alt Hacker NewsHow much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
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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.
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.
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.
What stops a bad actor from buying a bunch of these apps on fdroid adding malware to them and then having fdroid handle the distribution for you? I people did something similar with a bunch of plugins in the wordpress plugin archive.
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.
Many of the projects here predate 2022, so they wouldn't be "ai-generated" in that sense.
I'm somewhat surprised about PipePipe. I had a look on the commits of the various components and nothing looks out of place to me. Commits look rather reasonable, comments look useful and don't show obvious LLMisms.
What are the AI smells there?
It would be nice to expand a bit on the reasoning behind the verdicts.
Even before AI, I just looked at file size to determine whether an app was worth installing. There used to be tool to search the Google Play Store and sort by size. If it's a basic utility and more than a few MB, it's probably riddled with bloated libraries and ads.
FDroid can be very strange…
””” F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. ”””
It's an emotional problem. I love writing code to solve intricate problems. But knowing that a faster, and maybe better LLM solution is just a prompt away? Somehow that takes the joy out of it. Why spend hours, when you can get an equivalent result in minutes?
I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...
If they work, does it matter?
Separate from building your own code, ,of course you may have your own standards to apply.
But for apps, well, I never had a chance to see how good or bad the code was before AI was about, so why should I care now, so long as what I paid for does what it says it does (and nothing nefarious..)
The don’t tread on me person is fascinating. I wonder if they wrote the software from their phone using github codespaces in browser?
how did critics become suddenly concerned with virtue and beauty with AI? Wouldn't it be better to judge these apps on their utility?
The authors are sharing their creativity, and spending time & money to publish apps with a free license.
I have disdain for how entitled open source consumers are. Before AI, demanding free accounts, support , resources, traffic, cpu -- after AI demanding bespoke hand-written code be given out for free.
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.
Who/whatever does the layout and organisation of app categories is a blithering idiot and finding apps is best done with an external search as the internal one hides apps even when searched for directly by name. And the fdroid app is relentless systems deperformance burden that often just failed, and updating manualy is simpler as a chore done after any android update. Love a lot of the apps, and the concept of fdroid, but the fdroid UI is not good at all.
> Text just doesn’t carry enough meta information for any kind of assessments to be even close to accurate.
Well, that is true, but I have seen how one japanese developer, who has had low english language skills, suddenly writes epic text. So it is clear that he is using AI when interacting with other people. This is a problem because a lot of it is just AI slop fake interacting. I don't want to interact through any AI filter; it means the other human being is not interested in communicating with me, so why would I want to communicate with an AI slop controlled human? It makes no sense.
As for software: IMO documentation is very important. Many projects lack good documentation. This is valid for both AI slop created projects and real humans created projects. There are too many software developers who hate writing documentation. I don't want to use such software anymore.
Unfortunately AI slop documentation often sucks too. They just spam you down with words that mean nothing. And are very verbose. This is also totally useless.
It seems as if software designers indeed fail hard in the last years. Quality standards used to be higher in, say, 2005 to 2010, compared to now and the last five years.
> Their mere existence makes educating yourself and going on fun side projects much less rewarding.
It's not just AI though. Look at Google search. Use it. It is totally useless now. Google crippled it deliberately some years ago. Now you'd think alternatives are better, but they also suck. DuckDuckGo? Qwant? They, oddly enough, manage to be even worse crap than Google search, which is amazing. Crapification has become the default now.
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Please stop labelling a project as slop just because it has been developed using AI. Coding agent are now replacing the IDE and code is now mostly written by the agents.
How much of iOS is vibe coded?
> 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.