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How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
- Dwedit 19d agoMany of the projects here predate 2022, so they wouldn't be "ai-generated" in that sense.
- theandrewbailey 19d agoThis is about apps on F-Droid, not F-Droid itself.
- gib444 19d agoYeah maybe title should be "How much on F-Droid is LLM generated?"
- amelius 19d agoHow much of iOS is vibe coded?
- orbital-decay 19d ago> 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.
- fer 19d agoReminds me of a professor that displayed snippets of Haskell on MS Word in her lectures, formatted by hand. I don't blame her, this was >20 years ago, before Ctrl/Cmd + +/- became commonplace for zoom/font size.
- dweekly 18d agoMy first startup job after college I was astonished to find that one of our most productive engineers was a deaf furry who used Windows Notepad as his dev environment. His code always compiled first time and was nearly always right. It really was something to behold. "The way that works for you is the right way."
- 5555watch 18d agoNot that many years ago (maybe 2012-2014), we were taught working with R using only the base-R. Its' native script editor was a Windows Notepad or something equivalent. We used this for years.. Professors as well. For some reason we didn't know about RStudio or any other fancy IDE.
- greazy 18d agoAnd this is why I hate reading other peoples R scripts. 15 packages loaded but only 3 used, `rm(list = ls())` at the top of every script, hard coded paths or worse using the `here` package.
- RugnirViking 18d agoTBF using notepad + terminal is a great way to learn how a language or stack works. It's possible for pretty much everything, and once you learn how your ide (or LLM) is putting things together it makes it so much easier to fix when things go wrong
- djhn 17d agoThis must depend on language. I think that at least for Python, JS/TS, Go, C, Fortran there isn’t much difference in setup with notepad+terminal (or sublime+terminal for myself) relative to whatever the kids are using these days. Other than syntax highlighting and LSP, obviously, but I’m not sure those have much to do with learning how the language or stack work. Could you explain what you mean if I’m misunderstanding something?
- nextaccountic 18d agoI think I read somewhere that Ken Thompson still uses ed. I can't find a mention of it though
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- skeledrew 19d ago[flagged]
- pona-a 19d ago70% seems unexpectedly high... Was there maybe some overcounting? Yubico Authenticator https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter 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.
- Mylloon 19d agoUsually AI is marked as co-author, so you can't find it in the commit list. I use the contributor graph to find where the AI made the commits [1] and then I search using the date [2], I found 3 commits relative to a11y stuff. [1] https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/graphs/contributors?from=14%2F03%2F2026&to=10%2F04%2F2026 https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/graphs/contributo... [2] https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/commits/main/?since=2026-03-21&until=2026-04-06 https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/commits/main/?sin...
- psychoslave 19d agoCo-author is so strange. Like, would anyone credit an IDE or even a script generating code as co-author? Even legally, tools don't have the ontological requirement to be credited as author.
- bpev 19d agoPretty sure it's just because if the tool generates the commit, it auto-adds itself as co-author. Like the iPhone emails that say "sent from iPhone"
- psychoslave 18d agoYes, but the equivalent of "sent from Invasive·marketing·of·some·MUA™" would be "generated with Ludicrious·Laughable·Mockery™". That is, the MUAs don’t add "co-authored by myMUA".
- edg5000 19d agoSeems 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.
- 9cb14c1ec0 19d agoSame here. I'm still a better software architect that AI, but there is no question that my AI generated and reviewed code has fewer bugs than code I hand write. It takes some humility to acknowledge that your coding prowess is less of a useful skill than it used to be.
- cik 19d agoThere's an issue where people assumed the syntactic activity of writing code was what mattered. The reality is that this was always a smaller part of the role, as opposed to thinking about observability, serviceability, and test automation. The ability to write software that is properly separated from concerns and when to enact those separations matters. At the same time, I think we're far too far down the systems path now. We've hit a point where interviewing has become purely systems design "because the AI writes the code". Not that I'm ever asked, but I inherently believe the act of critical thinking, communication, and expression are the key skills for those who already have the appropriate coding/engineering/cs/etc background. I now only interview for those skills - but through the lens of impossible to solve systems design conversations as opposed to problems. It tells me a lot about how people think.
- jeltz 19d agoNot sure what you mean as system design conversations because while in theory those can be good in practice the ones I have been at had been techbro wankery where the interviewer had a particular answer in mind. Like designing your own memcached clone for example is a terrible task for systems design.
- cik 19d ago
- valgaze 19d agoFDroid 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. ”””
- 47282847 19d agoWhat do you find strange about trying to protect against tampering and theft? I find it strange how little people seem to care these days and just widely share their users and company data across clouds. Plenty of supply chain attacks to learn from.
- hnrprtlpdb 19d ago[dead]
- metalman 19d agoWho/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.
- john_quakemac 19d ago[dead]
- alienbaby 19d agoIf 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..)
- voidUpdate 19d agoSome programmers have ethical concerns around the use of LLMs. It's like saying "my clothes still work, why should it matter if child labour made them?"
- alienbaby 19d agoI don't know wnything of the ethics of any real meatbag developers that are working on the code or app I install on my phone either. I fail to see how, for pre-packaged code specifically, it being AI or not is a problem; ~ rather, surely all the concerns we have about AI code (hopefully properly developer reviewed.. - which I suspect is where the real problem lies) apply to developer written code also, when it comes to pre-packaged apps.
- harvey9 19d agoThis seems tenuous. The LLM is not being exploited.
- relevant_stats 19d ago> If they work, does it matter? The blog post provides something akin to answer to this question: You see, the main allure of LLMs is that they allow the developer to be more lazy. That’s kind of the whole point! You just prompt, sit back and relax. So it should not surprise you to hear that this attitude is then reflected in everything the vibe-coder touches As I understand it, one of concerns is that with the lowered barriers there comes a flood of low quality software, vibe coded by very lazy and not very talented people. This might be actually more of a human problem, but it's a problem nevertheless.
- bradley13 19d agoIt'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...
- cicko 19d agoThink of that the next time you take the train.
- xandrius 19d agoIs the goal solving a problem or spending time over it? Because then why do you ride a vehicle when you could walk? Why do you use fire when a well-positioned mirror with sun could do? Why a piezo ignition or lighter when a stick and lots of friction would do as well?
- zzrrt 18d agoVirtually nobody is a professional walker or firestarter, so those are different. And to the extent they do exist (athletes and survivalists) they might agree there is no "point" except the joy they derive from doing it themselves. The problem is that formerly there was more alignment between the joy of solving problems with a human's mind and the business need to have problems solved.
- asimovDev 19d agoThe don’t tread on me person is fascinating. I wonder if they wrote the software from their phone using github codespaces in browser?
- whiteleopard 19d agoPlease 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.
- ivanjermakov 19d agoIt's not about who wrote the code, rather who made decisions.
- alienbaby 19d agoSo we are calling the developers as sloppy now just because they use AI? It is entirely possible to use AI and still produce good code - the effort required changes, but so long as it is done by a diligent developer capable of asessing and correcting AI code, it should be fine.
- ivanjermakov 19d agoThat's my point, diligent use of AI is indistinguishable. And because of bad rep we will see any bad code called out "AI slop".
- bigstrat2003 18d ago> Coding agent are now replacing the IDE and code is now mostly written by the agents. If you're doing that, you are producing slop. So it should be called out as slop.
- whiteleopard 18d agoI did not say I don't read any produced code; I said I don't write it manually. What I wanted to demystify is that you can generate everything with AI and still put a lot of work into design choices, good code structure, and so on, without producing any slop.
- gpvos 18d agoPlease stop telling people what to do. Also, the discussion of the merits of LLM code writing is far from over. Author of TFA actually provided an interesting data point, you are just rehashing an often heard opinion.
- rafapersa 19d ago[flagged]
- jraph 19d agoI'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.
- samayashar 19d agoEvery 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.
- panny 18d agoI've worked with "engineers" that make one commit in 2 months and it's a spelling correction. I'm pretty sure that being 7 times faster than that is still quite slow compared to me :) I hear a lot of breathless enthusiasm, but this article is possibly the first time I'm seeing the question answered "If AI is so great, where are all the applications?"
- lrvick 19d agoI 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.
- bigstrat2003 18d ago[flagged]
- malfist 18d agoBut they have absolute confidence! They're absolutely right
- lrvick 18d agoI can have confidence because I specced the test suite to prove the rust assembly calls matches up with the tables in the linux source code. If any of that is wrong, then the Linux kernel is wrong the same way. I am not even close to vibe coding. This is built to my exact spec because I actually understand this area pretty well. I constructed a Linux distribution on my own before AI and contributed to the kernel by hand going back 20 years ago now.
- fhn 18d agohumans are overly confident too when they are mostly wrong
- Varelion 18d agoThe fact this got flagged says all you need to know about the current dev ecosystem.
- shevy-java 19d ago> 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.
- r0ze-at-hn 18d agoThis 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.
- p32929 18d ago[flagged]
- tonymet 18d agohow 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.
- gblargg 18d agoEven 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.
- t1234s 18d agoWhat 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.
- creesch 18d agoF-droid doesn't simply distribute build apps. It requires the source to be open and will build the apps itself. This does not guarantee there will be no bad actors trying to slip in malicious code. I do believe they also do initial audits before an app is allowed in their repos. It also often takes a while for an app update to show up in F-droid, I am not sure if that is due to auditing updates or something else though. More here: - https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ - https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/ https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/
- mwkaufma 18d agoWhen your "app store" is just a chatbot role-playing being an app store.
- brandonp2412-re 18d agoFitbook and Flexify I hand slopped until recently. Not my fault vibes win so hard maybe cry about it.