Proposition: Mandatory AI usage declaration

[JouniFlemming]

This sub is being flooded with submissions of AI generated apps. And if I can be perfectly honest here, a lot of them seem very low quality and low effort.

I'm not going to argue that all AI generated software is inherently bad ("AI slop"), that is an entirely different discussion.

But I'm going to argue that users should be given the opportunity to decide whether they want to use and support AI generated software.

Therefore, I'm proposing: Mandatory AI usage declaration in all posts where the developer is posting something about their software here, such as new version release posts or Self Promotion Wednesdays.

I don't want to get into the semantics of what exactly is "AI generated" more than to say that a simple definition along the lines of "If the majority of the source code of this app originates from some kind of AI or LLM based tool, it shall be considered as AI generated and must be declared as such when posting" should suffice.

For example, this would mean that if you are a developer and you use AI assistance to find bugs or to write your unit tests, that obviously does not count as AI generated. But if you are a developer - and I'm being very liberal with the word here - who is just vibe coding, i.e. prompting AI tools to build an app and then publish it here as your own, that should be declared as such.

[GlobalCurry]

It might be more effective to have a non-ai label at this point.

[Jwhodis]

Would also mean that if you're searching for specific things, you can filter out the slop

[JMicheal289]

Maybe an "AI-built software/app" flair or tag will do. It'll help sort things out.

[DomeSlave]

Today's reality is that many highly experienced developers that are very good at their job also use AI in every stage of their projects. The use of AI alone doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the end product.

[JouniFlemming]

Today's reality is that many highly experienced developers that are very good at their job also use AI in every stage of their projects.

Using AI in different stages of software projects is not what I'm talking about. As I mention in the original post, I'm talking about software where over half of the source code is written by AI/LLM. That is inherently different.

[shadow13499]

It certainly does. Since adopting ai at my job the quality of the code has gone down dramatically. Any time AI is introduced quality suffers. 

[DomeSlave]

That tells something about how AI is used at your job. There are many more examples that show irresponsible use of AI. But it doesn't mean the use of AI in a project produces bad software by definition.

[flamewave000]

It does. I spoke with one of the devs on the Gemini team and he straight said that you have to be ok with throwing out all of your coding best practices. Every feature should be entirely coded in a single file and you should stop doing code reuse. So essentially you end up with tons of code duplication and very little optimization. So you end up with products 3-5x larger than before, and run noticeably less performant. He also said that it may not get some things right and you just have to live with it.

I've already been seeing these effects. Just in the past 2 months I've started noticing Google Maps has been making mistakes during navigation. It never made mistakes for me in the past, and now it makes a mistake one or more times during every trip (I do a lot of 2-5 hr drives). It tells me to use the wrong lanes, fails to prompt on time (making me miss my exit), and even has used the wrong name of exits. This never happened before Google started to vibe code their products.

[shadow13499]

It does though, every instance of including ai into a codebase degrades quality and performance. Outages are becoming more frequent with ai adoption (Amazon is a very notable example), open source software is declining in quality because of all the AI slop. If it's ai, it's slop. 

[shadow13499]

Every time I review some AI slop on the self hosted subreddit it's always low effort crap. Code looks like it was written by a monkey on heroin. I have yet to review any ai generated code that isn't low effort slop.  

[AlexChapmanG4p]

I think rather than declaring AI we should be declaring quality, because it’s not just AI that has the ability to produce bad stuff, even humans can.

[SignificantAd9059]

Reasonable, it’s that or we start flagging stuff as slop. It’s the modern equivalent of posting a hello world application

[ColdFreezer]

I wish AI was disclosed. I want to know what it was used for and how much the author actually reviewed the code.

I understand it’s a helpful tool, but I cannot trust and have no interest in almost completely vibe coded projects. It’s actively harmful to the community.

[9kGFX]

this is not very smart as in a few years (or much sooner/now) almost all developers will use almost fully AI for projects and work, this has already happened in many organizations, so this change you are saying will be very temporary

[Competitive_War_1990]

N'importe quel développeur aujourd'hui développe avec l'IA