Open source projects draw a hard line: no AI-generated code
OSS projects banning AI-generated contributions
A growing list of open source projects—including immich, meilisearch, QEMU, Servo, Zig, MonoGame, and Gentoo Linux—now explicitly ban contributions made with LLMs or generative AI tools. Some reject AI-written code, docs, and issues; others threaten bans for AI-assisted pull requests. The policies vary in strictness but share a goal: keeping machine-generated content out of their codebases.
Content generated by large language models or similar technology, such as Copilot, ChatGPT, or Llama, is presumed to be tainted content, and must not be committed.
- Arbortheus
I have sympathy for the OSS maintainers, and I don’t see it purely as a “Luddite” behaviour.
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”.
That in combination with a large uptick in volume of community interactions (issues, PRs, …) risks burning out OSS maintainers.
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.
- ryandrake
I wish GitHub would have a clear, dedicated UI under "About" on each repo's page showing whether LLM-assisted PRs are accepted. Like right between the License display and Activity, or something, that says "AI PRs welcome" or "No AI PRs".
Sometimes I fork an open source project and just vibe a bugfix or a small feature that I need. I'll review the code myself and make sure it's sensible. But, now I have a dilemma. Do I submit a PR? I don't know if it's welcome anymore, given how much maintainers are complaining about AI PRs. I'm more likely nowadays just to keep the fork to myself and not bother, given how mad some maintainers might get. Not worth the grief to contribute back, and often it's not even welcome.
I fear we're just going to end up with a massive web of one-off forks going every which way, which I guess is OK but a weird consequence of all of this.
- maxloh
I don't think this is a good trend.
Projects like Servo or Redox OS are community-driven and already lack funding. Blocking AI-assisted code will only drive potential contributors away.
Some projects have built strong communities around AI-assisted development. The T3 Code community [0], for instance, is very active, and most PRs are created with LLM assistance.
The real issues are disclosure and taking responsibility for your own submissions, including carefully reading and testing your code. Code written by humans isn't inherently better in any sense.
- jcfrei
I bet you that these projects have AI contributions. The regular contributors just know their codebase a lot better and can instruct AI to make edits that are conforming to guidelines. The AI contributions they are banning are probably breaking code styles, conventions, are too broad, etc. and as a result creating more work than solving problems. I think the more honest approach for a lot of these projects would be to limit contributions to certain accounts - but then that would probably violate some of their egalitarian understanding of code development.
- koalalorenzo
This is super helpful to pick projects. I really care about human-authored code, quality, and I avoid when possible using tools that are vibe coded. OpenSource projects have always been about sharing knowledge and building things together, and I am a little sad to see that AI and LLMs are taking over.
Recently I was picking a self-hosted tool for planning trips, and I deleted it after a day, because it was extremely vibe-coded and none of the security issues reported in GitHub were ever fixed. It can be a prompt away to fix those! I noticed this way too often in OSS that is vibe coded, people focus on looks, feels and code does not get reviewed enough, because it "looks good with the CSS gradients" and "an LLM is always right".
So I understand why they would ban and forbid AI / LLM contribution, and I am happy they are banning them, I assume mostly for the mental sanity of maintainers and for making sure that knowledge share and somewhat better PR reviews happens. I will always pick a human-made project over an AI / LLM coded one.
- staminade
Some of these are misleading. Immich, for example, doesn't accept PRs created using an LLM, but the project has an agents file and there are Claude co-authored commits in the history.
- mik1998
I believe this will mean that established FOSS software will significantly improve thanks for using AI for catching bugs & human-reviewed code, while commercial programs will become significantly more unreliable due to being 100% AI generated, with a focus on LOC/token quotas instead of any metric of quality.
- benrutter
I think there's a lot of push back on this, but it seems quite sensible based on my experience with open source projects.
It's a huge amount of work to maintain a project with a large number of contributions, especially doing things like making sure the PRs don't drift things away from the initial design.
Having a bunch of PRs that don't come from a full understanding of the codebase, and drift the project into something inconsistent is a way bigger risk for most projects that "not shipping new features quickly enough".
So anyway, please don't paint these folks as "a bunch of luddites who don't understand AI" - they're just doing their best to maintain a successful project in a fast changing world that we're all trying to make sense of.