If you hired an intern or spent 10 nights yourself you could also have added a FLAC player to your imaginary app. Making bad product decisions is not inherent to the use of LLMs, and whether adding a useless feature is a waste of development effort has always been subject to discussion.
Extra features don’t necessarily make your app slower and heavier on RAM, that issue has been solved by the concept of dynamic loading - 40 years ago.
It would be the genetic fallacy to reject all AI generated plugins purely because they were written by AI. Being AI generated may have previously been a decent heuristic for being slop but with models improving it can become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human and AI output. If the concern is quality/security then I think that it would be safer to assume all code is unsafe until it is reviewed by some kind of crowdsourced peer review system.
I’ve read through everything here and can see both sides. I think it’s good, but at the same time bad, that people can simply create plugins here and post them, even if they contain “potential” security vulnerabilities that could compromise a Discourse installation.
A bit off-topic.
There’s another forum software provider (WoltLab) that has a plugin store, for example. Before any release, plugins and themes are reviewed by the team. Maybe that would be an idea to implement something similar here. However, the question always arises of who would do the reviewing, and I can imagine that this would require a significant investment of time and personnel.
I can with 100% confidence say thats absolute not a viable idea, for us to review every third party plugin and theme. (Or at least, not manually by a human)
It has been interesting to see everybody’s own takes on why this transparency may be important, both on moral and security grounds. Personally, I don’t care if something was made by a software engineer of 30 years who has been doing Ruby since the dawn of time or by little Timmy with zero coding experience. If it is 100% slop-coded[1], I won’t be using it, that would be hypocritical of me. I understand why it is popular but it’s just not something I will be getting behind. If these models were trained ethically and weren’t causing component shortages along with an epidemic on AI-generated media, my sentiment towards these models might be less negative, but that is not the world we live in.
Security concerns for plugins globally are also valid and not limited to “this was made by AI”. That is a hard problem to tackle and is out of scope for this topic though, this topic is merely a suggestion to require tags on fully LLM-generated assets.
“vibe-coding” or “agentic development” are words I refuse to use ↩︎
I still don’t see the problem this is trying to solve. Can anyone give me an example of a vibe coded plugin that was slop, insecure or a performance hog? One that should have never been advertised here because it was total crap and a waste of everyone’s time?
And if there actually are examples, are they enough to be a problem?
Sounds to me like it would about as useful to have some kind of self-certified checklist for themes: how much testing have you done, are you ready to receive reports on quality and security, will you be responsive to feedback.
Or indeed, what is your development process, in no more than three sentences.
The truth-value of the responses won’t be worth much, but the difference between themes which are self-certified and those which are not might be a signal worth something, to the person thinking of installing the thing.
