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 this technology's usage in popular software, as well as give people informed alternatives that they can reach for when they want to make decisions for themselves. This is not a list created so you can go and give these projects trouble for their decision. If you want to file a complaint about it with them, we consider that acceptable but ask that it be done respectfully and constructively.
For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.
To Contribute, checkout our CONTRIBUTING.md.
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. |
| sloperator |
A person who uses AI prompts to generate anything, typically code or images. |
| slopshop |
Company, Organization, or Group of sloperators working together to use AI to generate content. |
Tainted Software
Browsers
Command-Line Shells
Computer Graphics
Photography
Terminal Emulators
Developer Tools
Programming Languages
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 or Scala may be interesting candidates from the perspective of being similar VM-based frameworks, while Python or Rust may be interesting alternatives in other ways.
Editors
| Name |
Alternative(s) |
Evidence |
Notes |
| Zed |
Lapce, other popular editors like neovim, emacs, etc |
They prominently advertise genAI features as a core part of their product. See their website. |
There's a killswitch to disable genAI features entirely, but it's likely the code itself is still heavily LLM-authored. |
| VS Code |
VS Codium* removes the AI features from VS Code |
It's literally their main advertising tagline, and they publicly use LLMs in their public repository. Most AI "features" are enabled by default, and some cannot be disabled. |
*VS Codium is still written with LLMs since Microsoft owns it |
Accessibility Tools
Microcontroller Tools and Libraries
Service Monitoring
Libraries
Rust
Also, there is an advistory database of Rust slopware crates, which you can use in tools like
cargo-deny: https://codeberg.org/erin/rust-slopdb.
CSS
Game Engines
Services and Utilities
File Storage
Password Management
| Name |
Alternative(s) |
Evidence |
| Bitwarden |
vaultwarden |
Include CLAUDE.md |
| KeepassXC |
Use official KeePass 2. It is a .NET application, but Mono or Wine can be used for Linux, MacOS, BSD, ...
KeePassXC 2.7.9 was released before the statement, and was awarded 3 year security Visa by the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) for a First-level Security Certification (CSPN), valid in France and Germany, under report No. ANSSI-CSPN-2025/16 (archive.org, certificate). |
Explicitly stated in official blog post.
Use Copilot to generate PRs: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3. |
Social Media
This is for both social media websites and apps.
Messaging
Budgeting
Operating Systems
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 sloperator 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.
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.
