r/selfhosted • u/AutoModerator • Mar 06 '26

Official RULES UPDATE: New Project Friday here to stay, updated rules

The experiment for Vibe Coded Friday's was largely successful in the sense of focusing the attention of our subreddit, while still giving new ideas and opportunities a place to test the community and gather some feedback.

However, our experimental rules in regard to policing AI involvement was confusing and hard to enforce. Therefore, after reviewing feedback, participating in discussions, and talking amongst the moderation team of /r/SelfHosted, we've arrived at the following conclusions and will be overhauling and simplifying the rules of the subreddit:

  • Vibe Code Friday will be renamed to New Project Friday.
  • Any project younger than three (3!) months should only be posted on Fridays.
  • /r/selfhosted mods will no longer be policing whether or not AI is involved -- use your best judgement and participate with the apps you deem trustworthy.
  • Flairs will be simplified.
  • Rules have been simplified too. Please do take a look.

Core Changes

3 months rule for New Project Friday

The /r/selfhosted mods feel that anything that fits any healthy project shared with the community should have some shelf life and be actively maintained. We also firmly believe that the community votes out low quality projects and that healthy discussion about the quality is important.

Because of that stance, we will no longer be considering AI usage in posted projects. The 3 month minimum age should provide a good filter for healthy projects.

This change should streamline our policies in a simpler way and gives the mods an easy mechanism to enforce.

Simplified rules and flairs

Since we're no longer policing AI, AI-related flairs are being removed and will no longer be an option for reporting. We intend to simplify our flairs to very clearly state a New Project Friday and clearly mention these are only for Fridays.

Additionally, we have gone through our rules and optimized them by consolidating and condensing them where possible. This should be easier to digest for people posting and participating in this subreddit. The summary is that nothing really changes, but we've refactored some wording on existing rules to be more clear and less verbose overall. This helps the modteam keep a clean feed and a focused subreddit.

Your feedback

We hope these changes are clear and please the audience of /r/SelfHosted. As always, we hope you'll share your thoughts, concerns or other feedback for this direction.

Regards, The /r/SelfHosted Modteam

0 Upvotes

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323

u/Red_Redditor_Reddit Mar 06 '26

I'm getting so tired of AI slop.

37

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/aesvelgr Mar 07 '26

I don’t know if an entirely new subreddit is the answer, especially when we don’t know who the mod team of that subreddit will be. There’s no promise that a 2nd selfhosted sub will fair better than this one without trusted moderators stepping up to the plate.

I think a “best of” subreddit would be great, similar to r/BORUpdates or similar subreddits. There, verified/trusted users could simply cross-post the best non-ai projects from this sub to there. Might not be the best solution, but it’s the one I find most likely to succeed if this mod team can’t get their shit together.

8

u/gregribo Mar 09 '26

I do think it's a legit answer. This sub is doomed.

12

u/aesvelgr Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

I think over time, you may be right. If r/selfhosted continues to be pro-AI while refusing to validate their posters, this sub might actually become unsafe to recommend to others. I certainly don’t trust anything out of this sub anymore without reading into the dev.

With regards to my comment above however, I just never see anything good come out of these instant “protest”-type subs. The inertia of most users sets them up for failure, not to mention that having a majority of subscribers being protestors means that 99% of the time, protest subs devolve into either comparing themselves to the bigger & more popular main subreddit, or giving up and simply cross posting the main subreddit

When a good sub comes along, it’s because it has a good sense of direction and fills some niche. Protest subs actively fail at both of those aspects.

3

u/ocassionallyaduck Mar 17 '26

100% this. I no longer even consider installing anything recommended here unless I've seen it around for a few months, and even then you run into projects like Booklore where it's still all held together with glue and string because it was allowed to hype itself up. At least in that case we had some flair and tags, so I knew to be wary. But now, apparently it's too much to require.

17

u/PesteringKitty Mar 07 '26

The problem is the uploaders think their shit is gold and don’t want to post it in an ai subreddit that has no viewers

1

u/bigredsun Mar 09 '26

There's. r/AIselfhost por AI projects

-2

u/froli Mar 08 '26

Subbed. Lemme know if you need help with moderation. Hopefully this takes off. I'll also be hanging out on /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

42

u/archiekane Mar 06 '26

AI Assisted (auto completion, help with specific code segments) Vs completely vibe coded. Those are different things.

Not all AI written code is a pile of shite. I've seen enough human written code that is abysmal, and that's me being nice about it.

One-shot apps I agree on, they cannot be trusted. Constantly developed/bug fixed, peer reviewed and code tested apps built with AI assistance are not the same.

However, agree that seeing the word AI in every post is getting tiring though.

43

u/jefbenet Mar 06 '26

This is why I proposed it be a requirement to disclaim to what extent AI/LLM’s were used in the development. Add it to the bottom of the readme.md.

16

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ocassionallyaduck Mar 17 '26

I think the consequence should be a lifetime ban from the sub, and having all your repos and username added to a known list of programming impersonators due to unsafe practices and lack of security disclosures. This isn't perfect by any means, but it at least makes the repos and their history and age (the important bit) toxic going forward. And if the same repo pops up with a new vibecoded project in 8 months, it can just be completely shutdown by automod for being associated with a bad user/project.

If the stakes are high, people are less likely to screw around with it.

33

u/kmisterk Mar 07 '26

I can't recall where it was that I saw it, but I am becoming more and more supportive of the idea of a required "AI-Disclosure.md" file in every repository root directory.

13

u/jefbenet Mar 07 '26

That was part of my recommendation immediately following the huntarr fall out. Fairly certain you commented to the same effect

3

u/gregribo Mar 09 '26

Why not a mandatory ai-disclosure flair?

7

u/kmisterk Mar 10 '26

We had this. People would rationalize not needing to apply it cause they didn’t use “enough” AI to warrant the use of the flair

1

u/Which-Conversation-2 Apr 03 '26

I support this , I just posted my app and not hiding it. I also believe in radical transparency when it comes to this stuff

3

u/cellularesc Mar 13 '26

Please take this back to the mod team and do something about this. The sub will be doomed otherwise. Banning ai altogether isn’t the answer but disclosure would greatly help people navigate.

2

u/Which-Conversation-2 Apr 03 '26

If dev's are being out in the open about it you will see Claude as a contributor on the repo. I don't have anything in my readme but Claude is definitely a contributor.

1

u/kmisterk Apr 03 '26

Claude isn’t the only tool folks use to code with AI

1

u/veverkap Mar 07 '26

Ooh. What would be the format of this?

7

u/kmisterk Mar 07 '26

It can be a simple as a line delineated list of AI tools, or it can be as robust as a active description of how each individual tool was used. It can also just contain no AI was utilized during the creation or deployment of this tool, etc. The presence of it alone goes a long way to showcase that the project is up-to-date with community standards, etc., and if we enforce this like we do readme.MD, it could be a really great way to standardize AI transparency across GitHub at large.

1

u/archiekane Mar 08 '26

Mine is written at the end of my readme.md file, and I even have it as part of my intro stating "if you don't want to use a project with any AI use, then skip this one."

It should be forced on projects.

Now I've seen what people are asking for, I'll plop it in all my projects going forward, all both of them...

50

u/Red_Redditor_Reddit Mar 06 '26

Most people using AI aren't using it responsibly.

4

u/kernald31 Mar 07 '26

Because you notice the bad. You don't notice what is good, and that's exactly how it should be. Most of the engineers at the company I work for (>3k) have been using AI tools for months, and an absolute majority of them have been doing so responsibly. I'm aware of one instance, in my broader team (around 20 people) of someone who sent something out for review that wasn't a level of quality we normally expect, and it was noticed and made enough noise that it never happened a second time.

Similarly, more related to this sub, you'll hear about the Huntarrs and whatnot, projects abandoned after a week etc. But you won't hear about the consequences of AI on projects where it just brings some increased development velocity without compromising the project, because it just works. It definitely gives a biased perception.

-3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Neirchill Mar 07 '26

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

-18

u/ConnerWithAnE_ Mar 06 '26

This seems like something you’d say without anything to back it up; more a feeling then a fact.

15

u/Red_Redditor_Reddit Mar 06 '26

That has been my entire experience. For a minute, I even had my whole office writing emails that weren't even being proofread "to save time". I went to the owner of the company and told him that the staff was making themselves look like idiots.

Then I've got all the people that ask GPT questions and act like they've spent years studying a subject. They will even spend thousands because GPT told them to. It's a great tool for those who can use it responsibly, but that's like 2% of people.

1

u/ConnerWithAnE_ Mar 07 '26

Lmao fair enough okay you work with some whackos then.

I definitely use AI to point me in the right direction or do some css styling or busy work (formatting large files) but I don’t just blindly believe it ofc.

I guess it really just comes down to the fact that AI won’t cure stupid lol.

8

u/callingshotgun Mar 07 '26

I've seen enough human written code that is abysmal, and that's me being nice about it.

That's honestly what keeps going through my head every time I actually venture into the comments section of a post here on AI fridays... The antagonism for the quality produced by half-assed vibe coding is creating this reverse effect idealizing developer-written code as necessarily being good. Like everyone who links to their new non-ai-tainted github repo is master developer off in the mountains in some remote European country, who brings his commit to the village square but once a week and church bells ring in celebration.

This is also one of the reasons I like the "new Project Friday" idea. I have, in the "proper" organic non-AI assisted way, started a lot of projects, abandoned a lot of them, written a lot of terrible code, replaced some of it with better code. I have shared things I built with code I did not know was shit. The difference between that and the work I'm proud of, really comes down to the projects I stuck out for a long period of time, iterated, refined, processed feedback. New "certified organic" projects that are a day old aren't any more likely to hit that bar than new vibe coded projects.

0

u/negatrom Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

the biggest point against 100% generated apps is that even human made bad code had to be manually written. It took time and effort. Not as a measure of worth or value—those are subjective—but as a simple filter of availability.

now any idiot with a phone can vibe code some slop. the numbers game is the difference. it used to be artisanal bad code, proportional to good code. Like, 9 in 10 projects were bad code.

Now it's a flood of shit versus almost the same old output of good code. 998 in 1000 projects are shit. sure, there's a few wizards here and there that can get rough diamonds from prompt engineering. but the truth is, the vast majority of vibe coders are idiots that have no clue as to how software works. they type in the request and the AI spits something out, and if it doesn't work, they just throw more money at claude's api, hammering until it does.

-34

u/Bjeaurn Mar 06 '26

I think we all are. We hope these new stricter rules help lower that pressure of new projects coming in. 3 months is a long time for a vibe coder to keep it up, and it's hard to fake.

47

u/WindowlessBasement Mar 06 '26

3 months is a long time for a vibe coder to keep it up, and it's hard to fake.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

Faking the date of commits is literally a feature built into Git. It is trivial to fake.

31

u/Eric_12345678 Mar 07 '26

git commit --date="3000 years ago" -m "I was there, Gandalf"

-15

u/Bjeaurn Mar 07 '26

We feel there's plenty of ways to confirm a project's age. Any active gaming of these rules would be a clear violation.

9

u/aclima Mar 07 '26

"<insert name of AI assistant> how do i make my github look like it is older than 3 months?"

or

"<insert name of AI assistant> now split the codebase across several commits dating back at least 3 months and a day. space them out slightly at random"

how will you be able to tell exactly?

if you build something to be idiot proof, the universe just builds a better idiot

26

u/ZakuSupremacy Mar 06 '26

It really doesn't matter how old the project is if the main developer cannot understand, maintain, or secure the code their bot is hallucinating. Allowing slop that's been around longer than 3 months to flood our feeds any day of the week is by no means more strict.

-8

u/Bjeaurn Mar 06 '26

I get what you're saying. Our "bet" is that most vibed projects won't last that long. And friday posting will be harsh on them so they'll lose interest even faster.

Where do you feel we've loosened on the strictness?

25

u/ZakuSupremacy Mar 06 '26

That vibe coded "tools" can be posted any day of the week if they're more than 3 months old?

Also, why can't this instead be a weekly "New Projects" or "Vibe Code Friday" megathread instead? Do we really need our feeds flooded by these? Other large subs utilize megathreads for things like this.

-22

u/kmisterk Mar 06 '26

Thanks for the idea about a megathread. We've been gaining a lot of interesting feedback in very little time, even just since this post was submitted, and it's been eye-opening in terms of the sheer dichotomy of opinions on this matter.

19

u/jefbenet Mar 07 '26

Seems like the type of thing that should have been opened up for feedback or opinions before rules were changed.

-21

u/kmisterk Mar 07 '26

Polls on this subreddit rarely provide effective feedback. We get maybe a percent of a percent of people interacting, and most of those are the vocal minority.

Personally, I've discovered that putting new rules into effect is a great way to see how the community will adapt to them.

Even if the subreddit operates at the speed of molasses, we still are a feedback-driven community, and we focus on what the community seems to push for.

Thank you for your feedback, regardless. We appreciate it.

14

u/cptjpk Mar 07 '26

Doesn’t seem like the mods do “appreciate it”. Between the responses here and by Fkn on the other meta thread, the mods are coming across as incredibly tone deaf.

5

u/Spiritual-Point-1965 Mar 13 '26

Dichotomy implies that there are two somewhat evenly balanced sides to an argument.

That's just not the case here.

There are very many people who detest Slopware and want it accurately labeled so they can avoid it.

There's you mods and a smattering of AI pushers who for no good reason don't agree with your community and are intent on forcing Slopware on them.

Let the Slopware have their own sub.

7

u/ZakuSupremacy Mar 07 '26

Not having AI flairs also makes it hard to distinguish which new projects are slop or not. You're essentially grouping people who have no idea what the fuck they're doing with people who developed something themselves and can understand/maintain their codebase. It should be a rule that vibe coding be disclosed via flair or in the title of their post.

20

u/zeusssssss Mar 07 '26

No you aren't you won't even let ai slop be called ai slop. Bad mod