tainted-software

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?.

Contributing

To contribute to this list, file a pull request adding it to the appropriate category, along with any known alternatives. The pull request must include links to evidence of such (social media posts, screenshots, commit history, links to CLAUDE.md, etc). Title the pull request "Add <software-name>" or such.

The bar for being included in this repository is that one ne or more core/prominent devs must openly use LLMs to develop their software. That means that for the time being, simply being "neglectful" and allowing things by contributors that happen to use LLMs does not warrant inclusion on this list. In the future, this may be tightened to projects that accept contributions that are known to be made with genAI, or even any project maintained by known genAI boosters.

Tainted Software

Developer Tools

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
cargo-nextest	Just use cargo test	CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in repository

Editors

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence

Libraries

Rust

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
facet	Plain ol' serde	@fasterthanlime is a pretty open and prominent LLM user and booster	It's pretty safe to assume any other software/libraries by @fasterthanlime are similarly tainted.

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

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Calibre 8.16.2	BookLore, Clbre, a Calibre fork without AI	Added "Discuss selected book(s) with AI" feature

Why not LLMs?

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