// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
I love F-Droid. I love what F-Droid stands for and I like the freedom that it gives its users. As a FOSS app maintainer I also have nothing but good things to say about the people behind the project. Maybe they’re even a bit too nice, considering how many times repro has failed due to me forgetting to commit before building 😅.
But my god is it hard to find human-written software now.
Sometimes I open F-Droid just to browse. You know, maybe I’ll find an app that solves a problem I didn’t know I had, or maybe I’ll find a better alternative to something I already use.
And one day, while browsing, I noticed an app with an obvious and ugly AI generated icon. It’s not on the list and I will not shame it, but it got me thinking. How much of F-Droid is AI?
As someone who does programming for fun and is only a student, untarnished by honest work, I get my knowledge of what the coding world is like mostly from clickbaity YT videos and Reddit posts of CS professionals. They either describe LLMs as god reincarnate or as glorified autocomplete.
Both are, obviously, wrong, but that’s not really helpful in determining what I want to know. What is the actual state of programming nowadays? Whenever I use FOSS software, how likely it is that it has been vibe-coded by a rando in an afternoon?
That’s the trick—you can’t. Text just doesn’t carry enough meta information for any kind of assessments to be even close to accurate. However, just as that em-dash I used in the first sentence probably triggered an alarm in your brain, there are signs.
While that does make the task at hand sound fickle and dependent on happenstance, the signs, especially concerning LLM code repositories, are never too hard to find.
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.
Why write a README from scratch? Lol, just let the LLM do it.