Honestly, I'm fairly pro-AI for code writing (within reason), but the slop posts really are a problem. It's about effort. If you can't even be bothered to put in the bare minimum of thought and write the post yourself, I don't see why you should expect replies. Slop is slop, regardless of whether it came from a human or machine. If someone's so lazy that they aren't even reading what they post, let alone writing it, they're not contributing anything meaningful to this forum. Now, if someone uses AI e.g. to translate a post from their native language into English for posting, that's fine. If someone updates a wiki article with relevant information using an AI, and the article is actually improved, then that's fine by me too. I think it's reasonable to just ask for a minimum level of effort and quality.
I use AI-generated code in quite a few of my projects. I tend to use it in the areas I don't care about, and remain heavily involved in the areas I do. For projects as large as an entire OS, AI is a massive lever, and a lot of people who were interested but never had the time can now get started. But "hey claude, write an os for me" isn't going to teach them anything, and when they come here asking about some bug their LLM of choice put into 'their' code, the answer really should just be "go ask the LLM, or understand the code yourself first." In theory, AI should be a miracle for this site: it could be the recipient of all the "how do i paging?" questions, and the forum could clean up a bit. And maybe it is doing that as we speak. But the slop needs to stop.
sebihepp wrote: ↑Thu Aug 06, 2026 3:30 pm
I was against AI for a long time, but now I am considering it for my Hobby OS.
I need to implement a physical memory manager next and I already decided to base it on free memory chunks, combined with a balanced binary tree for address and size - well, details...
I can't motivate me to implement the bsp-tree and I decided to give AI a shot, to program it for me.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable use of a coding agent, provided you maintain oversight and direct it. I did something similar with the boilerplate syscall stubs in my C library. Fundamentally, it's not really that different from having a second developer. You just have to accept that the code they write isn't written by you, and as such it isn't your code, you don't
know the code, and you won't have gained the experience of implementing it. Which might be fine; it's entirely your choice: it's your project.
I don't post often, largely because I don't have much to contribute, but this forum and wiki have been an invaluable resource to me for years, and I'd hate to see them succumb to the slop tsunami. I'd also hate to see them go the other way and shun AI like the plague, because that would probably also lead to dwindling usefulness and eventual irrelevance.