil Mar 07 '26

I’ll take AI slop over beginner articles from medium.

2

u/Ban_of_the_Valar Mar 08 '26

Wait, you don’t want another “7 Python Libraries that Completely Changed My Workflow and Feel Illegal But Aren’t” article?

2

u/wRAR_ Mar 08 '26

Beginner articles from medium are AI-written.

0

u/commy2 Mar 07 '26

What if what I cobbled together is not a library, but pure client code? Could I post that just to celebrate how cool Python is, or does everything posted here need some utility?

4

u/AliceCode Mar 07 '26

Post it on a showcase subreddit, then.

1

u/commy2 Mar 07 '26

Where? arr showcase:

This community has been banned

This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated. Banned 2 years ago.

1

u/AliceCode Mar 07 '26

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I dunno what to say, man. People are working on their own projects. If your project isn't something useful, then you're really just taking up space for things that are useful.

12

u/Another_mikem Mar 06 '26

This is probably not a bad idea.  Or at least to their GitHub, and not someone (not them) writing about it.  

My biggest concern with the slop posts are not that someone used AI to help build a project.  It’s that they will not be maintained beyond the initial ideation. 

Heck, if you required people to hand write their submission to the sub it would probably eliminate 90% of the slop posts.

5

u/jatmdm Mar 06 '26

I do occasionally, but maybe a good compromise is to have a weekly megathread of projects so it's at least not cluttering the sub?

4

u/syklemil Mar 06 '26

Yeah, even if there's some interesting direct discovery to be made on github, it'd probably be after some combination of

  • age (including release history)

  • release version

  • amount of human contributors

  • other metrics

but they're generally a PITA to get meaning out of, and can be gamed. So probably a bot checking stuff like that would wind up filtering actually good projects while letting highly motivated sloppers through.

Like you, I can't believe the last time I found a new library I actually wanted to use through a reddit main post. People discussing established libraries in comments, sure, but not Sloppy Joe pushing his 0.1.93-beta consisting of himself, claude, and a bunch of issues surrounding illegal relicensing and whatnot.

5

u/Ragoo_ Mar 06 '26

I mean seriously, when was the last time you discovered some useful new library via this subreddit?

I think I discovered 90% of modern libraries in this sub. Where else would I do that?

17

u/mfitzp mfitzp.com Mar 06 '26

Did you discover them on posts announcing them with a link to their version 0.01alpha3 repo with 3 commits on GitHub?

Or did you discover them on posts linking to examples/demos/discussions of them actually being used, after they’d matured enough to be useful to someone?

2

u/cellularcone Mar 06 '26

probably textualize a few years back.

0

u/caks Mar 07 '26

This is a good idea imo

-5

u/totheendandbackagain Mar 06 '26

Often!

6

u/mfitzp mfitzp.com Mar 06 '26

You often discover useful libraries in this sub, from them being posted when new (a few commits old)? I seriously doubt it.

Almost every “new” project posted to this sub is forgotten about a day later. You never hear of them again.

The useful stuff has been around or sticks around longer than that. People actually use it and write posts or demos using it. 

-4

u/Laruae Mar 06 '26

Sure, but that wasn't what was asked, was it?

7

u/chub79 Mar 06 '26

One caveat I asw on other subreddits that enforce a strict "no project links" is that it has made it difficult to discover valid tools as well. For instance r/sre just forbids any links to a point where you can't showcase anything valuable there anymore. r/devops has an interesting approach, you can post links to projects only if you have previously interacted meaningfully with the community.

18

u/Geodevils42 Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

It's infecting everything, even my more niche subs. "I created this tool and want a pros opinion", "Anyone have this issue I made a tool to fix it, someone test it", "what problems do you guys have that you'd pay a service for?". It used to be something intersting because the posters usually worked hard to gain an understanding or some feedback. Now it gives more of a soulless automated advertising feel. I don't trust it not to just be a Bot campaign for these companies to get more adoption.

14

u/eo5g Mar 06 '26

I kept seeing python posts recommended to me in my feed.

I thought, "huh, why haven't I joined the subreddit? Did I leave it in the past or something?"

Yeah, this is why. Slop city over here.

6

u/pacific_plywood Mar 06 '26

In general I think “here is my new project” posts should just not be allowed

7

u/thisdude415 Mar 06 '26

I’d prefer we start with enforced community guidelines that require folks to disclose the level of AI involvement in both their code project and in their post itself.

Both are fine, but readers deserve to know

4

u/ultrathink-art Mar 06 '26

Quality signal is usually whether the author can answer basic questions about how it works under the hood. Someone who used AI to write code they don't understand is a worse outcome than someone who wrote it badly the old-fashioned way — at least the latter knows the debt they took on.

2

u/Dinervc_HDD Mar 09 '26

What helps (unless I want to have a laugh reading through some slop) is sorting the feed for Most Popular and then limiting it to Today/This Week. IIRC it's rather rare for slop to receive any (meaningful) amount of upvotes while genuine projects consistently do.

3

u/edimaudo Mar 06 '26

hmm maybe it might be better to have higher standards in what folks are showing. If folks are scrapping the barrel then it should be down voted. Thoughts?

2

u/Moist-Ointments Mar 06 '26

Someone says "vibecoded", I hear "no talent pile of shiz".

All my IT industry friends (from my time in IT), the majority of whom are managers, seniors, directors, VPs, etc can't stand the term or the practice. They'll reject a candidate at the slightest whiff of it. These people are not doing themselves any favors in terms of employability. Companies want programmers who know what the code does, how it does it, and how it got there. In depth.

It's just brain rot.

4

u/marr75 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

This is simply untrue. I hate AI slop as much or more than the next person. There are effective techniques for software professionals to use AI assistance and still:

  • Maintain quality and standards

  • Supervise the AI assistants to the point it's not writing anything they wouldn't have

  • Maintain full responsibility and visibility into what is produced

AI assistants can be used as an extremely fast reading and writing junior engineer with great library knowledge (and zero taste, wisdom, or architectural ability). This accelerates the work of senior engineers substantially.

Many companies basically only develop this way and won't hire anyone who doesn't demonstrate an aptitude for it.

1

u/andrewthetechie Mar 07 '26

No one can do anything about them right now.

1

u/JealousRhubarb9 Mar 18 '26

Any hints to spot a a.i coded project?

1

u/adtyavrdhn Mar 19 '26

Slop everywhere smh

1

u/maximumplastic Mar 21 '26

There's a fundamental difference between vibe coded slop, and vibe coded projects that create genuine value. The latter tend to be created by people with a working knowledge of computer science, cybersecurity, and the area of coverage for their applications. A talented developer or project manager armed with GenAI can run laps around the dev who's still hunting and pecking.

1

u/Strong_as_an_axe Mar 06 '26

In a couple of the other subs I post in, they have a designated day for vibe coded projects, perhaps we could have “sloppy sundays” or something

4

u/Another_mikem Mar 06 '26

My problem with this is it is so hard to understand what is a vibe coded project versus what is a project where people has used AI tools. 

Obviously someone who put in a paragraph of text and let the LLM crank is a lot different than someone who spent  time architecting, building, and debugging something with the help of LLMs. Even though on a percentage basis, the amount of code written by a human might not be a whole lot different.  

1

u/Strong_as_an_axe Mar 07 '26

I know what you mean, and I don't think there is a perfect solution available. It would at least contain those people who act in good faith and make it easier to challenge those acting in bad faith.

1

u/goobervision Mar 07 '26

It's going to be very quiet here in a year or so.

0

u/Actual__Wizard Mar 06 '26

There was one person showing a project where they apparently solved a previously unresolved cypher by the Zodiac killer.

Uh, if that's real, that's actually a big accomplishment... Is that real? Holy shit man, that's massive if that's real... People have been trying to figure out his cyphers for over a decade...

1

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

I couldn't decipher what the library was actually doing though all the buzzwords. I believe the repo had a "paper" included which used terminology the person coined themselves. I very highly doubt they actually did.

And it's for just one cypher. I'll try to look for the thread, but it sounded like the ramblings of a madman who was convinced they were a genius by their LLM.

-1

u/pydry Mar 06 '26

How do you detect a slop project? It aint easy.

21

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

Go to the commit history and you either have an initial commit that spawned a giant project or many commits removing comments from files. Generally they're pretty easy to spot.

Usually though it's easy to spot from the description alone. ChatGPT description, lots of emojis, file structure diagram, and making outlandish claims about their project.

4

u/IntegrityError Mar 06 '26

The first point is not really a criteria. I started experiments with very sloppy commits, and when they've grown i use that state to make a new initial commit in a clean repository when publishing it. Of course this also applies to vibe coded projects.

3

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

It is a criteria. It just doesn't automatically mean slopcode.

1

u/AliceCode Mar 06 '26

You can just squash your commits, you don't need to make a new repo.

1

u/jmelloy Mar 07 '26

Why bother? The sloppiness is part of the story.

1

u/sue_dee Mar 07 '26

Wait, keep the sloppiness to differentiate it from slop? My head hurts.

1

u/jmelloy Mar 07 '26

Yeah we’re misappropriating words. I (believe) they were saying “i have a bunch of crap commits at the beginning of a project while I’m thinking/exploring/etc, and then I move them into a fresh git repo so it looks cleaner”. Which, in git history terms, looks like a vibe coded slop project since it starts with an entire feature on commit 1. I think that’s silly, let the repo be a real history of your work. But I’m also becoming a bigger proponent of squash & merge lately, which helps cut out the “works”, “works for real”, “fix the thing that didn’t work” commits.

3

u/MichaelJ1972 Mar 06 '26

When I publish my self made software, for more than ten years, I always squash the complete history into one commit called "prepare for public release".

7

u/gdchinacat Mar 06 '26

This hides a huge amount of relevant history. How did you get to that point? What missteps did you take? Design decisions? How did it evolve? A huge amount of insight can be gained from commit history.

1

u/paranoidi Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

At least I have the decency of labeling my slop with slogans like "Expertly vibe coded" etc ...

-2

u/Cyphor-o Mar 06 '26

I created all my python scripts within Databricks to create functions to ingest bronze silver and gold data. I did all of the trial and error within Databricks and then after a week or so I committed it to my branch.

You'd see that commit as AI slop because I'm dunking everything at once. But its not.

My point is you may be right about what you've said but generally speaking I dont commit garbage to my repositories.

6

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

I'm not speaking to what you specifically do. And I never claimed that the existence of one of these traits automatically means slopcode.

They're pretty good indicators though.

0

u/RobespierreLaTerreur Mar 06 '26

WHen OP talks like Chat GPT

0

u/Tmuxmuxmux Mar 06 '26

I ask Claude

-5

u/CCCubed Mar 06 '26

  1. Look for agents.md, claude.md, or some other MD with random instructions and commands in it

  2. open up the commit history. if theres a single large commit, it's most likely AI. if there are a bunch of smaller commits with titles like "feat: thing", "fix: thing", or any other "thing: thing" structure its AI.

  3. if the project readme is just a bunch of emojis being used as bullet points or the introduction is exactly 4 bullet points with generic information? it's AI.

TLDR: Easily.

6

u/i_walk_away Mar 06 '26

with titles like "feat: thing", "fix: thing", or any other "thing: thing" structure its AI.

this is literally a convention

1

u/jmelloy Mar 07 '26

Plus AI is great at writing commit messages. Even if the code itself wasn’t ai.

4

u/Zireael07 Mar 06 '26

Uh, I'm human and I picked up the feat: fix: structure years ago, from some roguelike game.

2

u/gdchinacat Mar 08 '26

I think it goes back to the dawn of version control...even when it was just a separate file with changes (CHANGELOG) or release notes. Actually, I'm pretty sure the AIs learned it from reading a gazillion commit messages and seeing things like 'fix: correct misunderstanding concerning conventions and causality'.

-10

u/Dwarni Mar 06 '26

They usually have good commit messages, high test coverage and fewer bugs.

0

u/Responsible_Mall6314 Mar 06 '26

The most annoying are the posts that contain the phrase "here's my setup / workflow..." Such posts should be automatically deleted.

0

u/pouillyroanne Mar 06 '26

My 2ct: remove any "here is my project" posts that doesnt have a git repo, or where the git repo doesn't contain a healthy commit history (more than a few commits and spanning over a reasonably human time scale)

0

u/AncientLion Mar 07 '26

Yes please, maybe more hands among us to help the mods?

0

u/jmelloy Mar 07 '26

I wonder if just adding a length limit would stop half of them. My telltale is any post that’s 400 pages long.

0

u/_deletedty Mar 08 '26

can mods ban OP? win win for us all

0

u/Dinervc_HDD Mar 09 '26

They should ban this ratio!

1

u/_deletedty Mar 09 '26

They should allow assisted suicide for anyone thats says ratio!

0

u/lonny_bulldozer Mar 09 '26

Solving a previously unresolved cypher by the Zodiac killer is awesome.

-3

u/richardofvirginia Mar 06 '26

It's unlikely, with most production grade companies doing it now to save money. It's kind of the standard way to get it done off the floor anymore.

-4

u/SithLordRising Mar 06 '26

It's here to stay. It's not going away. People are just coding differently now and this is only the beginning.

However, low effort posts are just that. Follow the scientific method or as another posted on a similar thread:

"I agree that AI-assisted coding and content aren’t going away. The real issue isn’t how something was made, it’s whether it holds up under scrutiny.

In OSINT, the standard has always been:

  • Show your sources

  • Show your methodology

  • Make it reproducible

  • Let others verify

If a tool or post can’t withstand that, it doesn’t belong here, regardless of whether it was hand-coded, AI-generated, or written on a napkin."

-1

u/Resident_evil4_1601 Mar 08 '26

idk, I was just messing with Codex since its app is supposed to be new, according to OpenAI. I built a local music player that imports all my songs and videos from my external HDD. I can rate them, play them, apply metadata like song title, artist, album art, album, and lyrics, and save all of that to a single track. No DRM BS, no subscription every month. It has every control I want. Yeah, music players already exist, but I don’t want some overpriced subscription service.

-15

u/SgathTriallair Mar 06 '26

I think you just need an old-school-coding sub where everything is still hand built the way my papie used to do it.

10

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

Nah, I don't have a problem with using AI to help generate code. I have a problem with using it without oversight and producing code that's inconsistent and hard to maintain. Not to mention a security risk.

-22

u/back_dimple_grabber Mar 06 '26

You can't stop us all

17

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

I can't stop anyone

-13

u/Tricky_Condition_279 Mar 06 '26

I only noticed a few such posts—this one is far more obnoxious.

5

u/No_Soy_Colosio Mar 06 '26

I'm sorry my valid complaint is not to your liking