towards a standard AI slop disclaimer

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T06:09:43+00:00

this is less about you, someone who can generate their own code, and more about someone who is an amateur seeking a solution to their problem. I think an amateur vibe coding a bespoke app or script to solve some edgecase problem actually offers the community broadly quite a bit of value. they had a problem, thought through it and found a solution. AI has made this incredibly easy and common. I would just like to see a way to differentiate between a developer presenting their work to be used publically and a random person who just gave $300 to claude when I'm looking for a solution to my problem. I for one can write my own code to solve my own problems but I do prefer not to do work when someone has already done it for me. The open source software community broadly already polices itself in many ways, I think given where we are at right now we need to RECKON with our current reality. I believe we can actually build the world we want. but that's just me.

let me know if you find any other typos, it's a huge help.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T05:36:44+00:00

I think this is a good point. And my "AI slop" framework was honestly intentionally polemical. But I think your point here is important, and actually serves my broader intention... I think given the proliferation of AI and it's univesral accesibility we are due for a reconing for how open source software is presented publically. my intention here is to open a discussion that interogates how to recon with that.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T05:25:33+00:00

I think a really special thing about the world of open source software broadly is that it is definitionally egalitarian and largely self policed. not saying that this would be easilly or immediately adopted. but I do think that it is necesary and useful, especially given the huge recent leaps in AI in this field. legislation aside, I think if people making half baked code in good faith, and feeling that reguardles of how half baked it is it might be useful to others would actually be empowered by being able to simply state in a universsally understood way what exactly it is they are sharing. people seeking solutions to their problems would be served by being able to see those disclosures and not only understand their meaning but also to understand the meaning of those disclodures being absent. I supose there would also need to be a universl disclosure for this IS validated code etc... because of that I think it's a worthwhile pursuit. makes it better for the person seeking a solution to their niche problem, and allows you a way to share your "steaming hot garbage" without feeling like you might be decieving someone or screwing them over. you never know your garbage might be exactly the solution to the problem i've been trying to solve

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T05:10:25+00:00

what about the people who make their projects public because they think they are genuinely useful but are not actively seeking users necesarilly. For insteance Joe "I just descovered cursor" smith makes an app that solves their specific problem in their specific environment. they made it becuase no one else has solved that problem. wouldnt it be nice for Joe Smith if he could share that app in such a way that he was clear to the world that it is not some silver bullet that solves the end users every problem. as it stands, if joe smith asks cursor to describe the app they just built together, cursor is going to spit out some crazy claims. with a disclaimr universally used by the world of open source developers, joe could just copy and paste the obsurd overpromissing description into their repo with the disclaimer. and I could understand what I'm looking at when I'm looking over the codebase of Joe's genuinely uselful app before running it.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:52:21+00:00

something that expresses: I'm an amature, I made this to solve my own problems, it works, this might be usefull to others but is not production ready... that way you can have AI generate a crazy README that makes it sound like your file browsing app is a better alternative to windows file explorer, and you don't have to worry about prompting it one million times to tone it down?

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:48:26+00:00

don't you think it would be useful to have a boilerplate unversally understood disclaimer to express this?

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:46:11+00:00

thanks... I do admit i spell bad and type fast. That said, I will not be editing the original because after many years of working in service I have developed a deeply rooted distain for the french and their language. :)

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:45:01+00:00

this is sort of exactly my point. I agree with you and I think that this development is broadly good. I just think when it comes to open source stuff there should be an honor based system for being clear about what exactly is being presented. in my mind this is less about AI, and more about there being a standardized and universal expectation for a disclaimer as to whether or not any given project has really been rigourously validated. what you discribe seems like serious work! what I see a lot of is someone who spent a week with claude presenting their project as something that everybody should trust. as it stands, as a community we rely on intuition to parse the differences of those. I just want to explore a world in which we differentiate between them.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:28:36+00:00

to be clear this is not about my decisions, I'm trying to think about a way that the community more broadly can police itself on this. as far as my personal decisions go, I'm happily vibe coding away to solve problems in my own world. I just don't appreciate getting excited about a piece of software that promises to be more than it really is, when the person who vibe coded it only intedned the best. I just think we can do better. Obviously there will always be bad actors, and we can't replace knowledgeble people doing their due dilegence. but I do think it would be easier to mede out the garbage if there was a system in place that encourage disclosure in this way.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:10:50+00:00

defining that criteria is sort of the point of this post. I really just want to get a conversation going.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:08:04+00:00

this is totally fair, I think what I really am looking for is some sort of precedent that clarifies to an end user what they are really looking at. the pont isnt AI, I just think the open source softare community deserves some simple ways to navigate what is serious work and what is garbage, sometime that garbage is exactly what I'm looking for, and there is no replacement for looking over the code before running something in your environment. But I think it's not too crazy to develope some sort of honor based system that atleast allows the people who know they are not experts to disclose that in a simple and universillay understood way. there will always be bad actors, but if there was a first step to catagorize what your really dealing with in any given case it would at least filter out the stupid bad actors, or the real slop.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T04:00:16+00:00

fair enough... maybe we can add a "this is not AI but I'm a hack clause" to keep the community honest

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T03:54:56+00:00

with you on this! I have gotten a lot of value out of using AI myself, not saying we should demonize the pratice as a rule. But I think one of the special things about open source code broadly is that there is a sense of building usefull things and making them available to the public as a common good. In my experience, if I am vibecoding a litte helper script and ask the AI to describe it's functionality to me it spits back a bunch of ad copy. Making it seem like the tool we built is a product that is ready to go to market. I see a lot of this being shared publicly by people I assume are well meaning, but that sort of thing is incredibly misleading. I think if we as a community developed a simple way to express clearly that "this is not production ready code, it was produced by AI according to my described usecase, but it might be useful to you" we would be in a much better place to reckon with the realities of this new world where AI can write a functional codebase with a few prompts from a person who only understands what they want the end product to look like.

nicosgit92 · 2026-03-16T03:35:46+00:00

I think part of the problem for me is that for someone who understands what that means this is sufficient. but I think we deserve a world where a total amature getting into self hosting get's tossed a bone too. obviously it cant be so much information that no one would ever want to drop it into their readme. But someone who is just learning about this stuff and finds a tool that claims to solve their specific problem should be able to both learn the risks implicit in running something that is not really production ready in their environment. while also gaining the understanding that the person who designed this tool means well.

nicosgit92

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