If you like Open Source software, vibe coding now gives you a fantastic opportunity: to take that code and modify it to your liking with the help of vibe coding and the AI agents that program. Let them tell it to me. You may have good ideas and the AI will solve them with new code generated with these tools, but there is a problem: the quality of that code may not be adequate.
what has happened. Steve Ruiz (@steveruizok) is the creator and responsible for TLDrawa nice Open Source application that allows you to turn your browser into a canvas so you can easily draw whatever you want on it. On January 15, Steve posted a message on X in which he announced something very striking: he would stop accepting code contributions (pull requests, PRs) in the TLDraw GitHub repository.
We don’t need low quality code. “Due to the influx of pull requests of low quality, we will soon close those requests to external contributors,” said the person responsible for a project in an additional post on the official blog of the project. The message was clear: although people’s intentions are surely good when trying to contribute their ideas to an existing project, this developer soon realized that the code contributed by new programmers, fans of vibe coding, was of low quality. Solution? Ban those contributions made with AI.
AI-generated code can serve. In that article I indicated that this was not a measure against vibe coding, but against code (any code, human or AI) of poor quality. Ruiz explained how:
“We already accept code written with AI. I write code with AI tools. I hope my team uses those AI tools too. If you know the project’s code base and know what you’re doing, writing great code has never been easier thanks to these tools.”
AI Slop, but from code. Although we often talk about “slop created by AI“(AI Slop) in reference to low-quality text, images, music and videos, the term can also be applied to code. Ruiz explained how in September he began to detect many requests for code contributions that seemed correct but that after a deeper analysis, although they worked, could potentially introduce future problems and complexity to the project.
I correct here, I correct there. In addition, many of the contributors had profiles in which they could be seen jumping from Open Source project to Open Source project and then disappearing. They simply contributed without following the policies or requirements of the project and moved on to another.
This is a plague. In the debates that this decision generated in Hacker News and x Ruiz found himself with a surprise: people not only did not protest, but they valued the measure positively. He commented how “this seems to be the standard experience for all public repository maintainers right now.” He cited the example of Excalidrawanother similar project that “received more than twice as many PRs in the fourth quarter of 2025 than in the third” in your repository.
More and more vetoes of low-quality AI code. Other projects are going through that same phase. ghosttya terminal emulator for macOS and Linux, recently published their “AI policy” in the site’s public GitHub repository with important notices. For example, that “PRs created by AI must have been fully verified with human use”, and further that “all use of AI in any way, shape or form must be disclosed.”
That’s cheating. Curl, a very popular utility for command line users, had announced the opening of a bounty program to detect bugs and vulnerabilities in its code. What have many people done? Use AI to find them and take the money. Those responsible for the program have announced that They will close it this month in the face of the avalanche of low-quality vulnerability reports clearly generated by AI.
Linus already said it. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, admitted to using vibe coding tools for some small personal project. While recognizing that these tools can be great, he warned of the danger of all that AI-generated code:
“AI will be a tool, and it will make people more productive. I think vibe coding is great for getting people to start programming. I think (the code it generates) is going to be horrible to maintain… so I don’t think programmers will go away. You’ll still want to have people who know how to maintain the output.”
AI code works, but it is not usually “quality”. The developer community has been warning and experiencing this for some time. Although AI tools can help program and solve many routine tasks, the generated code must be reviewed by a human programmer to avoid future problems. It is reasonable to think that this code will be increasingly better and of higher quality, but today in many cases the situation is clear: it may work, yes, but that is not enough for many projects in production, especially when they are used by thousands (let alone millions) of people.
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