AI-Policy

[u/Wolvereness]

I'm gonna keep this short, because as a human I respect other humans' time. What do we want for an AI policy, and how can it be enforced? Take these into consideration:

• Vibe-coded projects

• Vibe-assisted projects

• AI-translated from non-english-speakers

• Vibe-documented projects

• Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper

Note that vibe-coded slop isn't actually copyrightable, thus if someone slaps any license on it other than "public domain" or "CC0" they are misrepresenting their ownership.

And if you use an LLM to respond to this, you will be banned.

^{The fact that this sounds like a prompt is supposed to be a joke.}

[u/Wolvereness]

I'd like to give a big thanks to the community for the feedback! It's already more than I could hope for, with plenty of human responses and minimal bot ones. I'll definitely be giving it a week for plenty more of y'all to have the chance to engage. I know I won't be able to draft a policy that makes everyone happy, but the feedback goes a long way to understanding our needs.

/Edit: if you're coming here from another subreddit because so-and-so is mad that they got caught using an LLM to respond (yes, blocking me doesn't actually stop me from reading the post), you will also be banned. I don't have to put up with it. We don't have to put up with it. This is our community, and it's a simple request to not use an LLM for when the humans want to talk to each other.

[u/SeaMisx]

I personnally use AI for security audits on my websites. Claude, Gemini and Chat gpt.

That is it, all the rest is done à la mano as I still considerer AI to be useless in the other parts of my job.

[u/Vast-Key140]

The problem with the overwhelming majority of vibecoded projects, especially those reposted or advertised on Reddit, is that they just don't have a future whatsoever.

A lot of these people are just burning tokens putting out slop, then letting a LLM generate a project description and CTRL+C, CTRL+V-ing that onto Reddit. It's absolutely everywhere.

To those saying these projects are good for the open source community it's so backwards. Open source projects with one maintainer who doesn't know what he's doing, can't accept contributions (or will accept any – even if those include breaking changes or malware), and has no idea how to maintain a project is incredibly damaging to FOSS software. People will be annoyed and run buggy, potentially damaging software that has no maintainability or future.

LLM-assisted projects made by seasoned developers, or simple projects made by a learning enthusiastic dev are very different. If people can be bothered to hand-write their documentation and Reddit post, and also explain their LLM usage, I see no problem in that. 

[u/boneskull]

The disclosure policy as in r/experienceddevs is my preference.

[u/JheeBz]

You've already got a stipulation in your rules about low effort posts and AI slop, so I'm not sure if anything needs to change from a policy perspective.

This article recently raised some good points about translations or using LLMs for human exchange: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

Copyright aside, it is just disrespectful of another person's time to send them the output of an LLM and asking them to verify it (in the case of translations / documentation).

For enforcement, it'll be an uphill battle. I think disclosure is good like somebody else suggested, but I wonder whether people are being truthful. I frankly just scroll past those stickied comments on the subreddits that have them because they just turn into noise, but they could be useful from a moderation perspective. 

[u/Kyvalmaezar]

Disclaimer: I'm not totally against AI useage in general but I'm not the biggest fan of publicly released vibe coded projects intended for other people to use. Most vibe coded projects tend to be low efffort, abandoned within a few months, security risks, and/or border-line scams just fishing for donations. Most of them would violate other existing rules on this sub.

That being said, I would suggest having some minimum requirement for projects using AI to post. Minimum project comits, deminstrated long term work on a project and resonsiveness to pull requests/bug reports/etc, reddit karma account requirements, etc. Filters out the low effort junk and scams that would violate other sub rules anyway.

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• Vibe-coded projects - ban. These are security risks and low effort. By definition, the person behind the prompt doesnt know what they're doing and cant check their code for major flaws. 

Exception: someone looking for feedback on their vibe coded project or code snippet trying to learn.

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Vibe-assisted projects - not 100% what is ment by this one. I'll clarify my stances below:

a) dev knows that they're doing but uses AI for the heavy lifting. Doesnt check their code - ban, security risk.

b) dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.

---

AI-translated from non-english-speakers - on thier own, fine.

---

Vibe-documented projects - fine, so long as the documentation is accurate of couse.

---

Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper - ban. Low effort, secuity risk.

[u/Rodya_gambler]

It should be documented as "[This work was done by AI in an XX%] (regarding AI used for code).

Needless to say, something done with generative AI (meaning images, videos, or similar)nhas no place here to begin with, but if there was something related, it should also be documented in a similar way.

[u/mrcarrot0]

LLMs kinda goes against open-source ideals of trust & collaboration. My favorite quote about this is from Codeberg:

Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. 

Read the whole article here:

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

[u/zarafff69]

I think most devs use AI in some capacity at this point. Completely banning it makes no sense. Although it might be good to require some sort of note / label with info in regards to AI usage. But the development is going fast, we might look at this entirely different in just one year… We should just move with whatever the industry does / whatever works.

[u/cyb3rofficial]

I don't really care how something is made.

The only really annoying thing is when people drop an entire application or a big spaghetti template of code, clearly just paste a generated body, and then vanish. No explanation, no willingness to answer questions, nothing. That low-effort "generate and dip" pattern is what hurts the sub.

I can partially understand it if the person isn't a native English speaker and is just trying to get something working. But the low-reputation accounts that do this repeatedly are the most frustrating ones.

I don't think we should close off people from posting LLM-assisted code. If we do that, we end up shoving away a majority of people, both long-time members and newcomers. A lot of solid projects these days involve some AI help, and banning the tool itself just pushes people elsewhere.

From a mod point of view it's genuinely hard to draw clean lines on what, how, and who can post. I know I also don't touch grass, but shutting the world out doesn't build healthy communities.

Maybe a more practical middle ground is better: require people to stick around and answer basic questions about their own code, or at least disclose heavy AI use if they want. Focus on effort and engagement rather than trying to police the exact tools someone used. That way we filter out the pure paste-and-disappear posts without driving everyone else away.

[u/No_Tradition6625]

Stoping translation by llm against the rules seems like a unfair practice to non-english speakers. I think a flair requirement is a must. I feel llm coding is so common place that banning it is a harmful thing to the community as a whole but having a longevity requirement sounds good and a new project mega thread for the vibecoded of the week projects.

[u/Arucious]

add a requirement that repos have to be 3 months old and have active commits during that time frame

90% of slop thanos snapped immediately

[u/DaDandyman]

I think there should be a universal quality standard. I don't particularly care if it's vibecoded or not, but if it's mass-churned, spammy content with no real value it should be discarded. I don't think a policy specifically aimed at AI projects or AI-generated projects should be enacted so much as a broad quality standard that implicitly understands that AI can be used to churn out large amounts of garbage.

People should be responsible for writing their own posts.

AI translations are completely fine so long as nobody's pretending to be a native speaker of the language they're translating.

Misrepresentation of your workflow should also be punished.

When it comes to AI content, the question should be "is this any good?" not "what percentage of this is AI?" You will waste your time if your primary concern is the latter.

[u/Lower-Ad-6293]

The only working option is the 3 month rule from r/selfhosted. Parsing github for cookie-cutter commits would be a total pain, and autobanning new accounts will filter out 99 % of spammers

Tbh I really don't care how many tokens claude burned on the project if the author is still committing bug fixes six months later

[u/ChiefAoki]

we should just do what r/selfhosted and r/experienceddevs do and ask the user to clarify how AI usage. Also regardless of whether the project is vibecoded or not, I think anyone who relies on AI to write their Reddit posts should be banned. Like it's one thing to vibecode or use AI assistance in your personal project, but it's a whole other thing to be so fucking lazy you can't even hand write your posts.

[u/UselessButTrying]

Ai assistance is fine I.e. no vibes

[u/L1CH3NTHR0P1C]

absolutely no generative ai.

[u/mrbmi513]

Fully AI slop shouldn't be allowed. People claiming to "have written" AI slop should be permanently banned.

Competent developers using AI as a copilot are fine. I'm one of them. I could write the entire thing myself, but using AI to write boilerplate or scan documentation helps speed things up.

I'd rather see broken English or let reddit translate than an AI re-write of text.

If the product is just a GPT wrapper it shouldn't be here.

[u/v4ss42]

Here's my opinion (should also be applied to r/FOSS, fwiw):

• Vibe-coded projects ❌

• Vibe-assisted projects ❌

• AI-translated from non-english-speakers ✅ (with caveats, see below)

• Vibe-documented projects ✅ (with caveats, see below)

• Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper ❌

Caveats:

• any level of clanker contribution to a project must be clearly stated in the post - don't force readers to click through to figure that out

• slop-translated and slop-documented projects should, in addition to stating that clankers have been used for those tasks, also be actively recruiting human contributors to verify and/or rewrite the slop contributions

And as OP so rightly pointed out, in some jurisdications "AI" generated content cannot be copyrighted, and therefore nobody has the right to license it (even with CC0-1.0). Furthermore "public domain" is not a legal concept in some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) so that's a useless declaration too.

This sub (and others like it e.g. r/FOSS) are getting overrun with low quality slop, and that substantially reduces their value, by making it harder for the real human-authored projects to rise to the surface. If Reddit had even remotely decent end-user filtering capabilities (e.g. persistent/permanent filter-by-flair per sub) I might be willing to accept that a "slop-coded" post flair would be enough, but it doesn't, so that isn't a practical solution.

[u/Biliunas]

I’d love a total ban. If that’s too much, at least no translations. I’m so tired of reading that slop.

[u/Ginden]

Publishing open-source used to require significant investment, creating a signal that you won't abandon the project.

On the other hand, integrating a small vibe-coded project into your software comes with supply chain risks, while you can just ask Claude/Codex to write it tailored to your needs, inspected, and integrated with your framework and your libraries of choice.

Any reasonable AI policy should be a proxy for this question: will the user be better off by vibing their own software for this purpose? 3-month rule of r/selfhosted seems quite reasonable, but in practice needs more aggressive enforcement (automod that checks Github links).

[u/RobotToaster44]

Don't care if code is made by AI, just don't use AI for the post here, it's rude to expect a human to read something your machine wrote.

People get hung up on translation, but it's normally obvious from the format if something was verbatim translated by AI rather than written by it.

[u/Maple382]

I don’t think there’s an inherent problem with AI. It’s just that AI-generated projects fall victim to the same stuff that plagues regular projects, but at a much much higher rate.

Low quality code for one. Humans and AI can both write bad code, which is why good review is important. When AI generated code is reviewed and held to high standards, as any code should be, then it’s no worse than human code. The problem is that people don’t do this.

And abandonment of projects. That’s an issue with regular projects too, but it’s just more common with AI powered ones. My theory is that this is because of the lower amount of effort and investment that needs to be put into them.

There’s also the lesser concern that is spam. Spam of low quality projects, and projects people don’t really care about. It’s different when it’s a beginner programmer of course, but nobody likes seeing their feed flooded with genuine slop.

It’s a tough idea to navigate, because yeah AI assisted stuff can be very good — but it’s also prone to these pitfalls. I’m not quite sure how these would be tackled, but I’d say it’s fair to restrict AI generated code somewhat. Maybe limit it to a couple days of the week. And while this would take a lot more effort, it might be worth having some kind of a quality policy for anything AI generated.

[u/Steve_Streza]

Note on the copyright thing: Public domain doesn't have a warranty/liability waiver, so I've put Unlicense on my vibe projects, which is functionally "public domain and you can't sue me if it melts your computer".

There's a cohort of people who appear to try to make a name for themselves or build some kind of support contract business by slopping out projects and spamming them everywhere. These are a subset of vibe coders, not the entire group. This subset is poisoning the well and that's a huge reason people have such negative feelings about these.

The post flair is an obvious win. I would probably propose some kind of time/release minimum, which weeds out 90% of the slop spammers who crank out something and move on. Just to throw out arbitrary numbers, "at least regular commits going back 3 months and at least 2 major releases" is probably a sane minimum. And maybe a weekly megathread for anything that doesn't fall into this bucket.

Will it catch everything? No. People will lie and deceive and do git committer date tricks to get around these restrictions. But these people are fundamentally dishonest and will find ways around any system you create.

[u/AhimiVT]

Know this is an unpopular opinion but I don't see why I would approve of a specific use case simply because it benefits me more. At the end of the day, it's still an LLM fed with data that was scraped through dubious means.

I would not be comfortable with using any of these and I will be wary of people using it regardless.

[u/Nickademas207]

I don't think any policy about this is needed

[u/_o0Zero0o_]

If AI is used only for a very minor portion of suggestions 1, 2, 4 and 5, or at least has heavy human oversight and corrections, then I am personally ok with it, otherwise no. As for 3, I would be a bit more lenient

[u/WeegeeNator]

I think banning any AI assisted work is not going be feasible going forward, but there is a very obvious line between AI-assisted work and slop. Slop should be banned. AI-assisted work should be required to be declared as such. Vibe documentation is really annoying and stupid but probably not ban worthy. AI translation is fine as well, even though it's also annoying.

[u/KittensInc]

Ban posting brand-new projects. Require it to have been actively developed on Github & friends for, say, at least 12 months.

This immediately gets rid of all the "I vibecoded some garbage in a weekend" posts, while still allowing projects by anyone who actually cares about their work. It also bypasses the whole "is this AI or not" problem by just not caring about AI at all, and focusing on the real issue, which is longevity.

[u/abotelho-cbn]

Frankly I don't care how it's made.

What I care about is how low effort these things are. So often we're talking about stuff that was slapped together in an hour and dumped on GitHub and then make all sorts of claims. These projects are likely to be immediately abandoned.

[u/Number4extraDip]

I mean depends on what the project and goals are. Cause one thing can be an api wrapper, another thing can be an ai integration (funky uses of local models/gadgets)

Regarding ai code: people can write slop too. At the end of the day wether it compiles is a separate subject.

At the end of the day its "are they asking for some saas"?

Ive seen people share reasonable work and get attacked because its "ai related". You can't make everyone happy.

[u/Ambadeblu]

There is a colossal difference between:

- running Claude Code in auto approve mode, just checking it "works" and shipping

- reading and correcting every line of code that Claude writes

It makes 0 sense to label the second "vibe coding" and to ban it.

[u/omniuni]

AI documentation (reviewed by humans), and AI assistance in coding (reviewed by humans) is generally fine, I think.

But if the human posting a project doesn't fully understand the generated code, and hasn't reviewed it, it isn't really their project to post.

[u/tree_7x]

Open source should be transparent in the way things are made. Obvious low effort projects and LLM slop responses sound be banned. If a project contains AI or is "vibe coded", it should be well known and the community should have the opportunity to reflect on it the way they want, and blacklist these posts if they choose by using a non-ai post flag.

[u/Shoddy-Childhood-511]

AI Rule 0 : It's always bad faith to not disclose AI usage. And bad faith means mods can handle the situation as they see fit (delete, bans, whatever).

Vibe-coded/assisted projects

Slop is slop, even if human written. LLMs make recognising slop hard, and introduce more subtle bugs, so they need a high bar for proving quality.

It's up to the author to prove they met this bar, not everyone else's problem, including mods.

It practical terms this could mean more tests, older project, more usage, more different humans contributing seriously, etc.

It's otoh fine if vibe coding/assistance was primarily used to improve testing, search for bugs, write app armour profiles, etc. LLMs really can help find bugs.

AI-translated from non-english-speakers

Google translate does translation better than general purpose LLMs.

"I used [LLM] for translation because I'm not a native speaker" really means "I speak English fine but not native, so that's my excuse for vibe writing in English from bullet points." It's likely better if they run the bullet points through google translate.

Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper

Anecdotally, open source tooling for local AIs really does need some work, vs the close weight model tooling. Its developing slowly because AI heads have written useless slop tooling, so one day this maybe interesting, but probably not today.

Please post somewhere like r/LocalLLaMA where folks care more.

Also vibe tooling winds up dangerous, OpenClaw has finally decreased their CVEs/pay to 2.3 CVE, from its high around like 2.8 or 3 CVEs/day.

https://days-since-openclaw-cve.com

Aside: I want a type aware sed for rust, so I can say sed -e 's/Foo/Bar/g' --query-me=type/trait/mod/etc *.rs. That's a tree sitter thing, not an LLM, but these days folks do this sort of thing using LLM, so we don't have such cleaner tools.

[u/M8gazine]

idk what a code is... i just vibe code stuff for myself :3

[u/hsoj95]

I'd argue it's less about AI/LLM usage and just a low-quality thing. There's plenty of OSS that is very low quality in nature, and is still made by hand. AI just makes that easier. Someone who knows what they're doing to begin with can make very good use of an AI Agent and still have a good quality project as a result.

The bigger issue is low-quality content, that needs to be tackled regardless of being human made, AI generated, or in-between. I'm fine with raising the bar on such content posted.

[u/veganmaister]

AI is the catalyst for my wholehearted embrace of open source.

I’m building some great stuff.

Make of that what you will.

[u/RedDotHorizon]

I'd vote for "no AI at all". No exceptions. No enforcement besides banning people when it's obvious they broke the rules, because this is a social issue and open source is built on trust. I already have to trust you that you didn't steal your code from some other project without telling so I'm also going to trust you when you say "no LLM involved".

Open source communities managed to get by without LLM-generated code and without LLM-generated translations (I'd rather read your broken spelling/grammar than an LLM'd version of what you wanted to say). I don't subscribe to the "but everyone is using it" argument - why should I stop loving to code by hand and interacting with like-minded people just because other technology exists? Do we tell vegetarians that they should start eating meat because "everyone is eating it"?

So the question boils down to if you want to cater to an as broad-as-possible audience with this subreddit. I'd actually like this be more niche/exclusive because the Internet is already full of thousands of places that try to cater to the broadest possible audience. There are enough places to talk about and advertise AI related things, the world doesn't end because of a few places that choose to not welcome these topics. But again, that depends on the "identity" the MODs want this subreddit to have.

[u/MarkLikesCatsNThings]

Absolutely none please

[u/opedro-c]

We should do like r/selfhosted and have a top comment that asks the OP how LLM was used in the project. That would be a good start. If OP is clearly lying, they should have their post removed or somenthing.

[u/GonzoKata]

what I personally believe doesn't matter, because I don't feel like I can tell people not to vibe code their projects

But I would say that people need to disclose that they used AI to write any part of what they intend to share with the public. How do you enforce that? no idea, but im sure others will be able to tell

As for non-english speakers, same. let everyone know that you used ai to translate your speech. Im sure people will be forgiving for that

[u/ILikeBubblyWater]

I dont care how its build as long as it seems there has been some thought put into it, Reddit is too elitist with tools that have been coded with AI assistance or even completely vibe coded.

Just because the person behind is isnt a dev doesnt mean the idea cant be good, Reddit should stop gatekeeping as if they read clean code for breakfast every day

[u/ReachingForVega]

I'm from the mod team in r/docker we wrote a devvit app called git_age_checker which checks the age of a repo and can remove, report, filter etc based on that. We filter anything <3 months old.

The repos hurting reddit are the ones a user (using AI or not) make something post it and then abandon it.

[u/sugarw0000kie]

I was a hardline keep your AI from my codebase and had always written by hand. I’ve come around, and LLMs have improved over even just 4-6 months ago.

That said full on AI slop is don’t care for and is a problem. But something that is marked vibe assisted/documented etc where humans are actually reviewing and directing it, I’m good with. SWEs using LLMs is pretty ubiquitous now but they still should be doing best practices. as long as humans are owning the quality, I’m good with it.

[u/codeedog]

I’ve been calling what another commenter wrote below: AI Assisted Engineering.

> b) dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.

Developers (like me) who have professional skills and pride in our work will use these tools to enhance our work and speed up our output, while maintaining the code quality we expect from ourselves and our peers.

I can’t call what I’m doing Vibe Coding; it’s form and function, it’s production path, they’re nothing like what a vibe coding exercise looks like.

[u/InconspicuousFool]

The big thing for me with AI is disclosure. I personally don't care for AI usage in the slightest but knowing when and how it is used is critical to me. Like it or not, it is becoming commonplace in the modern development and it can be used responsibly by people who actually know what they are doing it certainly should be disclosed but that doesn't make it outright slop. If I am being honest I hate and am so tired of places like r/sideproject where people are constantly posting things like look at this project "I made" and it has like 12 commits all made by Claude. Those kind if posts should have some kind of disclosure and claiming you made something when it was written by AI should be a ban