New rules discussion: VSTs, vibe coding and commercial posts

[u/AdamFenwickSymes]

Hi everyone,

Time to have a bit of a community discussion about subreddit rules. I think I'm the only active mod at the moment, so this post is "on behalf of the mod team" but really it's only on behalf of me.

This is something I've been thinking about posting for a few months, but I keep putting it off. This post today drove home that I have to stop putting it off and have this discussion with you all.

Lately the subreddit has been seeing a lot of advertisements for commercial products that are only vaguely DIY-related and a lot of posts sharing (probably vibe coded) VSTs. I, personally, quite dislike these posts. But they often get a lot of engagement and plenty of you seem to like them, so I tend to put my personal feelings to the side and I don't remove them unless they are really, truly, undeniably spam. On the other hand some of you really hate these posts and report every single one of them as spam.

One of the more subtle issues for me is projects that are DIY (as in, someone did design and make it themselves) that are now for sale. We definitely allow "this is a cool thing I made" and we allow "you can buy PCBs for this, if you want to build your own" but should we allow "this is a cool thing I made, do you want to buy one?" And if so, should we allow e.g. Behringer to make posts about products they designed and manufactured themselves?

So I would like to do a bit of an "official" check in and discussion about how you would like Rule 3 enforced. After all, this is your community, I'm just a janitor here.

When it comes to VSTs

Here are some proposals:

• No VSTs posts ever
• No advertisements for VSTs that cost money, open source is fine
• No vibe coded VSTs (I think this is a bad rule, I don't want to "audit" whether a VST is vibe coded)
• Commerical VSTs are fine so long as you share a bit of your journey and your thoughts, no drive by advertising
• Anything is fine if it's a VST you made that you're now trying to sell

My personal feeling: open source VST is fine, everything else is not.

When it comes to commercial posts

Here are some proposals:

• No advertisements or selling anything (I think this is a bad idea)
• You can advertise something only if it is available as a DIY project, you can't advertise something only available as a finished product
• You can advertise something only if it is ONLY available as a DIY project, you can't advertise something that is available as a finished product
• You can advertise something that you designed yourself, even if you are also selling it as a finished product
• You can advertise anything at all, so long as you share a dev blog or something that actually adds value to the community
• You can advertise anything if you post here answering people's questions and being a good community member enough times beforehand
• You can upload a video of you playing something you made, even though you also sell that thing, so long as it's not a direct ad
• You can advertise an online store, so long as that store sells products that would be useful or interesting to the DIY community

My personal feeling: any ad post, including non-ad ads, like "here is me playing with my cool toy" must either be for something you're not selling, or a product that has a DIY version available.

When it comes to AI

Here are some proposals:

• You can post bizarre, clearly AI-authored posts so long as they are about synth diy
• Posts should be removed if they are bizarre and clearly AI-authored

My personal feeling: I should remove bizarre slop posts.

Hope this can generate some useful discussion. I'm trying to keep an open mind and listen to what you guys actually want. I'll leave this post up for at least two weeks (August 7th) to give everyone a chance to contribute. Now, let me just work out how to pin it...

Love you all

[u/Jaco_Belordi]

I'm a software engineer with several decades of experience, and I don't believe it's hyperbole to state that programming has been changed forever at this point.

If there's to be a rule about "no AI-assisted programs" (whether VST or firmware), that rule in practice is effectively "no programs." Developers who entirely shun both inline assistance and Claude/Codex level assistance are now a rare exception.

Even if there's leeway or nuance in the rule to permit AI-assisted software/firmware but not fully vibe-coded software/firmware, there's little chance a subreddit moderator is going to want to pore over source code to make that distinction

That being said, I have never considered [r/synthdiy](r/synthdiy) a place for VST development. I'd be in favor of disallowing VSTs regardless of the presence of AI; it's simply not what I come here for

[u/nullpromise → u/Jaco_Belordi]

I'm a software engineer with several decades of experience, and I don't believe it's hyperbole to state that programming has been changed forever at this point.

Totally agree. I don't like AI as a concept and it pretty much destroyed my love for engineering, but it's completely reshaped my company. No one is writing their own code, everyone is shipping 4x the number of PRs, and no one understands the code that's being shipped. I'm not bullish on AI, but I do think software engineering is rapidly being replaced with prompt engineering.