RFC 406i: Standardized Rejection of AI-Generated Slop

RFC 406i establishes a protocol for identifying and rejecting unverified, AI-generated technical contributions. It highlights how "AI slop" wastes the limited time of human maintainers through hallucinated logic and robotic boilerplate. The document demands that contributors return to manual verification and human-authored content to maintain the integrity of technical communities.

Key Points

• AI-generated contributions create an "asymmetry of effort" by forcing human maintainers to spend time reviewing low-quality, machine-made content.
• Diagnostic markers of "AI slop" include hallucinated libraries, overly polite robotic language, and grammatically perfect but logically flawed code.
• The protocol mandates that contributors must manually verify their work and achieve "verifiable sentience" before submitting to projects.
• Maintainers are encouraged to use standardized rejection macros to quickly close AI-generated pull requests, issues, and security reports.
• The document asserts that community codes of conduct and "welcoming" environments apply to human thinkers, not automated botnets.

Sentiment

The HN community is strongly aligned with the article's premise. There is near-universal agreement that AI slop PRs are a real problem and that maintainers are right to reject them firmly. Dissenting voices don't defend AI slop itself, but rather question the document's practical utility as satire, note its overly specific framing, or argue for nuance around AI-assisted (but human-reviewed) contributions. Overall, Hacker News agrees enthusiastically with the article.

In Agreement

• The asymmetry of effort is the fundamental problem: AI can generate hundreds of PRs per day at near-zero cost, while each review consumes significant human attention — making open contribution unsustainable.
• GitHub archive data shows 99% of legitimate contributors submit to only one repo per day; accounts hitting 5+ repos are almost certainly bots, suggesting simple rate limiting would be highly effective.
• The primary motivation for most AI slop PRs is resume-padding and gaming GitHub's green contribution squares, not genuine intent to help the project.
• The article's FAQ bluntly and correctly dismantles the 'welcoming community' objection — invoking community standards to pressure maintainers into reviewing unvetted AI output is emotional manipulation, not a legitimate argument.
• Open source maintainers have no employment obligation to foster a welcoming environment; they can run their projects however they choose.
• The Ghostty AI policy — requiring contributors to be able to explain their changes without AI — is a practical and principled alternative that several commenters endorsed.
• AI slop PRs that import hallucinated libraries, fail CI, or include bloated commit messages for trivial changes represent obvious bad-faith submissions that deserve immediate rejection.
• The observation that 'code used to be rare, and therefore worth a lot' resonated widely — a 1500-line AI-generated PR is categorically different from 1500 human-crafted lines.

Opposed

• The RFC is more comedy than practical protocol — bad actors will never read it, so it functions only as a reference link when closing PRs, not as a deterrent.
• The document is too specific and narrowly targeted at egregious cases, making it a strawman that doesn't address the nuanced middle-ground of well-intentioned AI-assisted contributions.
• Some AI-assisted contributions, when the contributor has genuinely understood and owns the changes, can be valuable — blanket rejection of AI-generated code conflates low-effort slop with legitimate tool-assisted work.
• The FAQ's tone is unnecessarily snarky; a more neutral version of the same policy would be more useful in practice and less likely to escalate conflicts.
• One commenter felt 'bait-and-switched' by the satirical framing after expecting a genuine, enforceable protocol.