F-Droid's September Update: Over Half of New Apps Show Signs of AI Generation
How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
A FOSS maintainer manually reviewed 102 apps updated on F-Droid on September 12, 2026, to estimate how many were vibe-coded. Using a three-tier system based on repository aesthetics—commit messages, AI infrastructure, and disclosures—they found that a majority fell into the 'Mostly AI' category, with telltale signs like Claude co-authorship and agentic workflows. The author, a student and FOSS enthusiast, admits the method is subjective but argues the patterns are hard to miss.
Their mere existence makes educating yourself and going on fun side projects much less rewarding. Like yeah, I did something, but with an LLM I could have done this in a quarter of the time.
- orbital-decay
> I also noticed a pair of very bizarre apps, both branded with the yellow “Don’t tread on me” flag: DuressKeyboard & UnlicenseLauncher. What’s most curious is that they have been in development for quite some time, yet all the changes are done not with git but through the GitHub web file editor! Someone go find that person and teach them to use git.
- edg5000
Seems like the wrong question to ask. I've been programming my whole life but basically stopped writing code by hand in 2026. The LLM writes better code than I do, much better.
- lrvick
I have been working on a sub 1500 line rust init system for over a week. Hundreds of prompts. All with a local LLM running on my own GPUs because I expect to build with total sovereignty but also zero dependencies, no libc, no alloc, no std, and a test suite that proves the 20 implemented raw syscalls all use the right values by comparing against Linux kernel sources. This would be the only privileged code in my operating system so I must have absolute confidence it is perfect.
It would be too annoying for a human to ever write code to standards this high, and would have taken me months to write by hand, but with the help of AI I was able to get it done and built in a way I can easily review and reason about.
I have a memory safe baremetal tiny linux init now built to my exact requirements.
AI can help experienced engineers write better code in less time.
- pona-a
70% seems unexpectedly high... Was there maybe some overcounting?
Yubico Authenticator
https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter
I actually don't see any significant signs of AI use. There's Copilot listed in the contributor list, but I'm not seeing commits listed under it. Did they wipe it off Github?
Some seem to stamp Mostly AI based on weaker circumstantial like large init commits. Maybe it's just an artifact of human sloppiness.
Or maybe it was just the artifact of choosing these by last update, since vibe-coded apps genuinely do have an abnormal number of releases, and thus would be much more likely to show up.
- r0ze-at-hn
This reminds me of another time... Let's travel back to 1980 and interview a local grey beard:
Everything these days is shell scripts! They are even selling them like they have the same value as a C program! csh will never be real C. The kids have no idea what a stack is or how to optimize system calls. The performance is awful and they barely work! The way scripts spawn processes can bring a multi-user terminal system to its knees!
I mean, sure, I write some scripts now and then, but the real logic always goes in C. And just the other day my boss gave me a shell script he coded over the weekend and said putting it in production should be easy!
Over the weekend I was checking out BSD and I couldn't believe the number of scripts I found. I fear for the future of my career and computer science in general. Our field might die out before it can even get off the ground.
- theandrewbailey
This is about apps on F-Droid, not F-Droid itself.
- samayashar
Every codebase that is being actively worked on (closed/open source) will contain code that's AI generated. With the rising abilities of agents, expectations are sky rocketing in terms of productivity.
If you're as productive as an engineer in 2016, you're not at the level that's expected. A 7 day workflow back then should take you maybe a day or less to work on today.
- Dwedit
Many of the projects here predate 2022, so they wouldn't be "ai-generated" in that sense.