Techrights Was Right About Slop Destroying Development Communities and Projects

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 15, 2026,
updated Nov 15, 2026

Rejecting slop will save or protect your project

Months ago: If Your Software Project Welcomes Bots, Then All You'll Have Left at the End Is Bots (Same for Sites Which Permit LLM Slop; They End up as Slopfarms and No Human Wants to Contribute Anymore)

Last month: GAFAM LLMs Seem to be Causing Veteran, Experienced Linux Developers to Quit, Only to be Replaced With GAFAM Bots and Unaudited Slopfest 'Code'

Yesterday I noticed (while curating news) that in the last two months "on record" - so to speak - Debian gained 7 new Developers (DDs) and 8 new Maintainers (DMs). That's an increase compared to prior years and months, but Debian also loses existing ones fast. Some rage-quit and talk about it publicly, some are more "passive" and simply become dormant. Stale, no activity, not "rocking the boat"...

The same happened in Linux lately. We caught plenty of press coverage about that. As one developer put it in relation to Debian: "The bit I'm unhappy about is that this adds a step that I object to, to a workflow that I cannot avoid if I want to continue maintaining my packages, so in essence we went from "LLM use is acceptable in Debian" to "LLM use is mandatory" within a few weeks."

Lorenzo Stoakes has just said more or less the same about Linux.

Slop does not improve your project. It kills the community. Without community, what is left? A 'botfarm'? █