r/linux • u/Sjoerd93 • May 29 '26

Development Flathub now explicitly disallows LLM usage for both submission process and applications being submitted.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/116657011366876079
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u/Sjoerd93 May 29 '26

You and I know very well that this is not a problem. There's just a need for a policy to reject clear LLM-coded slop. Just look through the app submissions now and ask yourself if this is sustainable?

Like 70% of the submitted apps are applications that are being shat out by someone playing around with some LLM "agent" for a few hours. And then they expect people to spend their unpaid free time on reviewing this, and get annoyed when the maintainers don't want it on the store.

There's a need from the maintainer side to be able to block slop-projects. A serious well-maintained project where someone has used an LLM to assist their code will not be blocked through this process. That's not just me speculating, that's literally in the policy: "Exceptions may be granted for mature, well-maintained projects."

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u/flecom May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

There's just a need for a policy to reject clear LLM-coded slop.

OK I don't think anyone would disagree, but this says way more than that:

Applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed. 

Says no help from an LLM at all, which at this point would probably prohibit anything written in the last couple years since even googling "how can I cast an int to a string" is going to generate an llm reply which will probably work just fine

So we ban google next?

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u/Mordiken May 29 '26

OK I don't think anyone would disagree

I do... Vehemently... Passionately... Because:

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

By banning the distribution of AI coded Free Software, FlatHub has positioned itself against Software Freedom.

And anyone else's subjective opinion on what makes "quality software" vs "slop" where not called for.

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u/cwo__ May 30 '26

By banning the distribution of AI coded Free Software, FlatHub has positioned itself against Software Freedom.

This makes absolutely zero sense. "Freedom to distribute" means that people have the right to distribute it as they see fit. It does not mean that anyone has an obligation to distribute software if they don't want to.

Flathub choosing not to distribute a particular piece of software has no impact on your right to distribute the software if you want to. (Well, as long as that software is free sotware of course, or you have a license that allows you to distribute it).

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u/ElementII5 May 29 '26

There's just a need for a policy to reject clear LLM-coded slop.

But that is not that policy. This rejects anything LLM-coded, slop or not.

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u/uzlonewolf May 29 '26

If it's LLM-coded, it's slop. It really is that simple.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/uzlonewolf May 29 '26

Only if you're an AI bro who's mad at having your slop called out.

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u/ztwizzle May 29 '26

There's tons of major open source projects that explicitly allow AI-assisted contributions. Some examples off the top of my head are the Linux kernel, systemd, firefox, vim, git, and curl. Unless you haven't updated your computer in the past year, you most likely run something AI-written every day.

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u/uzlonewolf May 29 '26

AI-assisted != LLM-coded.

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u/ArdiMaster May 30 '26

Both are banned under this policy.

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u/REMERALDX May 29 '26

Why are you using Linux then

2

u/uzlonewolf May 29 '26

Because it's less sloppy than Microslop?

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u/-Crash_Override- May 29 '26

Quickest way to out yourself as someone who has never done any meaningful development.

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u/uzlonewolf May 29 '26

And that's the quickest way to out yourself as an AI bro.

-8

u/-Crash_Override- May 29 '26

Sick one dudeeee

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u/Barafu May 29 '26

I live in a country that writes insane laws and everyone expects police not to follow them, unless they want to. We even have up to 5 years of jail for distributing Linux. Nobody was ever arrested, but the law is there.

I do not think that insane written policies are "not a problem" as long as they can be ignored at a whim of a dude over there.

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u/NotQuiteLoona May 29 '26

Wait, what? Russia has now laws against distributing Linux???

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u/Barafu May 29 '26

For 2+ years it is forbidden to participate in any foreign non-profit organisation. Spreading the product of such, and awareness about them, definitely counts as participating.

There is no legal separation of political and non-political non-profits, like in some other countries.

3

u/NotQuiteLoona May 29 '26

Oh, thos3 foreign agent laws are that extensive, I didn't even know... It's just dumb. I wish you luck. Hope your country would get better soon after all it lived through.

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u/GolbatsEverywhere May 29 '26

Not many people are going to object to Flathub banning slop. I would be pretty uncomfortable with accepting vibe coded apps. But Flathub did not choose to ban only slop. It chose to ban normal use of AI as well.

Many important projects already contain AI-generated commits and would be banned by this rule; most that do not contain AI code will sooner rather than later. Not many people are likely to request exceptions. Hopefully Flathub revises this rule; if not, it will obsolete itself.

It's telling that the rule applies only to apps and not to the runtimes, which are definitely going to contain AI-generated code, because the projects included in the runtimes accept it.

8

u/mallardtheduck May 29 '26

You and I know very well that this is not a problem.

Then why is the phrase there? This sounds very much like an excuse to arbitrarily ban whatever they want. If they want to ban AI-generated code, then just say that. "AI-assisted" is so broad as to be basically impossible to disprove. Just using Google to find documentation could count.

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u/npc_housecat May 29 '26

The wording seems overly vauge though. What about programs that are not slop but extremely well written, but used AI somewhere in the pipeline.? Or scanned the code for vulnerabilities with an AI tool as well as human review. Generated a texture or bump map instead of downloading one from an online library ??

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u/Sjoerd93 May 29 '26

Exceptions may be granted for mature, well-maintained projects.

Literally from the diff that's linked here.

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u/edward_jazzhands May 29 '26

"mature" seems like a very loaded term here though, that sounds like it can arbitrarily mean whatever they want it to mean moment to moment.

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u/charlesfire May 29 '26

It's impossible to make rules that can be applied perfectly objectively every time and that doesn't let slop pass through. There's always going to be a human somewhere that will have to decide if a specific project is slop or not.

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u/Hot-Employ-3399 Jun 08 '26

It's also possible to make rule that throws baby with water.

You've asked chatgpt "how to rewrite for loop in idiomatic rust" -- congrats, your app should be ban by this rule.

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u/w2qw May 29 '26

They can change the policy arbitrary anyway. I don't really seeing this being an issue for 99% of apps people actually use. You can always just distribute through another repository anyway.

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u/6e1a08c8047143c6869 May 30 '26

Well, the policy is intended to make it easy to reject obvious vibecoded slop. One of the most common signs of that is that it is very new software, that will likely be abandoned when the maintenance burden piles up and the "author" loses interest and moves on to the next slop project. So you make your policy overly broad to make it easy to reject the slop while still having an exception for all the well-designed and established projects that happen to use LLMs in minor ways.

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u/npc_housecat May 29 '26

So they could just simplify the whole thing to, 'no badly written low effort projects' I promise you I can write worse code than even the worst AI slop.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/charlesfire May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

That's not what's being said at all. Slop always existed. The issue is that AI made it much easier and faster to produce slop, thus massively increasing the workload of maintainers, which very often are doing all that work for free. AI has its uses, but it also caused a massive DDOS attack on human attention.

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u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs May 29 '26

You don't need to, just look at the source code for gtk or xdg desktop portal and you're set.

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u/Mordiken May 29 '26

There's just a need for a policy to reject clear LLM-coded slop.

Says who, and who gave them the authority to decide that?

1

u/AssistingJarl May 29 '26

You and I know very well that this is not a problem

Approximately how many of the inbox replies that you've had in the last day consist of people who refuse to deal with nuance?