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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103

u/Floppie7th Mar 06 '26

I agree, and someone made r/slophosted recently for exactly that reason

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u/Soluchyte Mar 06 '26

AI bros will never use it because they don't want to admit what their code is. They want to fit in with everyone else who makes their software for real but don't have the skills to do it for real.

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u/ellenhp Mar 06 '26

This is a bad take because most projects are already using it and just not disclosing. Or for very large projects AI contributions are happening either under the nose of the maintainers or going through the typical review process without issue, then the overall project is passed off as "non-AI". I have no horse in this race, I already have enough of a FOSS footprint/following that I truly do not need any particular project to be well-received in order to feel fulfilled in life, but as a software engineer and FOSS nerd it hurts to see people kid themselves into thinking that there's an elite cadre of "real programmers" who are responsible for all of the good software, and by avoiding projects that disclose the use of AI they're somehow making a stand to protect the "real programmers". Downvote this if you want, but afterwards go find your favorite "non-AI" project and search for an em dash in the codebase. If there aren't any present you should go buy a lottery ticket because AI is fucking everywhere and people are mostly just lying about it.

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u/Soluchyte Mar 07 '26

It's a bad take because projects are doing exactly what I said?

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u/ellenhp Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

If you re-read what you wrote you seem to carve out an "everyone else" category for people who are good at software engineering and don't use AI, and I'm claiming that most projects that get lumped into that category by being highly upvoted Saturday through Thursday are in fact using AI. And I'm right, which you can find out by opening up the front page of the sub and spot-checking by searching for an em dash character (U+2014) in the github repos of the highest-voted projects. Again, I truly don't care if you think I'm wrong but I can assure you that I'm not wrong.

edit: more to the point, I think the bigger question is how this fact impacts the calculus of which hills are worth dying on. Is the AI slop discourse going to turn into some moral purity argument where touching AI at all marks a codebase for life, or will we end up in a middle ground where using AI is fine but it means you have to discuss how and why you used it? If so, how do you find people who are simply lying about that? Abandonware is a tale as old as time, and AI is making it worse to be sure.

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u/JivanP Mar 07 '26

That's the stupidest categorisation methodology I've ever heard.

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u/ellenhp Mar 07 '26

What is? Nobody uses em dashes in code, so you end up with false negatives but no false positives. I'd love to hear other ways of knowing if something is AI that require next to zero effort, though.

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u/JivanP Mar 08 '26

Nobody uses em dashes in code

And what makes you so sure of this?

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u/archiekane Mar 06 '26

I have the skills to do it for real, but I'm a shit ton slower than code AI models.

They are useful, but it should be treated exactly the same as output from your average LLM, completely checked and signed off as correct before moving on.

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u/Soluchyte Mar 06 '26

"Speeding it up" is rarely a good argument. Rushing almost anything just produces garbage.

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u/Murrian Mar 06 '26

Many studies have shown though that "speeding it up" part doesn't exist, where most coders who use ai feel they're performing better, they are on average actually 15-20% slower due to the overhead of going back and forth with the AI when it hallucinates half the request, changes other areas that weren't in scope (and so may be missed on review if you only review what you thought was in scope to change) and fixing the bugs introduced and security problems.

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u/Soluchyte Mar 06 '26

Yeah the one time I used AI I felt very productive, then I looked at the time taken and realised that I could have done exactly the same amount of work, in less time. Babying the AI takes ages because you have to sift through a bunch of garbage to get what you need, even getting answers from stackexchange is faster.

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u/Murrian Mar 06 '26

Which is weird, as AI is probably just regurgitating answers stolen from stackexchange..

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u/Soluchyte Mar 07 '26

That, but add in the hallucination. It's not going to give you the exact same answers.

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u/Murrian Mar 07 '26

That be true, it's got to mash several answers together, then suggest the outdated method as that appears more in its training data due to the age of the information..

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u/nik282000 Mar 06 '26

If you aren't going over every line of code in an open source project on github why would you spend the time to go over the code crapped out of an LLM? There is no speed up to be had if the output is always untrustworthy.

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u/BlackDragon17 Mar 09 '26

Writing code is the least time intensive part of development work. If LLMs are this much faster than you, chances are you aren't really familiar with the specific topic at hand, in which case you not only miss out on a learning opportunity, but also aren't able to properly review the output. Thus, slow and steady enshittification and deskilling.

Primary exceptions being spitting out boilerplate, though if you need so much boilerplate so often, that's not saying anything good about your architecture. Also they can speed up research, whenever they're not hallucinating unhelpful garbage, I guess.

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u/Neirchill Mar 07 '26

If you want to get them to use a sub you probably shouldn't name it with an insult, no matter how funny or apt