I love F-Droid. I love what F-Droid stands for and I like the freedom that it gives its users. As a FOSS app maintainer I also have nothing but good things to say about the people behind the project. Maybe they’re even a bit too nice, considering how many times repro has failed due to me forgetting to commit before building.

But my god is it hard to find human-written software now. Sometimes I open F-Droid just to browse. Maybe I’ll find an app that solves a problem I didn’t know I had, or maybe I’ll find a better alternative to something I already use. And one day, while browsing, I noticed an app with an obvious and ugly AI generated icon. It got me thinking. How much of F-Droid is AI?

Whenever I use FOSS software, how likely it is that it has been vibe-coded by a rando in an afternoon? How to know if an app is vibe-coded? That’s the trick—you can’t. Text just doesn’t carry enough meta information for any kind of assessments to be even close to accurate. However, there are signs. The main allure of LLMs is that they allow the developer to be more lazy. That attitude is then reflected in everything the vibe-coder touches. Why write a README from scratch? Lol, just let the LLM do it. Do code-review? Naw, just let the LLM review its own changes and then also give it access to the repo so you don’t even need to press the commit button. If a project was concerned with looking legitimate, it would be trivial to do such things by hand. But it’s low effort all the way down.

My biases To begin with, I’d like to acknowledge that LLMs are incredibly useful and capable. As 2026 has progressed, this has become more and more visible, but people being able to one-shot medium scale games and software in half an hour is ridiculously impressive, even if the end product is usually not very good. I also am very much in favor of software getting faster and more secure. The story of the Linux kernel development has shown that LLMs are capable of finding and sometimes even solving many types of code issues. With the pleasantries out of the way though, I have to admit I really hate LLMs and what they have done to programming, related engineering fields, and society as a whole. Their mere existence makes educating yourself and going on fun side projects much less rewarding.