As I have mentioned before, this blog is currently using a static site generator called Hugo.
I was recently browsing a changelog for Hugo 0.155 when I came across this commit.
This immediately raises alarm bells for me. LLM-generated code is demonstrably low-quality and poorly maintainable, no matter how politely you ask the LLM to write good, maintainable code. As I rely on Hugo to maintain my website, I obviously do not want it to become unmaintainable slopware. But I did not just want to assume the worst - this might just have slipped in by accident, or as part of one dev playing around with the technology for a bit out of curiosity. So I asked a question:
Immediately after posting this comment, I was notified that the comment had been removed and that my account was now banned until it was reviewed by a moderator. I believe due to the timing that this was an automatic mechanism, possibly because my account is relatively new and I posted a link.
So I just patiently waited for a bit, assuming that this would soon resolve itself.
It didn’t - bep (moderator and lead dev) posted a couple of comments on the forum, including in the thread where I had originally posted, but seemingly never got around to looking at his mod queue. At this point, I still was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and answered to one of his mod messages:
No response. Still possible he just overlooked it or was otherwise busy, so I reached out to the mod team once again:
Still, no response.
So I open a Github issue, still assuming that the mods simply have overlooked my issue. In response, I got this:
So, yeah.
I asked a question about a specific commit that was part of the 0.155.0 release in the 0.155.0 release’s announcement thread. That is off-topic, apparently.
I asked if the dev team uses AI and if that will have an impact on code quality. That is borderline trolling, apparently.
In the meantime, I did some more digging and it turns out that Hugo’s contribution guidelines have explicitly allowed AI contributions for about two months.
Conclusion: Hugo is going to be AI slop, and the lead dev will not let people question or critizise that decision or even allow basic transparency. They are so fragile, in fact, that they will just ban you without letting you know the reason for their decision unless you pester them for several days.
Steer clear of this project.