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 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.

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.

• Definitions
• Tainted Software
  • Browsers
  • Command-Line Shells
  • Computer Graphics
    • Photography
  • Terminal Emulators
  • Developer Tools
  • Programming Languages
    • Note on alternative languages
  • Editors
  • Accessibility Tools
  • Microcontroller Tools and Libraries
  • Service Monitoring
  • Libraries
    • Rust
    • CSS
  • Game Engines
  • Services and Utilities
    • File Storage
    • Password Management
    • Social Media
    • Messaging
  • Operating Systems
• Why not LLMs?
  • Legal Ramifications
  • Environmental Impact

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

Name	Alternatives	Evidence	Notes
Firefox	LibreWolf, several other forks	Blog post collecting details

Command-Line Shells

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
nushell	elvish shell, fish shell	Integrated MCP server, core developer sets Claude as a co-author
yash	dash shell, but there are no other major shells fully targeting POSIX	Assigns and auto-reviews MRs with LLMs

Computer Graphics

Photography

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
RapidRAW		From the README: "with the support from Google Gemini." Roadmap includes adding GenAI.
RawTherapee	Stick to version 5.12	Use Copilot for review PR7518, PR 7435, PR 7378 and code changes commit c4b0400

Terminal Emulators

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
Warp		Advertised as an "agentic development environment."

Developer Tools

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
cargo-nextest	Just use cargo test	CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in repository
jujutsu	continue using git itself	A core dev occasionally uses Claude to generate local test cases., (Discord link)
just		Lists an MCP server in its User Manual.
oh-my-posh	Starship	AGENTS.md file in main repository
oh-my-bash	Starship	All PRs are reviewed with "Qodo" Example PR
ohmyzsh	Starship	Added Claude and Grok as search engines
Taskfile		Uses Copilot for PRs

Programming Languages

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
.NET	See below	.NET Runtime PRs, .NET SDK PRs
Julia	Python (w/ appropriate scientific libraries)	AGENTS.md in main repository, PRs "written by Claude"

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

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
espeak-ng	flite	Dev uses copilot for review and is setting up copilot instructions	espeak still exists, but is heavily outdated and very bad from a modern standpoint, so it cannot be considered as an alternative. flite users may also wish to install speech-dispatcher-flite.

Microcontroller Tools and Libraries

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
FastLED		.claude and .cursor folders in main repository

Service Monitoring

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Uptime Kuma	Gatus	Dev uses copilot for review

Libraries

Rust

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
facet	Use more specific deserialization libraries and avoid macros that slow things down anyway. serde itself is tainted by its Palantir-defending author. nanoserde could be suitable for certain use cases.	Core developer openly uses LLMs for library dev
ratatui	iocraft and cursive. console and its family of libraries may also be enough for some use cases.	Core developer has stated their use of AI for rust code

CSS

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
tailwindcss	twind	Sponsorship page states explicitly that the founder uses AI to write code and even sells access to his "Cursor/Claude/AGENTS.md rules"

Game Engines

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
UPBGE 0.5	UPBGE 0.36.1 seems to be slop-free	0.5 release notes state the use of AI in plain language

Services and Utilities

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Calibre 8.16.2	BookLore Clbre, a Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, a Calibre hard-fork from before AI features	Added "Discuss selected book(s) with AI" feature
Ghost	WriteFreely	Include configurations for Claude and cursor; images on website seem generated
Wagtail CMS	WriteFreely	Include AGENTS.md; Wagtail AI
WordPress	WriteFreely	Include AGENTS.md; has Copilot PRs

File Storage

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
MinIO	Garage	Advertises AI as their primary focus on their website.
Nextcloud		✨ Nextcloud Assistant; Nextcloud Desktop has AGENTS.md
SeaweedFS	Garage for S3 api + JuiceFS for the NFS mounts ad K8s CSI driver - or Rook/Ceph	Using Gemini and coderabbitai in PRs.

Password Management

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Bitwarden	vaultwarden	Include CLAUDE.md
KeepassXC		Use Copilot to generate PRs: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3

Social Media

This is for both social media websites and apps.

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Bluesky	Mastodon, GoToSocial	CTO discusses using Claude in development
IceCubesApp for iOS	Feditext, an iOS fediverse app in beta	Project uses Claude

Messaging

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Telegram		.cursor folder in repository

Operating Systems

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Linux Kernel	BSD? Honestly this one's tough	Maintainers are explicitly trying out the technology and considering LLM-based reviews

Why not LLMs?

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

Legal Ramifications

1. 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.