There’s several lists of slop free software. We’re here.

I’m just tired at this point. Years ago, contributing to open source projects felt good - you helped out the developer and in turn, any other human who used the software. There was a sense of accomplishment and pride in doing something great for someone else.

But in 2026, Github is just filled with AI-generated projects. The people running these projects often don’t have any idea what they’re doing and they don’t take ownership of their code. The LLM blasts something out, they ship it and then they forget about it. That’s not a good baseline for building something.

I have set up a PlayStation 2 to run Homebrew last week and that development scene is one of the best examples for how AI ruins a whole community.

There is a project for running games on the PS2, called OPL (Open PS2 Loader). Over the course of the last year, the main developers of OPL all left and the only active fork that gets any new features is RiptOPL. RiptOPL uses this banner on their Github:

Yeeeah, I’m not gonna contribute to that kind of cringeslop. I tested it out and it’s got stupid features (pressing a button aggressively vibrates the controller) and the same (if not even more) bugs than the main OPL. Because the developer didn’t fix anything! He just took pending pull requests from the main project, added some cringe banners and useless slop and let the AI do the work.

There’s also a file manager, called wLaunchELF. You can browse the filesystem of your console and launch applications from memory cards, USB sticks and harddrives. You can also spin up an FTP server and transfer files over Ethernet.

The most active fork that gets new features is wLE R3Z, whose developer used AI to build the thing and had to turn off all Ethernet features - because the LLM couldn’t figure it out and he didn’t have any clue either. We are actively losing features and the homebrew projects get worse at this point. Capable developers either leave or decide to not contribute at all and that ruins the PS2 homebrew scene.

I am also active on vogons, a retro-computing forum and the amount of LLM-driven hobby projects in there has skyrocketed as well. I don’t know…someone’s LLM figured out how to control notebook brightness on DOS because it had crawled an internal Intel datasheet. It’s useful, I guess…but if no one did the work, there is no one to admire for doing it. All of this feels hollow and useless, I didn’t get into the hobby of retro computing to have a computer do the hard stuff for me, doing it by myself is the whole point of it.

I do write my own software without LLM support and I am currently learning Sveltekit and having a ton of fun. I am not putting anything up on the web to get crawled by bots, though.

Fun fact: A lot of devs know what they’re doing is shit and try to hide it. I have seen so many people putting CLAUDE.md into their .gitignore so it’s not added to the projects. Motherfucker, if you don’t want people see you using AI, then just don’t use AI.

The problem is slop coders can just out spam us like crazy right now with zero repercussions.

We’re still here but we’re pulling our code from GitHub so it isn’t stolen to make more slop. We’re trying to reorganize and find a new place, our place, where quality can be valued and not drowned out. You just have to dig beneath the mud

I write everything the normal way, without LLMs.

But yeah, it’s really depressing. People that used to be thinking about new ideas, tools, libraries, or methodologies now spend all of their time fiddling with prompts. It just sucks all of the air out of the room. People generate so much shit now that has no business existing, because there’s no friction in doing so. We fundamentally need to struggle with systems in order to understand them enough to make something better. Writing code was never the bottleneck, comprehension was. And struggling to understand is how one acquired comprehension. Now, things are so much worse. Not only are people not spending the necessary time to comprehend systems, but they are producing code at a rate far greater than anyone can comprehend. It’s an ever-increasing mountain of comprehension debt, and it’s poisoned the entire ecosystem. That’s what people just don’t get.

I still write everything by hand 🤷‍♂️ but depression and anxiety and stress from my contract ending in a month without anything lined up and only about ~3mos worth of savings and no family to help is moreso why im not doing anything you would see haha Im dealing with some existential stuff at the moment but I have no plans to let the robots write my code or even think for me while I can help it. Most software engineers I know are AI fans unfortunately

“The problem” in some parts is that the “bosses” want us to use AI “otherwise we will fall behind” but they have no clue on how, where and why to use it.

Easiest solution for us was to argue that we have “IP protected code” and also parts that are under NDAs, so “the upper echelon” needs to decide what we can lay bare to an AI company. As always with such decisions, they take time, get postponed and ultimately never done. 😁

But still marketing posts the AI usage, otherwise you look like a “Luddite”.

So IMHO it’s all just LinkedIn like hype and the “real developers” just keep quiet as always and sit out this s… storm.

Still here but even i got laid off and i’ll now dev in private. Trying to find a job but im also thinking that the sad reality might be me having to switch jobs :(

Or the people writing code stopped posting it publicly cuz it will just get ripped by AI.

Microslop bought github, which had an outage the other week. That might be part of it to.

Meanwhile Sloppas & Clankas spreading their clank-slop is increasing daily and adding to the noise.

You try finding a software engineering job that doesn’t require ai use as a condition of employment.

I still write software with my own two hands every day. I just don’t publish it. I use it for my own purposes or I distribute it amongst my friends.

Even if you just use AI here and there as a tool, you will be outpaced by slop coders that let Claude take the wheel. Slop gets generated super fucking fast because it just pumps out formulaic bullshit.

So you might still be debugging your project and cleaning up stuff, and they’re like… Debugging? Fuck that new entire project

The timing of the AI boom was really unfortunate. There were several tools coming off the ground that were all app builders for databases. I could tell they were about to start heading in a node-based or at least script-based design, but the moment AI came out, pretty much every single one was like, “we don’t know how our tool works anymore, but our AI can vomit some shit up in no time!”

I just want an app builder that doesn’t require a web dev masters to work with.

Honestly software devs are more pro AI than you’d expect.