A new website called Open Source Says No is cataloguing the growing number of open source projects that explicitly ban AI-generated contributions, and it struck a nerve: the site reached the front page of Hacker News on Tuesday, drawing hundreds of comments as developers argued over whether the bans protect code quality or shut out the future. The directory describes itself as a record of "OSS projects banning AI-generated contributions, and a broader catalogue of AI contribution policies across the industry."

The site's appearance marks a visible milestone in a tension that has been building in maintainer communities for months, as large volumes of machine-written pull requests increasingly compete for the limited review time of volunteer maintainers. The debate is one of several flashpoints in how the software world is absorbing generative tools, a topic we follow closely in our AI industry coverage.

What the Directory Tracks

Open Source Says No lists major repositories alongside their star counts and the dates their policies were verified. Among the entries confirmed as of November 11 are Immich, the widely used self-hosted photo and video management solution with roughly 118,800 GitHub stars, Meilisearch, the search engine API with about 59,800 stars, and OkHttp, the prominent HTTP client for the JVM and Android maintained under Square's umbrella, with around 47,100 stars.

The list also includes Servo, the browser engine project, verified in October, stb, the well-known single-file public domain C/C++ libraries, and Redox OS, the operating system written in Rust. The projects span wildly different domains — from consumer self-hosting apps to foundational systems software — which the site presents as evidence that resistance to AI-generated code is not confined to any one programming subculture.

Beyond the directory itself, the site offers a practical tool aimed at maintainers and contributors: users can paste a GitHub repository link, and the site opens a prefilled issue while an automated policy check runs against it. That positions the project less as a statement and more as infrastructure for enforcement, giving maintainers a repeatable way to document and communicate their contribution policies.

Why Maintainers Are Drawing the Line

The discussion on Hacker News revealed the motivations behind these policies. Several commenters described projects receiving floods of entirely AI-generated pull requests, with one noting they had scrolled through repositories where, in their words, they could not find a single piece of text that read like it was written by a human, despite what looked like an active contribution stream.

The core problem is one of scarce attention: reviewing a pull request takes real time, and maintainers argue that verifying machine-generated code — especially contributions whose authors may not understand what the code does — can cost more effort than writing the code from scratch. Others pointed to what they called "enthusiastic" contributors acting, as one commenter put it, as a meat proxy for whichever AI vendor happens to offer a free trial that week, submitting low-effort changes in pursuit of contribution counts.

A Community Divided

Not everyone agrees the bans are a good thing. Some argued that community-driven projects like Servo or Redox OS already struggle for funding and contributors, and that blocking AI-assisted work risks driving away exactly the people such projects need. Others countered that this filtering is the point: if a potential contributor is only willing to participate on the condition of shipping unreviewed machine output, the ban simply sorts out mismatches early.

There was also a pragmatist camp that sees the bans as useful signaling. Several commenters said the directory helps them identify codebases with active human oversight — libraries they can trust more readily and communities where contributions will actually be read. Others questioned whether the policy language conflates distinct practices, noting a wide gap between unreviewed AI slop submitted in bulk and closely human-guided agentic coding, which many professional developers now consider standard practice.

What It Means for Open Source

For contributors, the practical consequence is straightforward: contribution policies are becoming a first-class part of project documentation, and submitting AI-generated work to a project that bans it is now a documented policy violation rather than a judgment call. For companies that rely on open source components, the trend is a signal to check the contribution and governance posture of their dependency tree, since licensing and maintenance practices are increasingly entangled with how each project treats machine-generated code.

Whether the movement grows or plateaus will depend on whether mainstream foundations and very large projects adopt similar rules. For now, the directory's fast-growing list — and the intensity of the discussion around it — suggests that the question of who writes open source code, and who is accountable for reviewing it, has moved from mailing-list backchannels to a front-page fight.

---

Stay Ahead of AI

Get the latest AI news, analysis, and breakthroughs — all in one place.

Read more AI news →