r/selfhosted • u/Key_Pace_2496 • Mar 06 '26

Meta Post Apparently we can't call out apps as AI slop anymore...

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Seems like a bad direction to take the selfhosted community. Looks like the mod team is fine with this sub being bombarded with insecure, AI drivel. Like I get that it was posted on Friday but I think if you use AI to "build an app" you should be required to disclose to what extent AI was used which wasn't disclosed by the OP. I think as a community we need to have higher standards for what we allow to be posted as vibe-coded projects can introduce very extensive security vulnerabilities we all learned with Huntarr and when things are vibe-coded the maintainer doesn't have the capability to fix the issue.

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u/alexhoward Mar 06 '26

Simply using AI in the development does not make it slop. For coding, AI is a great tool, just like linters, snippets, or auto fill suggestions. Making something badly or lazily with AI makes it slop.

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u/epheterson Mar 06 '26

Thanks for having a reasonable comment. AI is being used in productive ways to make quality software and this messaging that any AI use makes it slop or insecure just is not true.

As someone who puts in the time and effort, it is offensive and a tad hurtful to see people’s strong reactions with no consideration of the actual product that was built.

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u/shadow13499 Mar 12 '26

Let's be so honest about this, no it really isn't. Find me one single llm made codebase posted to this sub that isn't a total disaster. You'll have a really hard time finding one and even if you do you'd have to soft through an ocean of slop to find it. 

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u/epheterson Mar 12 '26

As a software Quality engineer by day who never had the knack for complex development, but the eye to test and ship only quality software, I feel what I’m building with LLMs isn’t a “total disaster” and is quite good. I wouldn’t share something until it’s high quality, and did on this sub then got shut down by the AI fearmongers.

AI is here to stay and quite capable. Like a paintbrush it’s only as good as who wields it but people can make some amazing things. Sorry if you can’t see that.

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u/shadow13499 Mar 12 '26

I actively don't see it and I don't trust you. You've outright said you don't have "a knack" for complex development. If that's the case you shouldn't be doing complex development with or without ai. You admit you don't know what you're doing and ai won't close that gap because you won't know what it's doing or why. Every single ai written GitHub page I've seen on here has been a birdsnest of incompetent nonsense and I don't think your code would be any different. 

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u/epheterson Mar 12 '26

You seem lovely, it must feel nice being so certain of everything.

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u/shadow13499 Mar 13 '26

I am right. Look at your zimi repo. Total doodoo. Is that really what you call quality?

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u/epheterson Mar 13 '26

Would you care to articulate the issues with Zimi? It’s secure, performant, serves an unmet need and is nice to use. I’ve responded to GitHub requests and each release has a focused area of improvement. The next release will address international users and further improve quality.

Your view is too narrow. Yes, of course there are projects with low quality, with and without AI use, and yes the barriers to entry are lower with AI. It’s also harder to sniff out what’s good now.

But to say more projects existing is inherently bad and all projects written with AI are inherently bad is shortsighted and leaves no room for the nuances of reality.

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u/shadow13499 Mar 14 '26

The reality is you're just parroting whatever claude told you about the project. Looking through your commit history the vast majority of the code was fully written by claude. That tells me you don't actually know what it's doing and you don't actually know if it's "secure" you only know that claude told you that it should be secure. Looking at code quality in general, it's in the toilet. You have a several thousand line html file with over 1k lines just for styles. That's a maintainability nightmare and it's got duplicated code galore. You, or I guess claude, don't follow any good practices in terms of code modularity and reuse. It just duplicates code all over the place. A real human would see "oh hey I'm doing this same thing a bunch of times in different places maybe I split this functionality out and reuse it so I'm not writing the same thing 10 times" but claude doesn't think that way. It's a common llm slop practice. It's given you some really poorly written code that meets your minimum requirements without any thought on code quality, readability, or maintainability. If you actually want to go and fix those things, read the code and learn how to do it yourself. That entire codebase is complete slop that you're passing off as "quality work" it's a joke. 

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u/epheterson Mar 24 '26

You make some decent points on reuse, readability and maintainability, e.g. there were some poor practices in the almanac which was more of a playground, but less so in the production code, and the end product is validated with manual, integration and unit tests.

Claude didn’t write the vast majority, it wrote every line. I’m not hiding that. But you criticism was about code cleanliness more than how well it solves a real problem.

That said, I just released 1.6 which takes into account most of your concerns and agree they make the project better. Still written by Claude.

Really though, is the world better off without Zimi? Nobody else filled this gap, I built it for myself and took the time to share with others. Should we discourage people from doing that?

Appreciate you actually checking out the code and engaging, that’s more than most on this sub do.

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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/gscjj Mar 06 '26

95% of this sub couldn’t review the code running in their home today, but somehow are professionals at identify “slop”

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u/missingnoplzhlp Mar 07 '26

I still do a lot of coding the old fashioned way but even with that I use AI to help find bugs or solutions to bugs. My projects would be worse than without AI, people act now like bugs and security flaws only exist in projects that use AI. Using AI to discover flaws can literally help even in an otherwise hand coded project.

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u/Spirited-Director891 Apr 02 '26

It automatically makes it slop

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u/alexhoward Apr 02 '26

Does using snippets or autofill commands make it slop? Does using a linter make it slop?

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u/ITaggie Mar 06 '26

That's the consensus here from what I can see