I agree 100%. If you open a PR, you need to add value somehow - having thought about the problem, understanding the code base deeply or just your time by thinking about a solution you can't otherwise get easily.

The problem is that the last part changed drastically with LLMs. You can get a lot of solutions easily by prompting an LLM. But that also means you don't need outside PRs for that anymore, and just prompt the LLM yourself.

That means two things in my opinion:

1) People haven't internalized that yet. For a lot of people, a functioning solution to a problem with often quite a bit of source code is equivalent to "adding value" - because in the past it was. It meant you thought about the problem, understood it and found a solution. But it was that thinking that added the value.

2) The minimum threshold for adding this "quality" rises quite a bit. A lot of problems can now be solved very fast with an LLM by someone who understands the code base well enough. You don't need a PR for that.

I suspect, that means in the future you could both get and need less contributions to OSS projects in general.

We'll see

I noticed some of them don't allow *external* AI contributions. Which makes sense -- you can trust the AI code more if it's signed off by someone who knows the project. The main problem is with AI contributions generated by people who are not familiar with the project, who don't understand their goals, architecture and design decisions.

The problem is why do I accept ai generated PR if I can generate myself?

> I expect the problem isn’t necessarily the AI generation itself, but the difficulty to distinguish between someone that’s really understood the problem domain versus someone with LLM-induced “Dutch courage”.

Some of that. Also sometimes there isn't even a person, just a bot opening a pull request that doesn't hear feedback.

There's also the problem that many projects put disproportionate effort into mentoring new contributors and helping them get things right, and that's valuable when there's a human learning something, but not when you're just correcting someone's LLM slop.

And that's leaving aside all the other problems, like "these things took all our FOSS code, ignoring its licenses, and then used it to compete with us and drown us out", or "these things are going to turn us all into paperclips".

Personally, I'd say the right way to use an LLM is to let it review your code, or be your rubber duck helping you design the architecture or evaluate the security model or similar, but not let it write the code for you. (Unless it's truly throw-away code, like "write me some code to benchmark X vs Y to evaluate which is better for my use case". In which case, the point wasn't the code, it was the numbers.)

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> Perhaps giving it a few months/years for the flurry to die down, and for people to establish better best-practices for using these tools is the motive.

This is naive, these projects do not have years or even months to wait, nor will it die down.

Due to attackers using swarms of abliterated models at even 1,000 TPS, these projects can be easily targeted to find vulnerabilities that these AI models can also build exploits for them.

These open source projects have no choice but to defend themselves with AI to quickly patch these bugs before the attackers find them.

If someone is only willing to contribute to a project if they are allowed to use LLMs, then I think they don't really care about the project and only about the thrill of being seen as a "contributor"

I think it's great trend.

It tells me which codebases are worth studying, which libraries are high quality enough to be trusted in my code and which communities could be rewarding to contribute to.

> Blocking AI-assisted code will only drive potential contributors away.

Well, this seems to be the point of it? To drive away contributors that maintainers regard as more trouble than worth.

"LLM harness management project accepts PRs made by LLMs" hardly seems anything to write home about, to be honest...

>Projects like Servo or Redox OS are community-driven and already lack funding.

It's pretty interesting that for once, people have the ability to contribute $$$ that translate directly to code for the project, and maintainers dont want it. It's their choice, so that's ok.

I guess for someone using AI , it will be easier to fork the project, apply the changes and keep rebasing updates upstream.

Every halfway-decent project will have a near-infinite stream of enthusiastic teenagers willing to "contribute" by acting as a meat proxy for whatever LLM vendor happens to have a free trial tier of their bargain-bin model that week. How do you propose a project separates their PRs from genuinely valuable human-driven AI use?

Pre-LLM it used to be pretty obvious to reviewers which PRs were complete garbage, and which were worth actually reading. Post-LLM the two look identical at first glance, and it only becomes clear that something is garbage after investing a nontrivial amount of time into it. And reviewing is where the real bottleneck lies - not writing.

So if your project welcomes AI use, who is going to dig the diamonds out of the endless flow of slop? It sure is a great way to lose volunteers, and if you delegate all work to LLMs you no longer have a community.

Having a "we ban obvious AI use" policy means that the human is essentially asked to provide a proof-of-work. Want us to invest time in your PR? First demonstrate that you aren't a time-waster.

> Blocking AI-assisted code will only drive potential contributors away.

I am pretty sure they can prompt LLMs on their own.

They don't need your LLM contributions. If your concern is that they lack funds, donate to the project.

I don't see how a project getting hundreds of entirely AI generated (not just "assisted") PRs per day means it has an active community. Scrolling through the PRs and issues on that repository, I can't find a single piece of text that reads like it was written by a human. I often find myself wondering if such projects are actually used by any real people at all, as whenever I try using them myself, I always run into very obvious bugs that go months without being fixed despite the extremely high commit activity.

If I start my own project today, and set up 50 different AI agents to commit to it in a loop 24/7, should I claim my project has an active community because of it?

I think that method level changes could fly under the radar. But vibecoded - make a whole feature - if we view software development as a tree - good enough for the leaves, but not the branches.

The tools are just not there yet.

I agree. I'm also a fan of copyleft licenses, and incorporating code generated by LLMs, which were trained on proprietary and copyleft code without adequate license attribution, is completely unethical IMO.

I don't want the reverse (big tech LLMs taking from copyleft code and incorporating it into proprietary products) either.

"Rules for thee, but not for me" makes some sense for OSS maintainers. The maintainer may be comfortable using AI themselves but isn't interested in slop grenade PRs, especially if they accepted PRs fairly begrudgingly in the first place.

And I think that's doing the maintainers a disservice.

"Random strangers, please don't have your agent send us PRs, we don't want to review it" -> yeah, totally reasonable open source maintainer behaviour, doesn't update my perception of the project at all.

"All code in this repo must be written by hand" -> This is probably not a serious project and I'll make a mental note not to depend on it.

If servo is really in the latter camp I'd actually say that's negligent at this point. A browser engine that doesn't have agents scanning for and fixing vulns is totally unacceptable.

If the core issue was having too many contributions, wouldn't it have been a better idea to address that? Framed in this way, it looks like a scaling issue and not an AI issue.

Were any LLMs used in creating the list itself? Be it for its design, implementation or data gathering?

Author here. Just found the pun fun, I have no intention to claim that OSS says no. I'm mostly interested in finding cases where OSS does say no.

Thanks, added to the list

Given that LLMs will be increasingly used to make their job harder, it's an odd policy. OTOH, if a core team was inundated with slop PRs and issue reports, it's an understandable response.

I'd expect them to increasingly use AI to figure out the latest obfuscations regardless.

"We help people download copyrighted content therefore we ban tool made by copyrighted content"

It's funny

Good luck to them. It won’t be long before an AI-embracing fork starts getting traction because it will be getting you around blocks sooner than the original.

People can have all the morals they like, but the reality is most people aren’t developers in it for the art of programming. Their user base doesn’t know or care.

> All it puts is a target on the repo, and no benefit at all

They're doing it because they already are targets.

Happy to change this. It was enough for me. A repo, a quote of the contribution policy, and a direct link. what would you need?

ha, good catch. I'll fix that ty

> But this can only be a starting point to develop a better way to handle low quality input.

Great! So while the AI vendors are writing free tools to automatically check for low-quality input (surely they are working on that, right?), what do you propose projects do which isn't either banning all obviously-AI contributions due to the good ones being near-impossible to quickly tell apart from slop, or asking volunteers to dig through mountains of shit to find tiny nuggets of gold?

no. gentoo policy only applied to the contribution to Gentoo itself

What is the mechanism to hold the contributor responsible after the merge?

Agree, it's the contributor's responsibility to understand the PR thoroughly. If not, it's not ready for a PR or review yet.

> I get the feeling that banning AI code from a project nowadays ends up with people lying about their AI usage.

"If we set boundaries, people will violate them, so we shouldn't set boundaries."

No. It turns out, empirically, that most efforts to hide LLM usage are mostly unsuccessful. And most people aren't even trying to hide it.

Also, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero": https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... . We could go even further and even stricter trying to make sure that zero dishonest LLM usage gets through even from people trying to subvert the contribution policy, but that would make the experience worse for genuine contributors, not least of which because of false positives.

The copyright, licensing, and patent situation is completely up in the air. LLM-generated content might be in large part illegal.

They 100% got too much slop PRs. I can't speak for all OSS projects but in the case of Rust, it definitely got way out of hand. As a maintainer, there is no easy way to tell whether it was "AI code slop" or "closely human-guided agentic coding", you actually have to go in and understand the stuff. But making careless slop PRs takes 1% or less of the effort, and so the garbage PRs vastly outnumber everything else.

AI has ruined all of our previous signals for high-effort work, it is effectively running a sybil attack on FOSS.

That's probably one motive: a project notices a significant number of AI contributions, and determines they are of a lower average quality than the average non-AI contribution. Alternatively, there's an ideological motive.

Maybe it isn't about quality. I'd imagine with so many effortless pull requests about everything, you lose the ability to steer the project. The loss of agency and slaving to comprehend and merge everything leaves you witless and drone-like which sucks the joy out of things.

Maybe the requests should be focused on one or two areas at a time so you can see some improvement over time instead of "everything at once".

I have a tiny open source repo (https://github.com/ivankovic/omnidiff).

The amount of AI spam you get even with a not-really-notable repo is astounding. I get at least 2-3 different "I'm an AI agent and I made a website for your project" emails per _day_. Or an AI that "installs your project and for 40$ will suggest improvements". Or, or, or....

I can't imagine how many spam "contributions" immich gets per day.

Maybe people dont like their project to become dependent on proprietary black box software by unethical big tech companies...

It allows the project to quickly close PRs if they are obviously AI generated.

Is that a bad thing? MANY of these projects ban PRs made with LLMs, without explicitely mentioning being against AI in general. Since AI drastically increases how much code you can write, they might not need LLM contributions from outside - they can just prompt themselves.

In that case, only getting a few, hand written PRs could mean getting fewer, but higher quality contributers.

Other projects might not care about getting many contributers, many stars or being widely used. It might simply be a small project someone wants to code by hand. That's absolutely valid, many people still have fun coding by hand.

The truth is just that there are a lot of slop PRs currently, where ppl just sicced an LLM on a problem, did not validate any findings, did not check the code, did not read the output and just acted as a meat proxy. In many cases, these bans on LLM PRs are simply a reaction to this flood of PRs. After all, as I said above - everyone can do those prompts themselves, they don't need a PR for that.

> Gatekeeping that will only shrink the number of contributors over time.

That is the purpose.

If I am maintaining a project, I don't need your LLM contributions. I can prompt on my own.

Now, if you have some insight to offer that a LLM cannot give me, then I might listen.

The vast majority of AI-driven contributions are worse than useless. They contribute nothing of value, and cost a lot of volunteer-time to filter out. Not having an endless deluge of AI-driven slop contributions is a net positive, as it prevents the existing contributors from burning out.

Sure, it might hurt some vibecoder feelings that "Claude, write a useful contribution to this project, make no mistakes" returns in them getting banned rather than a mention as a valuable new contributor of a load-bearing OSS component, but that's a price many projects are happy to pay. Any genuinely valuable new contributor would have no trouble spending five minutes writing a PR in their own voice, before asking volunteers to spend fifty minutes reviewing it.

I'm not sure this website itself is even Anti-AI. The about page says "It is informational and takes no position on whether those policies are right". It also uses red for "banned" and green for "allowed". If it was Anti-AI, you'd expect the opposite, no?

I see your point but don't see the irony. I wanted to check something, not have a specific stance. As such, why not use AI

or that the awesome-claude-skills repo does not want AI-generated PRs?