Been banned for AI-Slop on a few subs here on Lemmy as well as on Reddit.
I always provide a good amount of technical detail in my posts and i try to be as transparant and communicative about the details. My projects are very complicated and I try to document them well.
my project is pretty cryptography-heavy… the act of me sharing my efforts in an attempt to show transparency… but it is used against my project by calling it AI-slop (undermining Kerkhoff’s principles).
It’s 2026 and most developers are using AI. I have used it to create things like formal proof and verification.
my project is aimed to be a secure messaging app. i have all the bells-and-whistles there along with documentation… but if the conversation cant move past “its AI-generated”… then it seems the cryptography/cybersecurity/privacy community isnt aligned with the fact that using AI is now common practice for developers of all levels.
AI is a tool. you cant (and shouldnt) “trust” AI to do anything without oversight. AI does not replace the due-diligence that has always been needed. i dont “trust” my hammer to bash in a nail… i “use” the hammer. AI is not different in how you need to be responsible for how its used.
i’ve busted my ass on my project for it to be called AI slop. i think its completely fine when it comes from folks in the community. cryptography is a serious subject and my ideas and implementation SHOULD/MUST be scrutinised… but its simply ignorant if mods are banning me for the quality of my work considering the the level of transparency and my engagement on discussions about it.
It’s a bit reductive to call it slop. I think i try harder than most in providing links, code and documentation. Of course I used AI… and it’s clearer for it. (you can find more detail on my profile)
i am of course sour from being banned, but am i wrong to think my code isnt AI slop? Some parts of my project are clearly lazy-ui… but im not sharing on some UI/UX/design sub. the cryptography module has unit tests and formal verification. if that is AI-slop and can result in me being banned, i simply dont have faith in that community to be objective on the reality of where AI can contribute.
while its understandable people dont want to review AI-slop… i think the cryptography/cybersecurity community needs to get on board with the idea of using AI to help in reviewing such code. am i wrong? is the future of cryptography is still people performing manual review of the breathtaking volumes of AI code?
the cryptography module has unit tests and formal verification.
Did you develop the spec by hand or is AI also involved in the spec development?
As far as I am not pleased with garbage proofs that these AI likes to write, it is still better than garbage spec…
I suspect your formal proof refers to the following files: https://github.com/positive-intentions/signal-protocol/tree/staging/formal-proofs
It contains 6 files each with less than 100 lines of code, and the claim seems to be it almost prove the entire security of the signal protocol.
Unless the formal proof community has advanced so much without me knowing, then I think you can definitely submit a paper to top PL conferences. Since my best known state of the art is Signal* from project everest. It involves tens of components, and years of works for top academics and proof engineers.
- Here is the website: https://project-everest.github.io/
- Here is the paper: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/sp/2019/666000b256/1dlwheTvbEI
- Here is the code: https://github.com/Inria-Prosecco/libsignal-protocol-wasm-fstar
Each file here, like
fstar/Impl.Signal.Core.fstwould already be longer than your entire proof, even just the hints provided to the SMT solvers are longer than your entire proof.So I am interested in what technique did you apply to acheive the almost same effect as this monumental project with less than 5% of the code?
Some communities have “no-AI” rules. If you didn’t break any, maybe you’ve been targeted by moderators that partake in cancel culture?
If that’s the case, at least helps to sift through communities. And worse comes worst, maybe start a personal community to share what you make?
I think you need to speak to a mental health specialist, because AI psychosis can be really destructive. We all have problems, but using chat bots to make us feel better is dangerous for you and those around you, even if it feels good in the moment. These bots are designed to tell you exactly what you want to hear so that you become addicted to them.
I’m going to guess you didn’t accomplish much as a software engineer before AI? The personal deficiencies at the core of that are still there even if you use AI to tell you otherwise. I won’t speculate what those deficiencies are, but I just want you to engage in some honest introspection. Absolutely nobody will trust someone like you to handle such a sensitive topic like cryptography. Stop wasting your short time on this earth on something so stupid. Go make literally anything else.
wow thats deep analysis and advice. i generally think i do well.
i work on my project and cryptography because its interesting. i worked with cryptography long before AI… but like a “regular” developer on a sideproject, im going to use AI.
i actively seek advice about the code in my project. i only share my work after ive put what i think is enough time and effort. it clearly isnt enough that the project “works”. in cybersec its important for code to be audited or reviewed, that fundamentally isnt an option on a project like mine unless i share something that is described as “AI-slop”. that feedback is fine. it’s important that its open source.
it might not be fun for most, but this is something i work on because its enjoyable to me. its open source for transparency and critisism. i just want to take “AI” as a critisism, off the table because i cant quantify my involvement… which is a understandably wild thing to ask so i try to approach it with caution.
i work on several project that interest me. many but not all are open source. they exist because i woke up some day and decided i wanted to create something.
i generally think i do well.
What are some of your engineering or research accomplishments? Where is your linkedin or github profile showing projects before ~2022?
i worked with cryptography long before AI
What kind of work did you do with cryptography? It couldn’t have been much if you don’t see what’s wrong with what you’re doing. “I set up LetsEncrypt on a web server” doesn’t count as experience.
Any answer you provide to these questions are worthless unless you’re willing to reveal your identity here. That’s the only way to build any credibility, and without credibility nobody should trust you with something like this.
this is something i work on because its enjoyable to me
No, this is something you’re working on because you’re hoping to make money from it. I remember you posting about this project some months ago and you mentioned as much. If it isn’t AI psychosis, then it’s a grift and you’re a snake oil salesman. Idk what you’re expecting to hear? This is a programming community; it’s probably the last place you’ll get positive feedback for this obvious trainwreck.
Unless you invented some new form of encryption why are you generating so much ai slop?
Just reuse human made cryptography libraries that are battle tested. Then you won’t have to do disastrous things like putting ai to review your ai slop.
You know that it lies, gaslights, writes or deletes production databases, tests etc as it pleases.
your right. my version of what your describing exists here: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
not AI slop, but slop of a different kind. purely a webpp and uses audited crypto primitives from the browser. webrtc is already encrypted, but there is a diffie-helman key exchange (you can share public key hashes to guard againt mitm sttacks). i put time and effort there and documented it to seek some kind of open source support. it didnt work out.
my plan was always to beef up the encryption. i wanted to add the signal protocol. i asked on eddit and i couldnt find something suitable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/1mi4ooa/looking_for_the_signal_protocol_in_javascript
i can ue AI to sweat it out myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1orsjw2/signal_protocol_in_javascript
there is a great deal of effort that i simply cant quantify.
No matter how hard you pet your LLM, this project is not your work. LLM output attribution is a gray zone by design. Your assumption that vibe coding has overtaken software development is a big red flag imho. I wonder where you’ve acquired this belief. If you’ve been banned from multiple communities already I recommend you reflect upon this.
I avoid slop code like yours because typically the user of the slop generator has no real idea of how things actually work, the slop is over-“engineered”, and it’s likely full of security issues. Further, it also wastes tons of resources just for poorly written slop.
I especially wouldn’t ever touch your cryptographic slop.
I’ve read some other comments and wanted to add.
You cannot use a LLM to verify its own work
They have no ability to think. Any intelligence they have is extremely limited. There a mostly automatic copy and paste machines. They pull code from their training data and online and attempt to compose the.
Using a LLM to verify its own work is like asking a criminal to run their own trial.
That’s just now any of this works. I think you should take a step back from the LLM and really start evaluating your work more critically. There is more to software then “it works!”
i stated off with a version i created manually without AI. i know how to do this old-school (i tried). that was a different kind of slop.
https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
i use AI in a way i think is appropriate. i check as much as i can myself too. i post online about details and questions. i can iterate with AI. im may naive to think i know how to inpect what is created, so i share it online. im not sharing slop. this is the best i can do. of couse there are countless points of improvement, but there are only so many hours in the day.
youre sharing a valid opinion, but its difficult for me to quantify my efforts. im sure you dont think i just asked AI something basic (e.g. “verify this code is correct”).
If you can’t write manually and have it not be slop then you can’t program with a LLM effectively.
It doesn’t matter how much instruction you give a LLM it fundamentally cannot evaluate itself. Because to ensure that it’s evaluating correctly either you need to evaluate it or someone else. These are not deterministic machines and will “lie” to reach their goals. And I put that in quotes because it’s not really lying that’s to much personification.
These things are not good for literally anything beyond minor transformation or boilerplate.
Trust me. If you actually spend the time learning to code well written software by hand you will save time and get a better result. LLMs based coding is a anti-pattern.
You’re not getting push back because “programmers a upset their jobs are getting stolen” you’re getting push back because your falling for LLM company propaganda. LLMs just are not there yet.
If more then 20% of your code is written by a LLM your using it wrong.
look I’m all for using LLMs for tedious or straight forward transformations of easily verifiable logic. The issue is they LLMs are sycophantic by nature and we are seeing a lot of newly freed “geniuses” who have promised “no no no. You see! I know the secret to using them for good!”
It’s like the one ring. If you start using it for doing anything beyond reformating, anything that requires critical thinking, you’ve already trapped yourself.
You’ll feel like your work is quality when it isn’t.
Personally I still think the quality of LLM code is crap for pretty much anything. Much better done by a well seasoned developer, which is harder to come by then people think. A LLM can help in some narrow cases but not many.
Yes we can. Watch me
So many critical bugs and security holes have been made from an oversight of the people handling the code.
Now you want to tell me that instead of having people write code that tries to make sense, and then review it (sometimes a bit too late), you want to have an hallucination machine produce some code randomly, then have people “fix” it, then review it?
This is just a recipe for disaster.
AIs are not “AIs”, they’re just bullshit generators that everyone is falling for. Technical debt and lack of code reliability were the main problems of software dev, and AIs are sacrificing those two specifically, just in exchange for the illusion of speed.
If you train monkeys to pile up bricks, it doesn’t make a house, it makes a disaster waiting to happen. And monkeys, unlike AIs, are actually intelligent and sentient, which would make them more reliable still.
It’s a broad topic. Everytime I see some new AI-coded project linked in the selfhosted community, it’s kinda shit… I had hallucinated installation instructions. Very overexagerrated claims of what it’s supposed to do… Sometimes it looks okay but some buttons don’t do anything and then I look at the code and everything is more of a stub. Some projects have ridiculous security issues like someone finds a master key buried in the code, and of course none of the “developers” ever noticed because noone ever had a look at the code…
You’re somewhere in the same territory. Maybe you’re the one who gets it applied properly. But once I’m going to notice the tell-tale signs of vibe-coding, I’m going to start looking at it with the prejudice that got shaped by my prior experience. And I tend to be right most of the times.
But with that said, I don’t think it’s healthy to have a war over it, ban people and yell at each other. Most I want is transparency. I think all software projects should just disclose if and how they use AI, to what extent. And the users can make up their mind.
And with cryptography code… Isn’t that a bit dangerous? From my own experience, AI models tend to learn a lot of example code and the standard documentation of libraries… Wikipedia articles and such… And then generate responses closer to that, than completely new thoughts… But(!) all these examples, tutorials and boilerplate code use a lot of shortcuts to explain it in simpler terms. Shortcuts that weaken security. And I wouldn’t be surprised if your AI is then going ahead to reproduce that, and casually forget about the steps to prepare the numbers and follow up on the next steps if that wasn’t ever in the Wikipedia example code. And I’ve seen a lot of wrong advice on StackOverflow and Reddit, so you better hope it also didn’t internalize that.
Most I want is transparency.
i agree with all youre saying. especially this which is why i entertain the idea of open source at all. what does transparency look like to you? code? documentation? open discussion? transparency is undermined when im trying to talk about something clearly complicated in order to seek feedback.
cryptography code… Isn’t that a bit dangerous?
in software dev we have thing like unit test (you already know that)… but when diving into cryptography we have formals proofs and verification we can use. it doesnt need AI to extract abstraction from the code implementation to run verification on. the tooking there is common practice and if we question if AI is doing it ptoperly we bring into question if the tooling used is good enough.
- security audit
- unit tests
- formal proof
- formal verification
- documentation
individually, they are all easily AI slop. but combined i hope it can serve as a starting point for a proper review. i dont mean a proper review from you either… im was seeking a review from orgs that specialise in such review.
you make a lot of assumptions about how i code and what i understand about my project. enumerating what ive done and plan to do wouldnt do it any justice… but i will say this project is the result of a long-term effort. i created the project without AI originally. the idea is unique around client-managed cryptography (https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat)… ultimately it was clear that open-source is dead and so ive started introducing less transparency in the project as i introduce a close-source UI. i still keep the cryptography related modules open for transparency (whatever thats worth when people see that AI was involved).
i wouldnt put my project out there if i didnt have faith in the implementation. i have actively seeked feedback and recieved good advice from which i iterated and improved. particularly concerning if im being banned from from communities for posting slop.
diving into cryptography we have formals proofs and verification we can use
Did you do formal proofs? I had a quick look at the repo and I can’t find them.
https://github.com/positive-intentions/signal-protocol
https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical/signal-protocol-formal-verification
There are still bugs there I’m actively working on it you look at the pull-requests where I’m trying to setup verification on the ci.
Uh, sorry your code is a bit difficult to read. There seems to be one implementation in the ‘src’ directory, which is referenced in your ProVerif pi code. But then there’s another one(?) in the ‘signal-protocol-core’ directory which seems to be the one that’s actually built?
And how did you arrive at those proverif files? Do they come from your Rust code? How? And how do you make sure they relate to your code? I mean for all I know they could contain some correct design, while your code does something else… I’m not really an expert at this, but they seem (to me) just to appear in some commit but I don’t really get how it relates to the Rust code. Or how it came to be.
And then it’s a bit difficult to tell for me whether your Chat uses the cryptography code from the ‘cryptography’ repository. Or the one from the ‘signal-protocol’ repository. It seems to load both?! But your own AI security audit flagged a lot of issues with your ‘cryptography’ repository. I can’t tell if that’s still up-to-date information but there was some report with mostly exclamation marks and red crosses in it. And a recommendation not to do it this way.
While at it, I had a look at the browser’s developer console, and you have a lot of JavaScript warnings and errors there. Which I guess isn’t good?! And another sidenote: If I were you and developing a secure and private messenger, I’d skip all the requests to Google fonts, AWS, JSdelivr, third party JS CDN, analytics… It directly connects to Youtube and another analytics service which gets broad permissions. All of that isn’t great for privacy. Plus your content security policy has way too many asterisks in it with external domains and domains you control but there’s debugging stuff on there. And I don’t think you even put further restrictions on what JavaScript can be loaded or injected, other than the CSP?!
And the hax just traslates code. It doesn’t do any theorems or verification, does it? I’m not sure where to look.
Sorry I’m not exactly a security researcher… Maybe my layman’s audit is shit… But I think there’s quite some stuff going on which pretty much renders any verification of a component irrelevant. I could be wrong though. But I’d still be interested to hear how the code relates to the ProVerif files, and what kind of assurance there is, they’re the same.
@xoron@programming.dev Does the currently deployed version on chat.positive-intentions.com work? I tried to connect and try some more. But somehow it doesn’t ever connect. I’m following the procedure in the Youtube video. It reloads something on the page intermittently but never connects to the other browser.
And already after opening the page, it says: “My peer ID is: xy”
But then immediately “peer disconnected” and “peer closed: undefined”. Even before I do anything. Is it supposed to say that?I tried several combinations of Chromium 147 and LibreWolf 150. And whatever Vanadium is on my phone. I tried phone-computer and two different browsers on the same computer. Is that an issue? Other PeerJS applications work just fine.
And does the QR scanner work? It opens the camera and scans the QR code just fine, but then reloads and doesn’t put any ID into the field?! So I guess that’s broken and I need to copy-paste it?
Edit: Your file demo seems to work better. It at least gets to the point where it tries to open a connection. For some reason it also fails (ICE failed, your TURN server appears to be broken, see about:webrtc for more details). But at least that demo gets far enough to listen to connections and try to initialize them.
using AI is now common practice for developers of all levels
is not a fact.
but one person standing in front of their (in part) dice-rolled “work” is not a welcomed sight is one.
any dev much rather would brown their own greenfields than help you regreen your AI-brownies…
You might be expecting too much nuance from online communities. It’s easy and fun to oversimplify and dunk on a perceived common enemy. Lemmy has a very AI critical community. I imagine on reddit you might get less backlash, at least depending on the community. You might also find more AI friendly places here. In any case, trying to fight against a community bias is often a fools errand. I’m sure your code isn’t slop, but I don’t think you’ll be able to change the minds of random, biased people on the internet with no incentive to really listen to you anyways.
I’m sure you already know all the reasons why people are against AI and are sick of having to defend yourself. Still, I want to add that even if you use AI as a tool instead of vibe-coding, as a consumer I wouldn’t trust any privacy/security critical software that’s developed with the use of AI. As a layman I can’t check how secure your software is, so I have to rely on simple signifiers to make my judgements. At this point in time, AI is a red flag for me for security reasons alone. I know it’s not “fair” or “accurate”, but I don’t have the time and knowledge to individually check every software to that extend. I know allegedly every programmer now uses AI in some form to code (I personally don’t and most people I know don’t either, but I’m sure it’s just my bubble), but it’s not a sign of quality code in my mind.
Another thing I want to add is that your hammer comparison should probably include how the hammer was produced and how much resources your hammer consumes to function. There is a strong ethical argument against the use of AI for most use cases. I’d include coding and code reviews. Again, that doesn’t make your code slop, but it might help you understand why so many people are ready to dismiss it as that.
Cryptography is notoriously easy to get wrong. If you don’t know enough about it - you should not offload it to the hallucination machine, because you will not be able to verify it properly, and those who can - will not bother to.
This is not what a real audit looks like and it should not be presented as such. This “audit” is, in fact, slop.
Auditor: Security Analysis (Automated + Manual Review)
Do you not see the problem in this line?
The implementation uses real cryptographic primitives
Or this?
perfect. you get it. you understand that generating an AI audit is wild!
the AI audit comes after a long time of to-and-fro from the various communities that asked for an audit… of course they asked for a professional one… but those that ask, must know that they are all prohibitively expensive. especially for a solo vibecoding dev like myself.
i also understand that people would prefer a project with a team of experts… sorry to break it to you, a team of experts are not going to hire themselves on an unfunded project like this.
while the security audit, unit test, formal proofs and verification are not good enough when its done with AI, my hope was that it could serve as a starting point for anyone like ROS to perform an actual review. i cant offer more transparancy that open source, documented and discussions.
of course they asked for a professional one… but those that ask, must know that they are all prohibitively expensive. especially for a solo vibecoding dev like myself
then… vibe-code something else?.. why do you think that you should be making something you are not an expert in, that can potentially put your users into danger and make you liable for it? if it’s a learning project - great, go wild. but if it’s intended to be used, then sorry - this is just an irresponsible approach that should not be entertained by anyone. I get that you have “positive intentions” but pick some other venue that you can get right. or contribute to an existing project (being mindful of contribution guidelines).
i vibecode a lot of things. my project is not inherently dangerous. people can use any software irresponsible. in my project and all my communications about it, i make it clear to users to use it cautiously and that its presented for testing and demo purpose. its mentioned in all of my post and i also have terms and condition within my projects the explain as much.
nobody is being tricked into sharing sensitive information… in fact i made a proactive attempt to create something that doesnt need any personal information.
dont tell me what i should and shouldnt be coding. i put time and effort into testing and verifying. this is the issue about mentioning AI is that it undermines all other efforts. its the low-hanging-fruit of critisism.
my project is not inherently dangerous.
It is not “your” project - it was generated by a glorified chatbot. Since you lack the experience to judge its output, I cannot trust you to verify the security of the project.
then what is the point of it existing, if it can’t be used seriously? why should people spend their time on it, when there isn’t a solid base to build on? if you want to do something useful - contribute to an existing project. if you just wanna hack away at something - sure, do that, just don’t be surprised if other people happen to hate it when you try to present it as a serious project. nobody would bat an eye if you presented it as “I wanted a to try and implement Signal protocol, this is what I’ve learned and how far I’ve gotten”.
“I wanted a to try and implement Signal protocol, this is what I’ve learned and how far I’ve gotten”
way ahead of you: https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1orsjw2/signal_protocol_in_javascript
im banned for AI slop, but that there is a small fraction of the complexity of my project.
i always try to post in a way so its clear the project is far from finished.
I don’t think everything is getting called ai slop, but I would say if any part of your project is ai slop (like your “lazy uis”) I’d also immediately lose trust in the entirety of the project, especially if it’s intended to be around security. I do think most projects that use AI for code generation are slop though, I’ve seen far fewer examples of good use (i.e. where the output looks human written because the operator reviewed and refactored every part of it, or where it was used to write small parts of functions rather than entire functionalities)
Your last sentence I think provides a great argument for why people here (and more and more broadly in engineering) hate on ai generated code in general. It produces such vast quantities of code (and often unnecessarily) that it becomes infeasible for a human to review it, immediately requiring us to place trust in the machine to both generate it and review it, and to continue maintaining it while the human operator probably does not even have full understanding of what’s changing. A machine, that we all know hallucinates and generates often low quality garbage, including severe security vulnerabilities by design. According to GitHub, your project has millions of lines of changes on a weekly basis in the earlier days, that does scream slop to me.
Last, AI is more and more hated due to the increasing number of horrible impacts it has on our world, personally I’d not support AI generated projects just on that principle alone.
in the recent post that got me banned it was a copy of this post here:
i make a point in all my posts to be clear with the caveats. im not promoting this to replace anything. details to find out more is there along with advice to not use it for sensitive data.
for me messaging app, the caveats are similarly mentioned: https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical/p2p-messaging-technical-breakdown
my projects are reasearch and development projects which i make sure to make clear when i post about them. im fairly consistent with advice around cautious use… knowing full well that it will deter people. im proactively seeking critisism in order to improve it.
It produces such vast quantities of code (and often unnecessarily) that it becomes infeasible for a human to review it, immediately requiring us to place trust in the machine to both generate it and review it, and to continue maintaining it while the human operator probably does not even have full understanding of what’s changing.
bingo!.. youre framing as a negative understandable, but unless im mistaken, that the way its going to have to go. software development broadly speaking (for better or worse) is going to be AI generated. the tooling and methodologies have to keep up.
horrible impacts it has on our world
thats pretty vague, im sure it does some good too. AI is a tool. its easy to talk about how AI is impacting people badly. personally ive been unemployed for the past few months. its a horrible experience to go through countless interview thinking i aced it, but still come up with a rejection because the field has become so competative. but i dont blame AI on that. its a tool that i need to be learn how to use. perhaps others use it better than me.
I don’t know the context around you getting banned, unless there’s some specific rules you violated. I am not in support of that, but it’s also not the focus of my message.
I disagree with development having to go that way. If anything, the hatred towards ai is a sign that it’s actively not sought after, or at least not with LLMs. If they managed to develop actual AI that is on par with senior engineers, maybe? But we don’t have that. What we have is faulty and inherently flawed. Why would we have to push ahead forcefully with it…?
I didn’t include a list of why ai is harmful as the post was already long, but displacing workers is just 1 point.
- massive waste of resources (as in water, electricity) for tasks which can already be achieved without AI for a fraction of the compute cost (think, search engines as an example). Also consider the environmental impact here in a society where a lot of our power still comes from burning fossil fuels.
- a war on consume hardware (all compute components “sold out” for 1-2 years ahead making everything expensive for average people)
- destruction of the workforce pipeline (even if only junior roles got displaced by ai, we will simply not have a pipeline of new staff to step in once seniors had enough, in any industry this is catastrophic, especially when the machine doing this is not actually able to fully replace staff)
- building a dependence of closed source subscription based tooling or end up locked out of your own codebase because it’s infeasible to do it without once you started
- theft of intellectual property ignoring all licensing for training data, or companies selling individual contributions
- the entire thing being funded by imaginary money propped up by a circle of loans driving us towards yet another financial collapse across the modern world
I’m sure there are even more.
Not all of these are the fault of the technology, but I’m more than happy to throw the entire technology and everything around it under the bus if it means it makes it easier for people to unite against these companies - which I think it does.
Saying “it’s a tool and provides value” is like saying “force feeding chickens in a tiny cage” is a tool that provides value. True? Yes. Valid? No.
