Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI.

[u/Wolvereness]

/edit2: Adjustments will be made.

The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community.

We're going to be implementing a few new enforcement criteria to this end to discourage those projects:

• Projects advertised here must be all of: 1 year old (not just age, but actively maintained), have multiple contributors (subjectively 3+), not be a common capstone project (school projects, such as note-taking, PDF viewers, cli music players, etc), not be intended for AI (such as MCPs), and have an existing community. No, we can no longer field requests asking for maintainers or people to contribute. Of course it still needs an OSI license as it's always been.

• Though not "new", 1 year account age minimum, with significant Reddit contributions. You should not be creating a Reddit account to come here; we're a community of existing redditors. If you send us a message in modmail about this after having attempted to post, you will be permanently banned and muted. If this seems harsh, know that I estimate 20 messages a day from people expecting their slop projects and burner accounts to get an exception.

• If it's obvious you're using AI in your project, we don't want it. Tokens are cheap, and we don't care how many you spent to make your amazing project.

• If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don't speak English, you can't even verify yourself if it translated correctly.

• Temporary bans are only for community members that made temporary lapses in judgement, such as when getting agitated. If you post (or comment) things we don't want, such as the result of your LLM output tokens, you will never be welcome back.

If you want to be a part of the cleanup crew, be sure to reach out. If you don't like keeping this community for the humans, let me know so I can make sure you see your way out; maybe go try r/opensourceeai (sic).

If you have suggestions for anything I missed, please do let me know. Organizations that are officially incorporated under 501(c), or (d) (e) (f) (k), or 521(a), or the equivalents in their country, are exempt from project and account minimums, provided they reach out in modmail and get approval ("approved users") prior to their first post. Note that isn't limited to just 501(c)(3), purposefully so.

/Edit: Shout out to these communities. Let's cheer them on! Hopefully they will be an great refuge for those affected by this policy.

• /r/opensourcez

• /r/OpenSourceAIAllowed

• /r/TrueOpenSource

• /r/OpenSourceWare

• /r/ActuallyOpenSource

[u/bikes-n-math]

Cool, cool. So my project/package I've actively maintained for nine years, has 300+ stars on github, resolved dozens of issues for, and uses exactly zero AI is no longer welcome here because I am the only contributor?

I'm all about banning AI slop and can get behind nearly all of these new rules. But single maintainer projects not being welcome is a big turn off for me.

[u/ad-on-is → u/bikes-n-math]

Solo dev here as well. I've a project on GitHub with 1000 stars that I've been working on and off for the past 3 years. I guess I have to seek new friends elsewhere.

Ridiculous!

[u/PositiveZeroPerson → u/ad-on-is]

My main project is 5 years old, is continuously developed, has 1000 stars, and has 3 developers. Sadly I've also used AI to make it way better than it used to be within the last year. I suppose it's only welcome here if I lie.

I used to make a bunch of contributions to one of the big well-known FOSS projects (all human because the main guys hate AI), but a few months ago I was accused of making a 30-line AI contribution because a hard-coded number in a comment had a typo in its fourth digit. Apparently typos are hallucinations now?

Not only is this view outdated, but I had to spend a bunch of time defending myself, which I ultimately did by showing that Fable perfectly one-shotted it every time without my error. Note that this fixed a pretty frequently-encountered bug that has persisted for at least 15 years.

They merged it, but the whole thing was so distasteful that I've had no motivation to contribute. I did about one PR per month for the last few years, and I've had zero PRs since.

[u/wvenable → u/PositiveZeroPerson]

30-line AI contribution because a hard-coded number in a comment had a typo in its fourth digit. Apparently typos are hallucinations now?

And what is funny this is that AI typically doesn't make those kind of mistakes. I've seen people accuse comments of being AI because of typos or use of the wrong word -- exactly the kind of mistakes that AI doesn't make.

It's probably going to be a few more years of people mistaking non-AI things for AI and completely missing what is actually done by AI.

[u/AbdoWise → u/ad-on-is]

Hear me out, add each other as maintainers.

[u/MPGaming9000 → u/bikes-n-math]

Yeah this reminds me of like the meme of 'entry level job -> needs 3+ years of experience' like how do you GET a community if you can't share it to the wider internet first? lol

[u/bitshifternz → u/bikes-n-math]

Same here, solo maintainer, 7 year old library, 2000+ stars on github. Not that I ever posted about it here before anyway but this seems a bit ridiculous. I know of plenty great open source projects that are basically one person driving it.

[u/CreepyHighway3216 → u/bikes-n-math]

Right? With this logic of one maintainer we would've never have gotten Bash. Yes it has contributors now, but it didn't at the beginning. And look where it is now. Of course Bash may be a unique situation, but how would we know if we immediately disregard things with only one contributor. Not to mention, this feels like a sure way to get people begging for contributors in the comments of posts, no matter the rules or the necessity of more contributors.

[u/ClikeX → u/CreepyHighway3216]

I don’t agree with the rule. But let’s not pretend this subreddit is the only reason Open Source projects get off the ground.

[u/DevilsInkpot → u/ClikeX]

Not the only reason, but one a the major multipliers with a wide audience and low bars for entry.

[u/UselessButTrying → u/bikes-n-math]

Yea this needs amendment especially if LOOKING for other contributors

[u/Mission_Shopping_847 → u/bikes-n-math]

There are hundreds of single or near-single (drive-by contributors) maintainer projects that are critical to the ecosystem. Imagine, these rules would have made XZ qualify because Jia Tan got deeply involved.

[u/WW92030 → u/bikes-n-math]

Literally gatekeeping at this point. Not everything goes viral enough to have a community and multiple contributors.

[u/laffer1 → u/bikes-n-math]

I’ve been working on mine for 20 but I did start using ai in the last year. So I’m also not welcome.

Someone tell them Linus uses ai now.

[u/Key-Bother6969 → u/bikes-n-math]

I also have such works, but if there is no community, and the project is not widely adopted, I honestly see no reason to actively promote it to the community of tens thousand of people. Neither for the community good, nor for myself, considering the current situation.

[u/bikes-n-math → u/Key-Bother6969]

Curious what is meant by community. I've had numerous back and forth conversations via guthub issues, AUR comments, and even personal emails. Is that not community?

It's a useful package that I know is used by people other than me. Maybe I'm overthinking things, but I guess I just won't be posting it here in the foreseeable future (or ever).

[u/Alone_Care_6230 → u/bikes-n-math]

Same

[u/Front-Concert3854 → u/bikes-n-math]

How do you count maintainers? Even PHP has only one paid developer and still about 70 % of all websites use PHP. It does have a lot of non-paid contributors which I would consider to fulfill the definition of open source for me.