Free/Open Source Software choosing to use and/or support LLM usage/AI, as well as alternatives and tips to requesting better policies or forking.

anti-slop no-ai noai

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yuli 73f3910d75 add Yazi (#760 ) Reviewed-on: #760 Reviewed-by: Admin <vleermuis-admin@noreply.codeberg.org>		2026-05-20 22:06:49 +02:00
.forgejo/issue_template	Fix typo in collaborate-with-me.yaml (#718 )	2026-05-13 08:55:16 +02:00
badges	adds a permits LLM ingestion tag (#472 )	2026-04-26 12:32:38 +02:00
img	add how to slop free fork doc (#629 )	2026-05-04 12:18:57 +02:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md	note our stance on the term NSFW (#735 )	2026-05-18 15:36:17 +02:00
CONTRIBUTING.md	make it clear that we don't want social media posts (#752 )	2026-05-20 21:29:14 +02:00
FAQ.md	make it clear that we don't want social media posts (#752 )	2026-05-20 21:29:14 +02:00
HOW_TO_SLOP_FREE_FORK.md	add how to slop free fork doc (#629 )	2026-05-04 12:18:57 +02:00
LICENSE.txt	add the original license that was added after our fork, but before the original repo deletion	2026-03-10 11:32:42 +01:00
NO_AI_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md	Fill in the missing no AI templates (#708 )	2026-05-13 12:30:35 +02:00
README.md	add Yazi (#760 )	2026-05-20 22:06:49 +02:00
STYLE.md	update style guide with full tag examples and required ordering (#666 )	2026-05-08 15:43:36 +02:00

README.md

Open Slopware

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives.

The intention of this list is to raise awareness of AI/LLM usage in popular open-source software. Provided below is an informed set of AI-free alternatives for users and developers to consider should their ethical boundaries be crossed or tolerance for risk be exceeded. This list is not a resource to be used for the harassment of other open-source developers. If you wish to advocate for the cessation of use and/or removal of AI-generated code from another project, we ask that it be done respectfully and constructively (and do not mention this list).

For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.

Want to add, update, or remove a project listed below? Check out our Contributing Doc.

See a project on here that you love, and wish wasn't on here? Check out our No AI Request Template.

Ready to fork a project to introduce a No AI policy? Check out our How to Slop Free Fork Guide.

Any other questions? Please check out our FAQ, and if your question isn't answered there, please feel free to start a Discussion.

Definitions

Term	Definition
LLM	Large Language Model, a language model trained on vast amounts of text (often entire websites without the website owner's permission)
slop	Anything generated by AI, typically code, books, articles, or images.
slopshop	Company, Organization, or Group of sloperators working together to use AI to generate content.

Below are special definitions that are used for tagging purposes.

Permissive AI Policy

A policy that permits the use of AI/LLMs in any capacity or is declared to be vibecoded. Both vibecoding and opening the door for people to vibecode count as a permissive AI policy.

Evidence can be:

an explicit AI policy (e.g. AI_POLICY.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, developer docs) in the repo or something in the project's contributing guidelines or in their website's documentation that says that AI/LLMs are allowed
an LLM friendly AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or other such LLM instruction files or folders.
core maintainers' blog or social media post about vibecoding
link to readme, website, or documentation stating the project is vibecoded

Important

If a core maintainer has noted that the code is entirely vibecoded, please put that as the first evidence link.

Vibecode

Asking an AI to write software for you (often without human review). Per Wikipedia:

In computer programming, vibe coding is a software development practice assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) such as by chatbots (programs that simulate conversation) or AI agents such as Codex or Claude Code. The software developer describes a project or task in a prompt to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. Vibe coding may involve accepting AI-generated code without reviewing the output thoroughly, instead relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI) in February 2025.

A Vibecoder is a person who uses AI prompts to generate anything, typically code or images. It would therefore be appropriate to call Andrej Karpathy a vibecoder.

Note

Humans reviewing vibecoded code does not disqualify said code from being considered vibecoded.

AI Functionality

This would include the ability to enable or disable an AI feature, such as an AI assistant or AI summary feature. This would also cover the case when a project depends on an AI program or library, such as an LLM SDK.

Evidence can be:

a link to the docs explaining the AI Functionality
a blog post advertising the AI Functionality
a link to the default branch in a repo that shows where the AI Functionality is implemented

AI Code Reviews

An AI agent/bot is used to review pull requests, which makes slop acceptance more probable and maintainability more difficult, especially when human reviews are scarce.

Evidence can be:

a link to an AI code review requested by a maintainer.
an AI code review CI workflow.
a PR where an AI code review seems to be automatically created by some sort of third party app

Gen AI 'Art'

AI "Art" is being used in a project. This is typically for banners, avatars, promotional material, and/or blog posts. This means they're using tools that steal art from visual artists.

Evidence can be:

link to the place where the AI "art" is used

AI Sponsored

The project is sponsored directly by an AI company. An AI company is any company that advertises itself as pro-AI or develops an AI product itself. The obvious ones are Anthropic and OpenAI, however, all the big tech companies (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon) also count because they all have AI services and direct products as major offerings.

Evidence can be:

Blog post disclosing AI funding
link to website that lists AI companies in sponsors list
README that says "Sponsored by "

AI Databroker Usage

The use of an AI company as a third party service for processing user data.

Evidence can be:

Blog post talking about using AI for processing user data
Privacy policy listing an AI company as a third party service

AI In Issue Tracker

The use of an AI bot/agent for responding to Issues, Discussions, Forums etc related to a project's issue/bug tracking.

Evidence can be:

Link to AI in an Issue, Bug report, Discussion, etc - must be related to the project's bug/issue tracking (e.g. dosu)

Permits LLM Ingestion

Permits the use of AI/LLMs to ingest the project's contents. This can be for "understanding the code better", "finding bugs/security issues/optimizations". This tag is to be used independently for projects that generally reject the use of AI in their code repositories, issue trackers, and sponsorships, but still encourage or permit users to use LLMs to ingest their code base.

The reason we still find this worthy of a tag is because it:

means that the LLM, often provided by a company with very little respect for copyright, will then save a copy of that open source repo for use in it's future outputs.
still encourages people to use LLMs and carves out a special situation in which they're still OK, but as this repo is against AI/LLMs for more than just "poor code quality" reasons, we still believe this is not a good course of action as it still promotes the use of inherently unethical tooling.

Evidence can be:

An AI or Contribution policy that carves out a space for "using LLMs to understand the code" or "finding bugs"
Core maintainer using or accepting the use of AI for finding Security issues

Request for Help

This means someone is asking for help with research. They would like it if you found the last known good version of a project or suggestions on alternatives for people to use. You can submit a pull request to add this info.

Sibling Repos

This is a section for repos that are similar to this one either because they are also forks of the original upstream, or because they align with our goal of identifying and avoiding AI/LLM usage OR identifying/elevating projects that do NOT use AI/LLMs. These repos are not all maintained by the same people, but we may share some contributors and are generally kind FOSS neighbors. ✨

llm-afflicted-software offers a similar list to ours here, however in YAML file format for each category, making it more suitable to consumption via code (for instance writing a CLI, GUI, or TUI tool to consume it). They've also kindly reached out in the past and submitted Issues and PRs (e.g. #12, #22) to help us here.
forge.starlightnet.work/Team/No-AI/ which is the repo for this no-AI list that lists projects that have explicitly pledged not to use AI or have an explicit policy to not use AI.
slop-free-index is a list of software that has taken steps to reject AI in its development processes.

Note

This is a fork of a repo by the same name maintained by the @gen-ai-transparency org on Codeberg. If they make their repo available again, we will contribute back.

Tainted Software

Warning

We've recently added a "Last Untainted Version or Commit ID" column to our below tables. This is meant for tech savvy individuals to be able to fork the project and continue maintaining it without the use of AI. Choosing to install an older version of software could expose you to to security risks over time. Only do this if you are able to accept such risks.

Accessibility Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
espeak-ng	`v1.52`	(1, 2) (1, 2)	espeak¹, flite
Nametag	`v0.17.0`	(1, 2, 3)	Monica

Note

¹ espeak may be considered heavily outdated and very bad from a modern standpoint.

Accounting and Budgeting

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Actual		(1, 2)
beancount		(1, 2)
Firefly III		(1)
hledger (v2.x)		(1)
KMyMoney		(1)
ledger-cli		(1, 2)
ODoo		(1)

Note

Accounting and Budgeting Alternatives

These might be worth reaching out to ask for a No AI Policy, but currently don't have LLM usage:

Eqonomize

Grisbi

HomeBank

API Documentation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Scalar		(1) (1) (1)

App Launchers

Mobile Launchers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
KISS		(1)
Lawnchair	`14.0.0-beta3`	(1, 2) (1)

Note

Mobile Launchers Alternatives

Ion Launcher

Pie Launcher

Audio

Digital Audio Workstations

Name	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Audacity	(1) (1) (1)	Tenacity
Ardour	(1)	LMMS¹
HISE	(1)	DPF
zrythm	(1)	LMMS¹

Note

1: Status as a replacement may be debatable.

You may also consider browsing the DAWs available on linuxdaw.org.

Standalone Digital Mixer

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FineTune		(1)	BackgroundMusic

Music Players

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
somafm_tui		(1, 2)	soma-player
SimpMusic		(1, 2) (1)

Podcast Aggregators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
AntennaPod		(1, 2)

Benchmarking

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Hyperfine	`v1.19.0`	(1)

Blogging Software

Content Management Systems

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Backdrop CMS	`1.33.2`	(1)
Banany blog		(1)
Bludit		(1) (1)	WriteFreely
Drupal		(1) (2)
Ghost		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)	WriteFreely
Wagtail		(1) (1)	WriteFreely
Webiny		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)	WriteFreely
WordPress		(1, 2) (1)	WriteFreely

Static Site Generators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Hugo	v0.151.2	(1, 2, 3) (1)
Pelican		(1)
Zola		(1)

Note

Static site generators alternatives

Bridgetown

BSSG

Frog for LISP lovers

Jekyll maybe? No signs of AI in the repo but also no clear statement provided

Haunt

org-blog-wiki (list by org devs - for GNU Emacs, no markdown)

org-static-blog (for GNU Emacs users, no markdown)

Zine

We haven't vetted these, but you may also find luck browsing Jamstack's Static Site Generator List.

Books and Library Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Booklore	none	(1)	Clbre, Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, Calibre hard-fork from before AI
Calibre	`8.15.0`	(1)	Clbre, Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, Calibre hard-fork from before AI
KOReader	`2023.08`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2)
Zotero		(1)	Citations

Bootloaders

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
barebox	`fe328bc`	(1)	Coreboot, EDK2 (UEFI), U-Boot
Limine		(1, 2)	Hyper, GRUB

Build Systems and Task Runners

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Bazel	`9.0.2`	(1)	Cloud Shake or See Below
Buck2	`2025-10-15`	(1)	Cloud Shake or See Below
Just		(1)	See Below
Mill	`v1.0.6`	(1, 2)	See Below
mise-en-place	`659f851`	(1, 2, 3) (1)	asdf or See Below
SCons	`4.10.1`	(1)	Waf or See Below
sbt	`1.12.3`	(1, 2)	See Below
Taskfile		(1)	See Below

Note

On task runners and make(1) implementations:

A lot of Make implementations exist that are very fit to replace other task runners. In fact so many were produced, that one can just look up "GNU Make alternative" and find >10 results to pick the one they like the best. Also see: wikipedia/Make Here are some Make implementation suggestions:

name description

GNU Make the most complete one, extra extensions, guile scripting, exports, etc.

NetBSD make Make used to build NetBSD ports tree

Jam OSS rewrite by Perforce

Schilytools or OpenOffice dmake Descendants of Sun's Distributed Make

name	description
GNU Make	the most complete one, extra extensions, guile scripting, exports, etc.
NetBSD `make`	Make used to build NetBSD ports tree
Jam	OSS rewrite by Perforce
Schilytools or OpenOffice `dmake`	Descendants of Sun's Distributed Make

Note

Alternative Build Systems

Various other build systems exist, that try to address perceived deficiencies in make and its derivatives.

Ninja - standalone or as the backend of a meta-build tool like CMake or Meson

redo

tup

Browsers

Browser Addons

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternatives
Stylus	`v2.3.19`	(1)	Stylebot

Desktop Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Chromium/Blink engine		(1, 2, 3)
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)
Ladybird		(1)
WebKit		(1, 2, 3)
Zen		(1, 2) (1)

Note

Desktop Browser Alternatives

Epiphany (by GNOME, WebKit based) does not currently have a stance, but GNOME developers as a whole show aware anti-"AI" sentiments and roll out wide reaching rules against it.

Servo (New engine, formerly owned by Mozilla, now by a co-op) is not yet daily driver ready, but has strong protections for when it is some time in the future.

waterfox They have clear anti-ai stance

Headless Browsers

Headless browsers are browsers, typically for server usage, that don't render web pages for humans to view.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Lightpanda		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)

Mobile Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)

Note

Mobile Browser Alternatives

IronFox For Android, while not officially related to LibreWolf, some of the same developers work on it.

waterfox For Android.

Cheat Sheets and Documentation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cheat	`v4.4.2`	(1)
explainshell	`1157256`	(1, 2, 3) (1)
tldr-pages	`v2.3`	(1, 2)	ethical-tldr, ethical-tldr-client

Command-Line Shells

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
nushell		(1) (1)
Oil Shell	`dddab4a`	(1)
PowerShell	`v7.4.0-preview.2`	(1, 2, 3) (1)
xonsh		(1)
yash		(1)

Note

Alternative Bourne Shell Implementations

dash

bash

oksh

Busybox ash

Schilytools bosh

Note

Alternative Shell Languages

elvish

fish

rc

xc

execline

Addons and Prompts

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Atuin		(1) (1, 2)	Built-in shell history
oh-my-bash		(1)
oh-my-posh		(1) (1)
ohmyzsh		(1) (1, 2, 3)
spaceship-prompt	`v4.19.3`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)
Starship		(1) (1) (1)	shmonad

Note

Alternative Plugin Managers

zimfw

Compiler Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
`Godbolt`	`d107352`?	(1)
LLVM		(1)	GCC, Cranelift, pcc

Linkers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Mold		(1)	GNU ld
Wild		(1, 2, 3)

Computer Graphics

3D Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Blender		(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
F3D		(1) (1)

Image Manipulation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ImageMagick	`v7.1.2.16`	(1)	GraphicsMagick, vips
excalidraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
LibreSprite		(1) (1)	Krita
tldraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
draw.io		(1)	LibreOffice Draw

Photography

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
darktable		(1, 2, 3)
RapidRAW		(1)
RawTherapee	`5.12`	(1) (1, 2, 3)

Video

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Fladder	`ddb71ef`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
gstreamer		(1)
Jellyfin (server)		(1) (1)
Jellyfin Desktop	Use archived Qt-based client	(1, 2, 3)
Kodi		(1) (1)
mpv		(1)	MPlayer Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based) ffplay (ffmpeg+SDL-based)
NewPipe		(1)	LibreTube
PipePipe		(1)	LibreTube
VLC		(1, 2) (1) (1)	Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based) ffplay (ffmpeg+SDL-based)

Continuous Integration

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Act	`v0.2.85`	(1)	Forgejo Actions
Woodpecker	`v3.12.0`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	Forgejo Actions

Data Archival

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
redumper		(1)

Developer Tools

Warning

We are working on deprecating this section. Please do not add anything else here and instead add to existing sections or create additional sections that are more specific.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
curl		(1, 2, 3) (1)	Wget
Golly		(1)
watchexec	`2.3.2` or `a17505e`	(1)	entr, watfs

Device Exploiting

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
MTKClient	`9f64e8e`	(1)

Documents

Document Converters

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cmark		(1, 2, 3) (1)	Markdown.pl (md to html)
commonmark-java	`e62bca1`	(1, 2, 3)
Pandoc	`0ce85b0`	(1, 2, 3)	lowdown? Typst?

Document Viewers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Sumatra PDF	`v3.5.2`	(1)	Xournal++

Editors

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
CotEditor		(1, 2)	See editors below
Helix		(1)	See editors below
Joplin		(1)	See note software below
Kakoune		(1)	See editors below
Lem	`e039567` `v2.3.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1)	Hemlock
Logseq		(1)	See note software below
Memos	`v0.12.1`	(1, 2) (1) (1)	See note software below
Microsoft Edit		(1) (1)	See editors below
Neovim		(1, 2, 3)	See editors below
Nextpad++	None	(1, 2)	See editors below
Ox	`v0.7.5`	(1)	See editors below
Qt Creator		(1)	See editors below
RStudio		(1) (1, 2)	See editors below
VIm	`v9.1.0189`	(1, 2, 3)	See editors below
VS Code		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	VSCodium's builds disable AI "features"
Zed		(1) (1, 2, 3)	Lapce Gram (fork) Others (GNU Emacs, etc.)

Note

Note Software Alternatives

flatnotes (Markdown-based)

Zettlr (Markdown-based)

Note

Alternative TUI Code Editors

GNU Emacs

EVi

vim-classic

Other forks of VIm prior to March 20th 2024, build v9.1.0190 or commit 8950bf7f8b85c1287d4e696965d88091fcc60594

E-Mail and Calendar

E-Mail Desktop Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Forward Email	`v0.9.1`	(1)
NeoMutt		(1)	mutt

E-Mail Mobile Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FairEmail		(1)
thunderbird android/k-9 mail		(1)	Simple Email

Calendar Mobile Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Giggity		(1)

File Storage

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Ente Locker		(1)
JuiceFS	`v1.2.3`	(1)
MinIO		(1)
Nextcloud		(1) (1)
Rook/Ceph	`v1.17.0`	(1)
RustFS	None	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
SeaweedFS	`3.87`	(1)
Silo	None	(1, 2, 3)
Syncthing		(1, 2)

Note

File Storage Alternatives

CopyParty for general file sharing

Garage for S3 compatibility

k8s-csi-s3 S3-backed k8s CSI

OpenEBS for block storage

For MinIO: MinIO no longer maintains open source software so the entry is just for their old FOSS presence.

File Transferring

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
LocalSend	`a14e610`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1)	LocalShare, PairDrop, Sharing, Warp
rsync	`3.4.1`	(1, 2)	openrsync, `scp`, an FTP client, tar

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
eza	`v0.21.0`	(1)	ls
fd	`v10.2.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	find
LSDeluxe		(1, 2)	ls
zoxide	`v0.9.2`	(1, 2, 3)	cd

File Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Superfile		(1,2,3) (1,2,3) (1)	lf, Midnight Commander, vifm
Yazi		(1, 2) (1,2,3) (1, 2)	lf, Midnight Commander, vifm

Forum Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Discourse	`v3.1.0.beta2`	(1, 2) (1) (1)

Gaming

Game engines

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Godot Engine	`4.3-stable`	(1, 2)	Pandemonium Engine
GDevelop		(1, 2, 3)	Pandemonium Engine
GZDoom		(1)	UZDoom, Chocolate Doom
Jmonkey	`3.6.1-stable`	(1) (1)
Luanti	`5.14.0`	(1, 2, 3)	ClassiCube Cubyz Cubos
UPBGE 0.5	`0.36.1`	(1)

Note

Alternative Game Engines

LÖVE is a 2D game engine based on Lua with some 3D capability that may serve as a viable alternative to Godot/Unity depending on your project's requirements.

Game Managers and Launchers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Heroic	`2.20.1`	(1)
Lutris		(1, 2)	Bottles
TinyWiiBackupManager		(1)	See this post
umu	`1.3.0`	(1, 2)

Mod managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Modrinth		(1, 2)

Emulators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Amiberry	`7.1.1`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	Denise
Azahar	`2124.3`	(1)
VisualBoyAdvance-M		(1, 2, 3) (1)	mGBA

Language and Localization

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Weblate		(1, 2, 3)

Learning

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Anki		(1, 2)
AnkiDroid		(1)

Note

Anki desktop alternatives

Mnemosyne: Project is written in Python, which is tainted. See Programming languages

Scholarsome: Last commit was 2 years ago. Self-hosted.

Mapping

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
BRouter		(1)
CoMaps		(1)
GraphHopper		(1)
Organic Maps		(1)
OsmAnd		(1)
OSRM		(1)
Vespucci	`c1053f9`	(1)

Note

Mapping Alternatives

Navit for car navigation

OpenRouteService

Open Street Map provides lists of clients on its wiki. For example, other mobile clients can be found on the Android page.

Messaging

Messaging Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Dendrite	`v0.14.1`	(1)
Nerimity	`661d069`	(1, 2, 3)
Synapse	`b4282b8`	(1, 2, 3)

Note

Messaging Server Alternatives by protocols

IRC servers overall don't seem to have AI-committed code

Messaging Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
ArcaneChat	None	(1) (1)
Converse.js		(1)
Delta Chat		(1) (1, 2, 3)
Element Web		(1)
Element X Android		(1)
Element X iOS		(1)
Fluxer	None	(1, 2, 3)
gomuks		(1)
Mattermost		(1) (1)
Nerimity	`9077876`	(1, 2, 3)
Psi		(1)
Sharkord		(1, 2)
Telegram		(1) (1)
Zulip		(1, 2) (1)

Note

Messaging Client Alternatives by protocols

matrix

Cinny (web)

FluffyChat (cross-platform)

nheko (desktop, Linux phones)

xmpp

Conversations (android)

Kaidan (cross-platform)

WeeChat: Multi-protocol

IRC clients overall don't seem to have AI-committed code

Microcontroller Tools and Libraries

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
betaflight		(1) (1)
BouffaloSDK	`2.0.0`	(1, 2, 3)	See below
ch32-hal	`07687b9`	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
esphome	`a31a5e7`	(1, 2) (1, 2)
ESP-IDF	`5.5.2`	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	See below
FastLED	`3.10.1`	(1, 2, 3)	See below
WLED	`62d3e15`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)

Note

Alternative Microcontroller Tools and Libraries:

Suggestions for alternative microcontroller SDK's are necessarily more complex than many other categories considered here, as that's one of the core technical choices to be made when starting a new hardware development project and the fact that a microcontroller SDK contains many peices (like HAL's for hardware blocks, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth libraries) that are not easy to replicate from scratch, so don't feel pressured to switch.

Switching to a different less known platform (e.g. Realtek or Beken) means losing out on many examples, community support and depending on the SDK also different licensing.

Depending on your needs and technical concerns, you may find any number of different alternative microcontrollers useful. For example, when considering alternatives to ESP32 based chips, Beken may be an interesting candidate from the perspective of being a similar WiFi based microcontroller replacing the legacy ESP based microcontrollers in Wi-Fi enabled devices.

For Bouffalo Lab microcontrollers:

bl_iot_sdk

For WCH microcontrollers:

ch32fun

Official WCH C SDK's

Everything else not microcontroller-specific:

Adafruit NeoPixel

Networking

Reverse proxies

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
caddy		(1, 2, 3)

Networking security tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Anubis	none	(1) (1, 2)

Note

Networking security tool alternatives

iocaine

go-away

Operating Systems

Note

Operating systems are a tough ask. No matter what you choose, support will be inferior compared to an operating system with the Linux kernel, so don't feel pressured to switch.

BSD-based

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
DragonFlyBSD		(1)
FreeBSD		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
MidnightBSD	`ed4b0a5`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)
OpenBSD		(1, 2)

Note

Alternative BSD-based operating systems

HyperbolaBSD has banned LLMs

MirBSD has banned LLMs

NetBSD has a somewhat ambiguous policy

Linux-based

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Fedora		(1)	See below
NixOS		(1, 2, 3)	GNU Guix System
OpenWrt	`7214acd`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Ubuntu		(1, 2)	See below

Note

Alternative Linux-based operating systems

Chimera Linux has banned LLMs

elementary OS has banned LLMs

Gentoo Linux has banned LLMs

Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre has banned LLMs

postmarketOS has banned LLMs

Kernels

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
GNU Mach		(1)
Linux Kernel		(1, 2)

Other Operating Systems

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FreeDOS		(1) (1, 2)	MS-DOS source code (Expat/MIT license)
ReactOS	`d4993c6`	(1) (1, 2, 3)	Wine for some use cases
TrueNAS		(1)

Note

Other alternative operating systems

Haiku has banned LLMs

illumos and its distributions remain unaffected as of April 2026.

RedoxOS has banned LLMs

Package Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
brew		(1)
macports		(1)
PiKISS		(1)

Note

Package Manager Alternatives

For most operating systems, there should be a default package mananager provided to you (e.g. apt). You may consider using this, or you can consider a manual installation of the software you choose. There's also the option of compiling from source. Cross-platform alternatives include:

pkgsrc - A framework for managing third-party software on UNIX-like systems. Used by default on NetBSD and SmartOS, but also available on Linux, macOS, and illumos.

If you have any other suggestions for package managers with a "No AI" policy, please feel free to open a PR.

Peripheral Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Logitune	None	(1, 2, 3)

Password Management

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
AliasVault		(1)
Bitwarden		(1)
KeepassXC	`2.7.9`	(1, 2, 3)
vaultwarden		(1, 2, 3)

Note

Password Manager Alternatives

rbw (client)

KeePass 2. It is a .NET application, but Mono or Wine can be used for non-Windows platforms.

ChiPass: An active fork of KeePass 2.7.9 with clear stance against LLMs and a No AI Contribution Policy.

Secrets uses the KeePass file format.

Password managers based on pass or Himitsu could be interesting.

Programming Languages

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
.NET	`v9.0.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
D	`2.112.0`	(1)	See below
Dart		(1, 2, 3)	See below
Elixir		(1)	See below
Gerbil Scheme		(1)	Chez Scheme Guile
Go	`go1.22.4`	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
Haskell		(1)	Idris (attempts to refine Haskell; Bans AI) SML (several implementations; community is nearly dead)
Janet	`517e40a`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	See below
Julia	`v1.11.4`	(1 (1, 2)	See below
Kotlin	`v2.3.0`	(1, 2) (1)	See below
mruby	`v3.3.0`	(1) (1, 2)	See below
Nim	`e2a3063`	(1, 2, 3)	Ada?
Numbat	`18f81b1`	(1)
OCaml		(1, 2)	SML
Odin		(1, 2)	See below
Python	`v3.14.0a4`	(1, 2) (1)	See below
MicroPython	`1.26.1`	(1, 2, 3)	See below
CircuitPython	`9.2.9`	(1, 2, 3)	See below
Racket		(1, 2)	Chez Scheme Guile
Ruby	`v3.3.8`	(1, 2) (1)	See below
Scala	`v3.7.1`	(1, 2, 3)	Scala 2.13.18, Scala 3.3 LTS, See below
Scratch		(1) (1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2)	Scratch 1.4 Scratch 2
TruffleRuby	`v33.0.0`	(1, 2) (1)	See below
TurboWarp		(1)	Scratch 1.4 Scratch 2
Typescript	`v5.1.3`	(1, 2, 3)	See below

Note

On alternative languages:

Suggestions for alternative programming languages are necessarily more complex than many other categories considered here, as that's one of the core technical choices to be made when starting a new software development project.

Depending on your needs and technical concerns, you may find any number of different alternative languages useful. For example, when considering alternatives to .NET, Java may be an interesting candidate from the perspective of being a similar VM-based framework.

Clojure - dynamic, compiled, general-purpose programming language: AI-generated code not accepted

Idris - purely functional programming language, similar to Haskell: Strict No LLM / No AI Policy

Java - memory safe, object-oriented, VM-based programming language: AI-generated code not accepted

Zig - general-purpose, compiled, system programming language: Strict No LLM / No AI Policy

Programming Language-Specific Tooling

C

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Expat	`2.7.4`	(1)
gobject-linter	None	(1)
harfbuzz	`12.3.2`	(1,2,3)
LVGL	`9.2.2`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
MbedTLS		(1, 2, 3)	See below
Mongoose	`7a21199`	(1, 2)	libmicrohttpd
OpenSSL	`3.5.0`	(1,2,3) (1,2,3)	See below
raylib		(1)
sd-bus (via systemd)		See systemd section	basu
SDL		(1)
WolfSSL	`5.7.6`	(1) (1, 2, 3)	See below
zlib-ng		(1,2,3) (1)	zlib

Note

Crypto/SSL/TLS Software Alternatives

axTLS

GnuTLS

LibreSSL

C++

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Scratch Everywhere		(1)
spdlog	`v1.16.0`	(1, 2) (1)
SQLiteCpp	`v3.3.3`	(1, 2)	SQLite's first-party interface

CSS

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
`tailwindcss`		(1) (1)	`twind`

Dart

Note that Dart is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Flutter	`985576d`	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

Go

Note that Go is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
debugui	`f9c0b31a`	(1, 2)
ebitengine	`v2.8.7`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	Vuelto, Engo
goffi		(1)	go-ffi
gotests	`v1.6.0`	1	nxt_unit
oto	`b71107cf`	(1, 2) (1)	sio
purego	`469dacd`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	go-ffi

Java

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Gradle		(1)	Apache Ant
libGDX		(1, 2)
Maven	3.9.12	(1)	Apache Ant

JavaScript And TypeScript

Note that TypeScript is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ArkType		(1, 2, 3) (1)
bun		(1, 2) (1) (1, 2, 3) (1) (1, 2) (1)
Deno	`6002d26`	(1, 2, 3) (1)
Electron		(1, 2, 3)	Use native GUIs, such as GTK
ESLint		(1) (1)
es-toolkit		(1) (1, 2)	Lodash
fnm		(1)	asdf, n
Next.js	`v13.2.5-canary.0`	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
npmx		(1, 2, 3) (1)	npmjs
nvm	`v0.40.2`?	(1, 2)
React	`v19.1.1`	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
TS for GIR		(1, 2, 3)
Typebox		(1, 2, 3)
Valibot		(1, 2) (1) (1)
Vite		(1) (1, 2) (1)
Zod		(1, 2, 3) (1)

Lua

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Penlight	`8bf90ff`	(1)	Microlight Penlighter (fork, WIP)

Python

Note that Python is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Black	`25.9.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Chardet	`6.0.0.post1`	(1, 2)	charset_normalizer
`cryptography`	`44.0.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	PyCryptodome
isort	`8.0.0`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
JupyterLab	`v4.5.6`	(1) (1)	Possibly GNU Emacs (1, 2)
Pygments	`2.19.2`	(1)
Pylint		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
pytermgui	`v7.7.4`	(1)
Requests		(1)	`urllib.request` (Python Standard Lib)
ruff		(1, 2, 3) (1)
Textual	`v2.1.2`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Trio	`v0.28.0`	(1, 2, 3)
uv		(1, 2, 3) (1)
ty		(1, 2) (1)

Ruby

Note that Ruby is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Hanakai		(1)	sinatra
Ruby on Rails		(1)	sinatra

Rust

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
c2rust	`0.21.0`	(1,2) (1) (1,2,3)
egui	`0.31.1`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	See below
facet	`cad0de9` as Shapely (before the `facet-rs` rebrand)	(1,2,3) (1,2,3)	nanoserde See note below.
iocraft	`0.7.17`	(1,2) (1, 2)	console, cursive
Matrix-rust-sdk		(1), 2)
Nextest		(1)	`cargo test`
ratatui	`0.29.0`	(1,2) (1,2)	console, cursive
rust-analyzer		(1,2) (1,2,3)	cargo check
Slint	`1.14.1`	(1, 2)	See below
wgpu		(1, 2, 3) (1,2,3)	ash, glow, vulcano
zbus		(1, 2) (1)
zerocopy		(1,2)

Note

Alternative GUI crates

GTK

iced

imgui

relm

Note

Also, there is an advisory database of Rust slopware crates, which you can use in tools like cargo-deny: https://codeberg.org/1millibyte/rust-slopdb.

On facet: If possible avoid all-in-one libraries for deserialization, and avoid macros that slow things down.

Reverse Engineering and Debugging

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
binutils / gdb	`928e6f5`	(1)	See below
ImHex		(1)	See below
radare2	`7a4aa2c`	(1, 2)	See below
Rizin		(1)	See below

Note

Alternatives

Debugger:

scanmem & Game Conqueror: last updated in 2024

Disassembler:

da65 (part of cc65) (MOS 6502-only)

DIS6502 (MOS 6502-only)

Hex editor:

Vim Classic's xxd

hexedit

ghex

hexcurse

Search Engines

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Searxng		(1) (1)	LibreY, marginalia, securityops.co

Service Monitoring

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Glitchtip		(1)
Grafana		(1) (1, 2)
Uptime Kuma		(1)
Vector	`44562f6`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

This is for both social media websites and apps.

Servers

Name	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Bluesky	(1)	See below
`rsky`	(1, 2, 3)	See below
PeerTube	(1) (1)
Mastodon	(1)	See below
Misskey	(1)	See below
Lemmy	(1)	PieFed

Note

Generic social media server alternatives

GoToSocial

Wafrn supports both ActivityPub and ATproto

snac2

Iceshrimp.NET

Epicyon

Clients

Name	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
IceCubesApp	(1)	Feditext (iOS), wafrn-rn
Bluesky Social App	(1, 2, 3)	wafrn-rn
FeurStagram	(1, 2)

SSH

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ConnectBot	`f523c43`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

System Base

This section is strictly for software implementing a core set of UNIX-like utilities and/or directly interfacing with several kernel subsystems. Think potential replacements for coreutils and util-linux.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
plan9port	`0155f29`	(1)
uutils		(1, 2 3) (1, 2, 3)	Busybox, GNU coreutils

System Logs Managers

Android

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Logcat Reader	`877cc0a`, version 2.3.1	(1, 2, 3) (1)
LogFox	`dd1405c`, version 2.0.7	(1, 2, 3)

Note

Alternatives for Android

Rootless Logcat

aShell You or aShell running the logcatcommand.

Direct use of the logcat command in the Android shell.

System Services and Daemons

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
framework-system	`50a18e8`	(1, 2)	BIOS settings, UI widgets, /proc
libinput	`43547b46`	(1, 2, 3)	evdev
lvm2		(1,2,3)
Mesa3D		(1)
rsyslog		(1)	syslog-ng
systemd		(1, 2)	dinit, s6, OpenRC, shepherd
wireplumber		(1)

Terminal

Terminal Emulators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Ghostty		(1)
iTerm2		(1)
Kitty		(1, 2, 3)
OpenWarp	None	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1)
Warp	None	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Waveterm		(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

Note

Alternative terminal emulators

Alacritty or the Alacritty fork with sixel

Contour Terminal

COSMIC terminal

Deepin Terminal

foot

GNOME Terminal

Konsole

MATE Terminal

Rio Terminal

xfce4-terminal

XTerm

Terminal Multiplexers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
tmux		(1)
zellij	`1411b2d9`	(1)

Note

Terminal Multiplexer Alternatives

dvtm

GNU Screen

mtm

Unified Push Distributors

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
ntfy-sh		(1, 2)

Note

Alternative Unified Push Distributors

See List of unified push distributors

Sunup

NextPush (see entry for NextCloud on taintedness)

Conversations (XMPP client) or one of the forks

Version Control

Version Control Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Gitea		(1, 2, 3) (1)
GitLab		(1)

Note

Alternative Version Control Servers

Forgejo (self-hosted)

Codeberg (hosted)

Version Control Clients and Tooling

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Git		(1, 2)
Git for Windows		(1, 2, 3)
gitoxide		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Jujutsu		(1, 2, 3)
Sapling		(1, 2)

Note

Alternative Version Control Systems

Game of Trees

Mercurial

Fossil

BitKeeper

Virtualization

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Botspot Virtual Machine		(1)
Cloud-Hypervisor	`v47.0`	(1) (1)
Kubevirt	`v1.5.0`	(1) (1) (1)
VirtualBox		(1)

Note

Virtualization Alternatives

QEMU: Emulator and virtualizer that does not accept slop contributions.

virt-manager: GUI for managing libvirt machines. Needed for VirtualBox feature parity as QEMU does not provide one of its own.

GNOME Boxes

Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing is a system in which someone can donate (excess) compute resources to research projects.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
BOINC	`3e5c24b`	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

VPN Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Headscale	`474ea23` (`v0.26.1`)	(1, 2, 3)
netbird		(1)
nebula		(1)
frp	`0.48.0`	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1)

Note

VPN Software Alternatives

Use WireGuard^®️ capable VPN's such as those listed in the official wireguard repos.

Window Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Hyprland		(1)
i3		(1, 2)
IceWM		(1
MangoWC		(1, 2, 3)
Mir		(1) (1)
miracle-wm		(1, 2, 3, 4)

Note

Window Managers Alternatives

Wayland

dwl

river has Strict No LLM / No AI Policy

sway

tinywl is a "minimum viable product" compositor for learning and experimentation (not for everyday use), see tinywl limitations

vivarium

X11

awesome

bspwm

cwm

FVWM

Openbox

wmii

XMonad

Desktop Bars

Little bar on your desktop, kinda like a "start" bar.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Waybar		(1, 2)	polybar

Desktop Shells

All-in-one solutions for stitching together a desktop.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
DankMaterialShell	none	(1, 2)
Noctalia Shell	`v2.7.0`	(1)

Why not LLMs?

Could use some help writing this with concrete receipts on environmental, social, political, and economic/labor harms.

Legal Ramifications

LLMs are often trained on, and thus prone to regurgitate (either completely, or in-part), chunks of code that are licensed under terms which have specific legal requirements that a contributor using LLMs may not understand or even be aware of when making a contribution. Regardless of this ignorance, it falls to the repo's owner to comply with the terms of any and all licensed code integrated into their project.

Legal Cases And Law Problems

License Problems

Legal, copyright, and ethics problems arise, especially with copyleft licenses such as the GNU (A/L)GPL. With the "help" of AI the copyleft code may be "license-washed" very easily.

There are ongoing problems with AI "license-washing" in the FOSS world:

chardet - used an LLM to rewrite the codebase from the LGPL license to Expat/MIT (and later 0-BSD) license, violating the (L)GPL.
- relicensed release: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0
- original author's concerns: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
- "consumer's" concerns: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331

Stolen Training Data

AI companies use data from across the web to train their models, most often without the website owners' and users' consent. Big tech companies like Google and Meta are scraping data from the users of major FOSS projects, such as Mastodon, WordPress, and other ActivityPub-powered and self-hosted software.

In 2023, the Washington Post published a list of sources in Google's C4 data set. A multitude of fediverse instances and personal sites were included. The fediverse is known for its userbase being major proponents of privacy and opt-in consent, making this especially jarring for those who have chosen to use decentralized social media for control over their data.
In 2025, a similar leak of Meta's sources was published. Meta's list demonstrates how their integration of ActivityPub into their Threads software has enhanced their ability to scrape content without authorization. Threads is widely blocked in some parts of the fediverse, but their scraping of server CDNs has allowed them to get around that. Notably, both the CDN domains of the managed hosting services masto.host and fedi.monster are included in the list; large servers like mastodon.art, which is hosted by the former and has many artists who've left sites like DeviantArt and others due to their AI scraping of user content, had media unknowingly scraped.
In March 2026, a research paper showed that simply fine-tuning LLMs resulted in outputs containing up to 90% of entire (copyrighted) books, contradicting LLM companies' previous statements in court that their models do not store copies of training data. After fine-tuning exclusively on a single author, the researchers were able to cause the LLM to output works from over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. None of the models were explicitly trained on these books by the researchers, which indicates that LLMs always carry with them a considerable amount of copyrighted materials from training.

FOSS projects listed in this repo are using tooling that blatantly disregard licensing and violate of Codes of Conduct, making said tools antithetical to FOSS' purpose.

Environmental Impact

To start learning a bit more, you can checkout the wikipedia page on Environmental impact of artificial intelligence. We're very open to people contributing other explanations, links, and resources to learn more about this. Here's what we've gathered so far:

Labor

AI usage and normalization contributes to labor violations in many ways that are obvious and some you may not be aware of.

On one hand, many things that you think are "AI" are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot for you for either extremely low wages or in some cases, no wages e.g. prison labor. This is particularly common for "friend"/"sex" bots, but it is also extremely common in the image/video identification. You can find a bit more info at the following links:

Poor Code Quality

Vibe coding / agentic workflows result in poorer code quality, and relaxed oversight practices. These effects may be compounded by the common practice of using additional LLM-based tooling to provide code-reviews.

How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS
Claude Tested Everything Except the One Thing That Mattered (AI agent refuses to follow explicit instructions to test createPost() in increasingly erratic ways)
Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages
GitClear has released reports in 2024 and 2025 indicating a worsening of key code quality metrics correlating with increased LLM adoption.

Deskilling

There is increasing evidence to show that LLMs negatively impact developers' coding abilities:

Brains show less activity when completing tasks with LLMs compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
Developers who use early-2025 LLMs reported higher subjective performance, but were measured to have lower objective performance. This gap between subjective and objective performance was considered notable.
In an Anthropic study, learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
There are anecdotal reports of LLM users forgetting how to code.
A paper entitled "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" from April 2026 by academics from MIT, Oxford, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon showed alarming evidence that performing a variety of tasks with the help of AI for only 10 minutes causes "inpaired unassisted performance and reduced persistence". The researchers noted that "although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up"; they also pointed out that "these findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning".

Infosec risks

LLM usage results in massive security holes.

Health and Safety

There's been a number of high profile incidents that have resulted in endangerment or death. Here's some examples:

LLM use has also been linked to new-onset psychosis.

Ties to the War Industrial Complex

A lot of AI companies also work directly with nation states for use in their Departments of War (sometimes called Defense) which in turn leads to further AI usage during war and invasions. This is coupled with NYT: Palantir, Anthropic and small start-ups are generating rewards from their investments in defense tech.

As another example NPR: OpenAI announced Pentagon deal after Trump banned Anthropic which was due to the USA Department of War launching an AI acceleration strategy.

Due to the nature of LLMs being only kind of as good as the data they are trained on, this can lead to additional civilian deaths and housing/infrastructure damage either intensionally or not. Examples:

Content Warning: War details, death

All of this to remind you that if you use AI, you're helping to support these companies and the additional activities they participate in, outside of generative code or images.

Effects on Policing

Police have quickly embraced AI, which has already directly led to people being jailed for things they've never done. As examples:

This is, in part, due to companies such as Amazon Aggressively pushing police to use AI which they do through both facial recognition and offering compute for predictive policing. With regards to facial recognition, here's an example of how it too can lead to false arrests: Face Recognition on Flawed Data.

There have been warnings about AI in policing, particularly around racial bias, such as:

Maintainer Fatigue

Having to deal with the onslaught of many LLM written pull requests and issues, causes real maintainer burnout that stagnates projects as maintainers become overwhelmed with half baked, poorly written, insecure code. Here's some examples:

Effect on Hardware Prices

The demand for construction and outfitting of new data-centers to host AI/LLM compute capacity has overwhelmed global supply and production of multiple hardware components. Memory, Storage, and GPUs have seen massive increases in price for both consumer and enterprise models upward of 400% in some cases.

The lack of supply has led large system-builders to purchase production capacity from OEMs well in-advance of delivery leading some manufacturers to end consumer-oriented product lines in favor of enterprise capacity.

The down-stream effects for consumers is that near all electronic devices which contain memory and storage will see their prices rise and availability decline. Those who already own existing electronics and computer hardware components may also find themselves unable to have their devices repaired or replaced under warranty.

This all results in shrinking the pool of people who have access to building home computers for any purpose, from gaming to coding to home labs, which in turn makes the tech industry less diverse due to people who have been historically marginalized having less financial resources to learn the skills at home. When this is factored in with the price of college being unaffordable in many places, we will see a sharper decline in disabled people, people of color, women, and the queer community entering the tech industry.

License

This repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license. Please see LICENSE.txt for more information.

README.md

Open Slopware

Definitions

Permissive AI Policy

Vibecode

AI Functionality

AI Code Reviews

Gen AI 'Art'

AI Sponsored

AI Databroker Usage

AI In Issue Tracker

Permits LLM Ingestion

Request for Help

Sibling Repos

Tainted Software

Accessibility Tools

Accounting and Budgeting

Accounting and Budgeting Alternatives

API Documentation

App Launchers

Mobile Launchers

Mobile Launchers Alternatives

Audio

Digital Audio Workstations

Standalone Digital Mixer

Music Players

Podcast Aggregators

Benchmarking

Blogging Software

Content Management Systems

Static Site Generators

Static site generators alternatives

Books and Library Software

Bootloaders

Build Systems and Task Runners

On task runners and make(1) implementations:

Alternative Build Systems

Browsers

Browser Addons

Desktop Browsers

Desktop Browser Alternatives

Headless Browsers

Mobile Browsers

Mobile Browser Alternatives

Cheat Sheets and Documentation

Command-Line Shells

Alternative Bourne Shell Implementations

Alternative Shell Languages

Addons and Prompts

Alternative Plugin Managers

Compiler Tools

Linkers

Computer Graphics

3D Tools

Image Manipulation

Photography

Video

Continuous Integration

Data Archival

Developer Tools

Device Exploiting

Documents

Document Converters

Document Viewers

Editors

Note Software Alternatives

Alternative TUI Code Editors

E-Mail and Calendar

E-Mail Desktop Clients

E-Mail Mobile Clients

Calendar Mobile Clients

File Storage

File Storage Alternatives

File Transferring

Filesystem Navigation

File Managers

Forum Software

Gaming

Game engines

Alternative Game Engines

On task runners and `make(1)` implementations: