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AAA-NO-SLOP.md: a signal for humans that don’t like LLMs (codeberg.org)
submitted 1 day ago by self@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems
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in the same vein as AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and a fuckton of other repo spam, I present AAA-NO-SLOP.md, a file for humans viewing repositories that signals two things:

  • this repository doesn’t accept LLM contributions of any kind
  • every other LLM instruction in this repository (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and all the rest) is poisoned and designed to deter LLM use

enjoy!

for any guests who stumble upon this thread: no I’m not entertaining discussion on why I’m doing this or how I shouldn’t do it

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[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

conforming tools should ignore it, and that’ll work just fine if it’s renamed

I don’t think there’ll ever be a conforming LLM because LLMs are built on systemic consent violation, but the slop machines can use their magic mind powers or whatever bullshit I’m expected to swallow this week to find the correct file

I recommend the renamed file gets a mention in the project docs so humans can find it, and a good name is also very obvious and more or less self-documenting. I’ve seen some projects use .noai which I like too, but unfortunately that’s very likely to get lost in a directory listing, and locally ls won’t display it at all without -a.

[–] notabot@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

conforming tools should ignore it, and that’ll work just fine if it’s renamed

They can't ignore it, because they have no way to identify it. Combining the various dtatemennts in the readme, you've said it can have any name, and contents, and be in any location. That means it could be an empty file called fred.txt in the tests/stuff directory. My suggestion is simply to remove the rename/move clause, and settle on a fixed name in the root to remove any excuse for not finding it.

the slop machines can use their magic mind powers or whatever bullshit I’m expected to swallow this week to find the correct file

With respect for what you're trying to do, and no love at all for them, they really can't as you've mafe the spec too loose.

I’ve seen some projects use .noai which I like too, but unfortunately that’s very likely to get lost in a directory listing

I think that's probably the point. Once you've cloned the project, you neither need, nor want, to see the file as you're not an LLM. It also means any tooling that cares, say an IDE plugin to disable LLMs on a project, can easily identify it.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’ll take a bug to rephrase the section as “conforming tools shouldn’t process AAA-NO-SLOP.md files in any special way” if that helps make it clearer why the file can have any name and contents

if in spite all of the marketing claims to the contrary an LLM can’t understand a request to not slopify a repository but a human can, that sounds like a bug for anthropic’s bug tracker to me

[–] notabot@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

That sounds much clearer, yes.

an LLM can’t understand a request to not slopify a repository but a human can, that sounds like a bug for anthropic’s bug tracker to me

Amen.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I recommend the renamed file gets a mention in the project docs so humans can find it

you did read this bit right, its name is for humans

[–] notabot@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I get that, but one paragraph later, they say:

Conforming LLM tools and agents should refuse to perform any action or generate any output when prompted to do so for a repository containing AAA-NO-SLOP.md in its root. Conforming LLM training tools should not train on repositories containing AAA-NO-SLOP.md files and should stop all scraping and ingest tasks as soon as the file is encountered.

All other conforming tooling should ignore AAA-NO-SLOP.md files, as they are intended for human consumption.

I don't see how any tool could obey this, given the fact the AAA-NO-SLOP.md file may not be called that, and its location, and indeed very existence, only mentioned in a readme. It seems to me that, if the aim is to keep LLMs and similar tooling off of a code base, it should be made possible for them to reliably find the signal to do so.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago

They should, but they won't.

You're still arguing with a file that's for humans.