Currently some people may try to upload plugins, themes, or components entirely generated by LLMs and not disclose it as such. There’s many reasons why it may be beneficial to know when something is fully generated by a LLM and there is no obligation to disclose said plugins as such at the moment. Personally, I would like to know upfront so I don’t end up installing a low-quality plugin with many performance/optimization/UX problems that LLM plugins have.
Obviously this relies on people being truthful and upfront (and people who have AI generated topics might not know better than what it says) but having a tag like #ai-generated that gets put on assets that are primarily AI generated would be beneficial for everybody.
I disagree with the notion that an LLM-generated plugin is inherently low-quality or necessarily suffers from performance, optimization, or UX issues. The quality of the result depends heavily on the person guiding the LLM and reviewing its output.
I’ve taken pride in the software I’ve developed over the past 40 years, and incorporating LLMs into my workflow has improved the quality of my work, not diminished it.
Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of hand-written plugins riddled with security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and poor design decisions, where I genuinely wished the author had used an LLM. Ultimately, it’s the quality of the developer and the resulting code that matters, not whether an LLM was involved in writing it.
I wonder how you suggest reviewing and/or updating code generated by LLMs, for those of us who are getting into vibe-coding to implement new functionalities or customize the actually shipped ones.
I know that a collective review in public repositories is ideal, but I would like to first do my homework and only publish versions that have exhausted my current capacity.
I am agree with the previous comment, not being anti-AI but at the same time being aware that EVERYTHING they generate must be audited, verified, and updated by humans.
This is totally fair and at the end of the day I’m only allowed to speak for myself which has been observations of low-quality “slop” apps that all look identical and are generally low quality (both in terms of functionality and security), along with existing apps that have severely gone down in quality since they started largely offloading work to LLMs (such as visual studio code and formbricks; both of which I have since stopped using). Even if your app is perfect there’s still ethical concerns so it would be great if there was some form of notification for these creations as suggested. Doesn’t mean anybody has to base anything off the tag but if you would like to then the option is nice.
As I said, this is inherently trust-based system and the sole developer’s responsibility to ensure it is tagged as such. Obviously there are some cases where the LLM tags itself in the git logs (like most do) so a TL3+ can take action if desired by viewing the GitHub.
I appreciate your reply, thank you. My inquiry is also directed to everyone and concerns tools that currently exist to verify code generated by LLMs.
I am not a developer, but I managed to implement functionalities that did not exist in Discourse. And I want to do what is within my reach in the best possible way.
I will consider tagging if I end up publishing my repositories; for now, they are private precisely because I am testing them, and I am interested in doing it right before distributing to the community.
I’d be extremely surprised if most Core code (inc. Core Plugins) was not now built with Coding Agents, such is the extent to which development has changed.
It is also clear a lot of effort has been put into the Discourse repo to make it coding agent friendly, both for building extensions and modifying core.
It is now, imho, very hard to justify not using coding agents on most work as the drop in efficiency simply wouldn’t make business or even common sense.
This horse has truly bolted (in fact it bolted around September 2025)
It’s only about standards and workflow refinement now.
You might be better off asking for a tag for “no AI was used to build this” aka “ai-free” as that would apply to so very few.
I get the sensitivity around this, but I really believe the world has moved on.
I am not concerned at all about “how a plugin was formed” and if the craft person used a pencil vs a pen.
“No AI here”, is not something that gives me even an ounce of extra confidence when it comes to installing a theme or plugin.
However… there is a much more serious problem we need to tackle at CDCK.
Core plugins and source code at Discourse is security scanned regularly, when a person installs a supported channel they have confidence around how secure the code is.
The third party plugins and themes here are “the wild west”, anyone can contribute, we do not security scan them or ensure they are following best practices. This puts the community at risk.
I would like to reach a world where “version XYZ” of theme was at least automatically scanned to give self hosters at least some confidence.
So my vision here is the complete opposite require versions of third party themes and plugins pass some sort of AI scan prior to being advertised here.
Code review by LLM is totally different than “claude build me this app and make no mistakes” and publishing the output with little to no validation or edits you made yourself in my opinion at least on ethical grounds. Unfortunately, you can’t really force an end user to have accountability, and no matter how hard you try somebody will find a way to download something malicious. But regardless, how ethical LLMs are is a separate conversation and not really relevant to this thread.
and that’s okay! I’m not suggesting a sweeping ban on anything with AI involvement in Customization.. I’d just like it tagged properly so those who do not want to open that can of worms don’t end up doing so.
require versions of third party themes and plugins pass some sort of AI scan prior to being advertised here.