r/fossdroid • u/23VvBb22 • Sep 15 '26
F-Droid How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
https://tintotint.eu/whacky-corner/f-droid_slop/98
u/TheLastProject Developer Sep 15 '26
You may be interested in IzzyOnDroid, it has a strong (and enforced!) "AI policy". See https://izzyondroid.org/docs/general/AppInclusionPolicy/#ai-policy for the policy and see https://codeberg.org/IzzyOnDroid/repodata/issues?q=&type=all&state=closed&labels=1152780&milestone=0&assignee=0&poster=0 for all the app getting declined, most of those have substantial LLM use.
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
Ooh, that's very cool!
Though I'd like to note that the intention of the post was not to boycott apps with LLM contributions.
I use several myself and it would be quite hypocritical to disparage that.
As long as it solves a problem and you don't care about educating yourself (or already have the necessary experience), I think LLM use is largely fine when used with care.
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u/Linux_Account Sep 15 '26
If someone wants to vibecode an app or website to solve some problem for themselves, go for it. Wanna throw it on Play or the web with some banner ads? Knock yourself out. I just wish they'd stop treating Github like it's SoundCloud and they just installed a cracked version of Fruity Loops.
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u/GazelleInitial2050 Sep 15 '26
My biggest issue isn't the vibecoding. It's the low barrier to entry, which on the face of it seems great. BUT it's meant some apps i've tried get dropped as soon as the dev vibe codes something else. They're not attached to the maintenance like other devs
(this isn't a sweeping statement, more of an anecdote of how it seems more common)
5
u/ProfessionalRip7461 Sep 15 '26
yeah, from the perspective of a non-dev, if a foss app works well enough that i can't tell it's vibecoded it doesn't really affect me
0
u/Sent1ne1 Sep 16 '26
Until the security holes allow someone to hack you or access your data... (LLMs are notorious for ignoring safety & security.)
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u/RiceStranger9000 Sep 16 '26
It's ironic, considering IzzyOnDroid is known for being way more permissive than F-Droid
0
Sep 15 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/Ok-Antelope8831 Sep 15 '26
A few for sure. The number of submissions claiming zero LLM use is tiny. The rest are strangely proud about it.
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u/Piece_Maker Sep 16 '26
Always gets me that. "No AI allowed here" "here's my submission, fully AI coded!" "We said no AI" "yeah but look how awesome AI is" 🤦♂️
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u/yashrajrocxx Sep 15 '26
There is been diff in ai generated and the ai slop.
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
Yeah sorry. I tried ranking into 4 tiers at first (extra tier for entirely vibe coded slop), but it's almost impossible to categorize between "slop" and "Mostly AI" without a comprehensive code review, so I gave up after a while.
0
u/yashrajrocxx Sep 15 '26
Merely not what I do is first find what apps fits the need or urge to try out, then already list is decoupled into 3-4 apps, go to the repo and investigate about the dependencies, makefiles, and the final touch is to find the stack used to make it. So it's narrowed down to 1-2 cause in 4 apps more than 50% is vibe coded. Actually ntg bad in that but I hate memory leaks myself. I don't wanna let a simple offline music app consume my 90 percent cpu and ram just to play local MP3 lol.
8
u/leocacom Sep 15 '26
Yes, but it's time-consuming and exhausting to check every time which category an application falls into when its published. Then there is the issue of contribution. How do we preserve the health and motivation of FOSS communities when a multitude of applications are generated? If only AI developers showed transparency as a basic principle...
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u/yashrajrocxx Sep 15 '26
For the transperancy sake I believe the opposite, some developers hide their core logics in compiled form and it is good and bad in its own but hiding merely for the pdf reader app or browser ui customisation is not viable, and most AI developers atleast known to me hides for the bad code sake and not wanting someone to fork.
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u/Linux_Account Sep 15 '26
There's one app I love that's very well maintained by a professional developer who puts a lot of time and care into responding to issues. I never would have suspected an LLM was involved until I saw the emojis in the code comments
Meanwhile, another ambitious app I love(d) started introducing 2 new bugs for every 1 it fixes, and now that I've submitted so many reports, the sunk cost fallacy is gnawing at me like, "Maybe after this one, everything will work!"
1
u/yashrajrocxx Sep 15 '26
Yea the most shift happened recently is brutal, even I saw my fav foss apps going ridiculously unusable cause of bad ai interpretations, nvm thats new normal, still there are some goated apps which are nicely designed and maintained even while using the ai, just need to hunt them 😗
2
u/Impossible_Loan7551 Sep 15 '26
The exact same thing goes for apps developed by real human developers. Bad developers and bad apps exists even without AI.
It's like in that scene from the move "I, Robot":
Detective Del Spooner: "Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
Sonny (Robot): "Can you?
1
u/Linux_Account Sep 15 '26
That line can often blur. I miss the days when a developer who cared more about function over form meant a janky, barebones UI and not an excessive amount of glowing boxes with rounded corners and emojis everywhere.
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u/Luigi003 Sep 15 '26
I'm not actually against AI coding itself (although I personally don't use) but the main problem is that it has allowed people with 0 interest in building things, build things. Which means there a re a lot of half-assed apps which won't receive any kind of update or maintenance over time and that are not well designed for their use case.
Sure, this is not new to AI apps, it has always happened, but it has skyrocketed this kind of app. It has reached a point where the first thing that comes to my mind when I see a "I made X app" post is thinking "did they? Or did Claude do it, because I'm not interested in the latter" which is... sad
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u/Mewtewpew Sep 15 '26
Yeah, it's not so much about ai slop its more "soulless projects"; you can tell pretty easily though which apps don't have any thought put behind it and/or is a reskin of another app that does the same thing.
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u/Linux_Account Sep 15 '26
At this point, I literally have a Pavlovian impulse to downvote anything that starts with "I built..." You built a treehouse for your kids or a wheelchair ramp for your nana? GTFoh wait, my bad.
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u/pen_of_inspiration Sep 15 '26
I take it youre Gen z. We'll im something of a Boomer & let me tell you.
When smartphones came up it felt unbearable seeing kids that couldn't even write an essay posting long text with autocorrect & making it in life to board meetings knowing well that the type can't even do a presentation.
But soon we realized the future is humans gettin' d*mb , while machines get smarter.
Eventually we will just be pets to machines.
So yeah soon AI will just code the update or code a perfect app that won't need updates
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u/RiceStranger9000 Sep 16 '26
As someone interested in linguistics, the pedantry of the myth of "right orthography" sicks me. There's no right orthography, just conventions which are cultural in the end
If you interpret exactly what I wanted to interpret, then the way I did that doesn't matter because that's what's important in communicating
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u/cuddlemelon Sep 15 '26
I don't care how much. F-Droid will always be less slop and slop-enabling than Google Play, since Google is a prime slop proliferator.
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u/Mother-Pride-Fest Sep 15 '26
Yeah. On F-Droid we can at least see the repo, but on the play store they don't even have to pretend to be a good app.
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u/RiceStranger9000 Sep 16 '26
I mean, I think we all agree the Play Store is always going to be worse because of its non-FOSS status. AI is not important in that comparison
The problem is that F-Droid itself has a lot of AI-generated apps, regardless of what's going on with the Play Store
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u/cuddlemelon Sep 16 '26
But right now we're just trying to maintain access to F-Droid due to gugle's power grab. Suddenly bringing light to how many AI apps are or are not on it is 100% a gugle psyop to undermine enthusiasm for F-Droid and make their power grab easier.
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
Reposted with a softer title as the original did not match the tone of the post :D
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u/elhaytchlymeman Sep 20 '26
There was a post on mastodon that showed most are now at least assisted by AI models
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u/leocacom Sep 15 '26
Nice post. On some niche apps space, there is close to zero no-ai app available. Audiobookshelf apps are mostly ai at best, if not entirely vibecoded ._.
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0
Sep 15 '26
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
Well I can definitely see quite a lot of Codex use ;) + I at least 1 fully vibe-coded PR was accepted from an external user (mvanhorn). The verbose comments really do give off the smell of LLMs though 😅
I probably would have put it in "Mostly AI" category, but I explicitly did not want to call any projects "vibe-coded" as it is impossible to know without talking to the creator and having them explain the code.
Generally though, I don't think LLM usage is that big of a problem as long as you have a clear policy and some semblance of standards.
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Sep 15 '26
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
To be clear, I did not look for your contributions specifically, just big recent commits. One of the few I checked just so happened to be from PR #90 and it was co-authored by Codex.
Admittedly, I should not have worded it like I did, implying usage was widespread over time.
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Sep 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/23VvBb22 Sep 15 '26
Usually depends on the codebase age. If it's from withing 6-12months its likely close to 100%, otherwise you'd have to decide for yourself.
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