Fighting AI Slop
Hacker News
The Actual project is implementing a policy to reject AI-generated pull requests and issues lacking human oversight, aiming to preserve maintainer time for genuine contributions and prevent project pollution.
對抗AI生成的低劣內容
AI 生成摘要
Actual專案宣布將拒絕未經人類審查的AI生成程式碼請求與問題，以保護維護者時間用於真正貢獻，並防止專案被低劣內容污染。
Fighting AI Slop | Actual Budget
2026
2025
Fighting AI Slop
Actual has started receiving what can only be described as AI slop — pull requests and issues generated entirely by automated systems with no human involvement. These require the same amount of triage and review time as genuine contributions, but add no value. Every minute spent dealing with machine-generated junk is time not spent improving Actual itself.
The Problem
To be clear: AI is a useful tool. We use it ourselves to draft code, fix bugs, and build features. Heck - even this article was written with the assistance of AI. But the difference is that a human is always in charge. We review, test, and take responsibility for what we merge. What we are seeing now is the opposite — unreviewed output blindly pushed upstream (i.e. opened as PRs or issues). That is not contribution; it's pollution.
Our Policy
From this point on, we will close any PRs or issues that appear to be 100% AI-generated with no sign of human oversight. This isn't about being harsh, it's about protecting the limited time our maintainers have to review genuine contributions.
Why This Matters
Every AI slop PR or issue requires the same triage and review time as genuine contributions. With limited maintainer bandwidth, this directly impacts:
We want to spend our time improving Actual, not filtering through automated noise.
How to Contribute Properly with AI
If you're using AI to help with contributions, that's perfectly fine! Just make sure you:
For more details on how to contribute, see our contributing guidelines.
A Silver Lining
One small silver lining: our "WIP" (Work-In-Progress) workflow — which requires contributors to manually remove the "WIP" prefix before a PR can be reviewed — has proven effective at filtering out AI bots. It's an unintentional captcha we have built. Many of them can't complete that simple step, so their PRs go stale and close automatically.
Even so, it would be better not to receive AI slop at all.
Keep It Human
Please, if you're using AI to help contribute, stay in the loop. Review, edit, and understand what you're submitting. Actual is built by humans, for humans. Keep it that way.
We're grateful for all genuine contributions, whether AI-assisted or not. The key is human oversight and understanding. Thank you for helping keep Actual focused on what matters.